Events - Left Coast Writers

James Patterson, LCW Visiting Publisher/Author: Schedule of Events

Visiting Author/Publisher James J. Patterson will be speaking and reading at a number of special events while he is in the San Francisco/Bay Area. Left Coast Writers is a participating organizer of many of these events and will be providing refreshments. We are posting his entire schedule in the hope that you will be able to join us at some of these occasions.

Thursday, April 28th, 2011 @5:30pm
Towne Center Books
w/Joanna Biggar author of That Paris Year
555 Main Street, Pleasanton, CA
925 846 8826

Monday, May 2, 2011 @7pm
Book Passage w/Left Coast Writers Literary Salon
51 Tamal Vista Blvd.
Corte Madera, CA 94929
415 927 0960
Left Coast Writers and Invitation only

Wednesday, May 4, 2011 @7pm
A Great Good Place for Books
w/Joanna Biggar
6120 LaSalle Avenue
Oakland, CA 94611
510 339 8210

Friday, May 6, 2011 @7pm
Friends of Left Coast Writers Salon
Sonoma, CA
Invitation only

Saturday, May 7, 2011 @7pm
Friends of Left Coast Writers Salon
Oakland, CA
Invitation only

Monday, May 9, 2011 @6pm
Book Passage/Left Coast Writers
w/Joanna Biggar
1 Ferry Building
San Francisco, CA 94111
415 835 1200

Tuesday, May 10, 2011 @7:30pm
The Booksmith
w/Linda Watanabe McFerrin & Joanna Biggar
1644 Haight Street
San Francisco, CA 94117
415 863 8688
http://www.booksmith.com/event

Thursday, May 12, 2011 @7pm
The Double Play Sports Bar & Restaurant
w/Dan Fost, Jason Turbow, Steve Hermanos, and Aaron Pribble
2401 16th Street
“The Mission”
San Francisco, CA 94103
415 621 9859

Ferry Plaza Book Party: Joanna Biggar and Wanderland Writers

LEFT COAST WRITERS BOOK PARTY: Joanna Biggar and Wanderland Writers

Monday, April 11, 6pm
Book Passage || Ferry Plaza
San Francisco || www.bookpassage.com

Readers, writers, travelers—adventuresome to armchair—and lovers of Costa Rica, you won’t want to miss an evening of exciting travel tales from this delightful group of travelers. Colette Obrien fills in as host for Linda Watanabe McFerrin at Book Passage in the Ferry Plaza.

When workshop leaders Linda Watanabe McFerrin and Joanna Biggar gathered a baker’s dozen of their favorite travelers and writers, they had no idea how transformative the journey would be. Nurtured and inspired in an environment beyond compare, the assembled explored Costa Rica, gathering tales from across the country. From rainforests, volcanoes, tropical beaches, butterfly gardens, colorful towns and villages, the writers wandered the country and brought back a fine collection of poetry and stories that present Costa Rica in richly personal style.

On this night, members of the merry band will share some of these travel stories and more as they prepare in spirit for yet another adventure: This year they head for Bali in search of more marvelous tales from the road.

Book Party: Patricia Volonakis Davis

LEFT COAST WRITERS BOOK PARTY: Patricia Volonakis Davis, Author of Harlot’s Sauce and The Diva Doctrine: 16 Universal Principles Every Woman Needs to Know

Saturday, April 9, 2011 || 7pm
Book Passage-Corte Madera || 51 Tamal Vista Dr.
Corte Madera || www.bookpassage.com

Please join us for an evening with Patricia Volonakis Davis as she shares her work: the award-winning Harlot’s Sauce: A Memoir of Food, Family, Love, Loss and Greece, and The Diva Doctrine: 16 Universal Principles Every Woman Needs to Know.

Patricia’s aim is to leave her spot of the world just a little bit better than it was before she got there. She focuses on that through her writing, teaching, philanthropic work, and the promoting of other people who she believes have that same goal. She has been called a “Renaissance Woman” by Carine Nadel in The Orange County Register for her writing. As founder and editor-in-chief of the non-partisan HS Radio e-magazine and podcast, Patricia loves encouraging new writers and interviewing other “Renaissance people”, such as Neal deGrasse Tyson , James Redford, Jane Friedman , and more. She holds a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing and Education, and has taught, spoken, read, and conducted seminars extensively in various venues and schools throughout the US and overseas. Patricia was named one of the Top 25 Mentors for Young Women and Girls 2010, by the Hot Mommas Project. Her latest work, The Diva Doctrine, is an extension of the guidance and support she hopes to give to women.

Literary Salon: Scott James

LEFT COAST WRITERS LITERARY SALON: Scott James, New York Times Columnist and Author of Soma and The Sower

Monday, April 4, 2011 || 7pm
Book Passage || Corte Madera
51 Tamal Vista Drive, Corte Madera || www.bookpassage.com

Laurie McAndish King fills in as host for Linda Watanabe McFerrin at the April salon when Scott James, New York Times columnist and author of SoMa and The Sower shares “Insights From the Front Lines of Publishing.”

There seem to be game-changing headlines about writing every day: ebooks, blogels, print-on-demand, pay walls, DIY. How do you sort it all out? Scott James has worked with both mainstream publishers and the latest technologies that allow writers to reach readers directly. James will share his experiences in both realms, plus offer a frank discussion about the opportunities and challenges in this time of transition in the publishing world. (more…)

Ferry Plaza Book Party: Diane LeBow, MJ Pramik and Travelers’ Tales

LEFT COAST WRITERS BOOK PARTY: Diane LeBow, MJ Pramik & Kate Crawford

Monday, March 14, 6pm
Book Passage || Ferry Plaza
San Francisco || www.bookpassage.com

Please join our Left Coast Writers Travelers’ Tales Solas Award winners and honorees and contributors to The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2010 for an evening of wine and wonderful stories about travel. Diane LeBow will read from her Afghan story, “Tea in Kabul,” winner of the Solas Gold Award for Best Women’s Travel Writing 2010. MJ Pramik will read from her Solas Award winning tale about Running in Puglia. Kate Crawford will be reading from her Solas Award winning story, “Elephant Driving 101.”

Since the publication of A Woman’s World in 1995, Travelers’ Tales has been publishing award-winning books by and for women. They continue this tradition with The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2010, the sixth collection in our annual series guaranteed to inspire women to take their first trip—or to continue exploring the world with wit, soul, and verve, as so many adventurous women do each and every day.

This best-selling, award-winning series presents the finest accounts of women who have traveled to the ends of the earth to discover new places, peoples — and themselves. The common threads connecting the stories are a woman’s perspective and lively storytelling to make the reader laugh, cry, wish she were there, or be glad she wasn’t. From climbing a volcano in Ecuador to running a kennel for pariah dogs in India to helping prepare meals in Iran, the points of view and perspectives are global and the themes eclectic, including stories that encompass spiritual growth, hilarity and misadventure, high adventure, romance, solo journeys, stories of service to humanity, family travel, and encounters with exotic cuisine.

In The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2010:

A search for the perfect wave in New Zealand provides a lesson in love
Curiosity leads to an understanding of political activism and human rights in Burma
A childless American is adopted by a six-year-old and becomes part of the family in Italy
Cultural understanding deepens in surprising ways through language lessons in
Vietnam
On a fact-finding mission in Afghanistan, a retired professor learns that peace is
everything
A day on a nude beach in the Netherlands gives a self-described “prude” a new appreciation of body types, and comfort with her own
…and much more.Travelers’ Tales books luxuriate in that complicated, beautiful, shadowy place where the best stories begin, and the most compelling characters roam free.”
—ForeWord Magazine

Book Party: Joanna Biggar

LEFT COAST WRITERS BOOK PARTY: Joanna Biggar, Author of That Paris Year

Saturday, March 12, 2011 || 7pm
Book Passage-Corte Madera || 51 Tamal Vista Dr.
Corte Madera || www.bookpassage.com

Spring travel is already in the air! Allow yourself to be carried away to Paris by Joanna Biggar. We’ll supply the wine and snacks.

Who has not dreamed of escaping to Paris? When wildfire ravished the landscape of Los Angeles, five young co-eds, house-mates in the rundown Maison Française, found the freedom to pursue that dream. They set sail on a rusty boat in the summer of 1962 determined to enroll in the Sorbonne. It was as if Mary McCarthy’s “Group” had landed on a mystifying Left Bank, exotic and compelling as Durrell’s Alexandria. What they lost was more than their virginity, their bad American accents, and their beloved clichés about “meaning”; what they gained, as they traded notes, clothes, dreams, loves and identities was the gift of geography — the tectonic shift that occurs upon discovering that place, native or adopted, is an integral part of who we are.

Joanna Biggar turned twenty in Paris, where she was a student at the Sorbonne, and went on to earn degrees in Chinese language and French literature. Since then she has chaired a school board in Ghana, traveled solo to remote regions of China, worked as a journalist in Washington, D.C., and taught inner-city school students in Oakland, California, where she lives. She is married, has five adult children and six grandchildren, who love books. A member of the Society of Woman Geographers, her special places of the heart remain France and the California coast.

Literary Salon: Faith Adiele

LEFT COAST WRITERS LITERARY SALON: Faith Adiele, PEN Beyond Margins Award winner and Author of Meeting Faith

Monday, March 7, 2011 || 7pm
Book Passage || Corte Madera
51 Tamal Vista Drive, Corte Madera || www.bookpassage.com

Faith Adiele is the author of Meeting Faith (W.W. Norton), a travel memoir about becoming Thailand’s first black Buddhist nun, which received thePEN Beyond Margins Award for Best Memoir of 2004. A Publishers Weekly starred review credited it with “a comic’s timing, a novelist’s keen observations about human idiosyncrasies and an anthropologist’s sensitivity to race and culture.”

She is also lead editor of the international collection, Coming of Age Around the World: A Multicultural Anthology (The New Press, 2008), and writer/narrator/subject of the PBS documentary My Journey Home. The film documents Adiele’s experiences—similar to President Obama’s—growing up with a Nordic-American single mother and traveling to Nigeria as an adult to find her father and siblings.

Educated at Harvard University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Adiele has taught in the Creative Nonfiction MFAProgram at the University of Pittsburgh, held the Christa Corrigan McAuliffe Chair at Framingham State College, and served as Rachel B. Noel Distinguished Visiting Professor at Metropolitan State College; she is presently the DistinguishedVisiting Writer at Mills College in Oakland, California.

Adiele has published or been featured in such periodicals as O magazine, Ploughshares, Marie Claire, Creative Nonfiction, Essence, Transition, Pink magazine, Tricycle, The Root.com, and in numerous anthologies. The recipient of a UNESCO International Artists Bursary, two Best American Essays shortlists, and the Millennium Award from Creative Nonfiction, she is currently at work on Twins: Growing UpNigerian/Nordic/American, a social/cultural memoir that will complete the story begun in the PBS documentary. Her work is newly out in two great anthologies: The Word: Black Writers Talk about the Transformative Power of Reading and Writing and The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World.

Visit her at adiele.com.

Literary Salon: Kevin Smokler

LEFT COAST WRITERS LITERARY SALON: Kevin Smokler, Co-Founder and CEO of BookTour.com

Monday, February 7, 2011 || 7pm
Book Passage || Corte Madera
51 Tamal Vista Drive, Corte Madera || www.bookpassage.com

Wondering about internet marketing or, perhaps the future of publishing? Join us for an evening with Kevin Smokler.

Kevin Smokler is the co-founder and CEO of BookTour.com (www.booktour.com), an Amazon-funded startup that produces affordable promotional and marketing tools for authors. He lectures across North America on the future of publishing and reading and lives in San Francisco.

Kevin is an author, journalist, speaker and entrepreneur. He’s the editor of the anthology Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times (Basic Books, June 2005), which was a San Francisco Chronicle notable book of 2005. His writing has appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle, The LA Times, Fast Company, and on National Public Radio.

In 2007, Kevin Smokler founded with Chris Anderson (editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine) BookTour.com, the world’s largest online directory of author and literary events. Kevin now serves as the company’s CEO, regularly speaking at publishing industry conferences and book festivals throughout North America. In April of 2008, Amazon purchased a minority stake in BookTour.com.

As a speaker, Smokler has lectured throughout North America on the arts and their role in contemporary society at The Commonwealth Club of California, The Idea Festival, Book Expo America and universities such as Stanford and Johns Hopkins. He sits on the advisory board of the South by Southwest Interactive Conference where he has been a featured speaker since 2003.

Kevin has a B.A. in Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins University and an M.A. In American Studies from The University of Texas at Austin. A native of Ann Arbor, Michigan, he lives in San Francisco.

Book Launch: Tami Casias

LEFT COAST WRITERS BOOK LAUNCH: Tami Casias, Author of Crystal Bound

Saturday, February 12, 2011 || 7pm
Book Passage-Corte Madera || 51 Tamal Vista Dr.
Corte Madera || www.bookpassage.com

We hope you’ll join us for wine, juice, cookies and a lovely evening suitable for the whole family.

Tami Casias discusses her young adult novel Crystal Bound ($19.95).

Julie hopes to skate under the radar on her first day at a new high school. But when she inherits powers that compel her to help others, she is forced out of both her comfort zone and her sense of reality. As she tries to fade into the background, the powers force her to deal with serious issues that threaten to shatter her dreams.

Tami Casias wrote local news for years while raising four children. Nowadays, writing fiction for young adults while sitting in coffee shops has taken the place of city council meetings. She uses her degree in Journalism to research new ideas for stories. Tami lives with her husband, teenage son, and Yorkshire terrier, Bruiser, in Sonoma, California.

Ferry Plaza Book Party: Patricia Ljutic

LEFT COAST WRITERS BOOK PARTY: Patricia Ljutic

Monday, February 14, 6pm
Book Passage || Ferry Plaza
San Francisco || www.bookpassage.com

Treat yourself, a friend or partner to a playful stop on Valentine’s Day.

You’re invited to join Patricia Ljutic for a reading about love and lovers.

Come for free wine and chocolate compliments of Left Coast Writers, love poems by a surprise guest, a story of long-term-love, and a reading from a sensual fantasy. There will also be a raffle and you could WIN THE PERFECT VALENTINE’S DAY GIFT for your loved one.

Patricia Ljutic reads Love Check published in Colleen Sell’s A Cup of Comfort for Couples: Stories That Celebrate What It Means to Be in Love ($11.95). This book is a collection of true stories that share the laughter, tears, hugs, and kisses of fifty wonderful couples.

Patricia Ljutic’s work has appeared in regional and national publications including My Mom Is My Hero, A Cup of Comfort for Couples and Chicken Soup of the Soul: Family Matters. She received her MA in Nursing Administration from the University of California at San Francisco and works as a nurse manager and writer. Patricia lives with Kirby, her husband of nearly thirty years, and their creative family in a home filled with paper, paints and the makings of several great works of art still in progress.

You can make this the start of a Valentine’s Day to remember, and follow the reading with dinner. Make a reservation at a nearby San Francisco restaurant (below).

Restaurant Suggestions:

Taqueria Zorro 308 Columbus Ave (415) 392-9677
Boulevard 1 Mission St (415) 543-6084

La Mar Cebicheria Peruana Pier 1 ½ (415) 397-8880
The Slanted Door 1 Ferry Bldg (415) 861-8032

RN74 301 Mission St (415) 543-7474
Town Hall 342 Howard St (415) 908-3900

One Market 1 Market Plaza (415) 777-5577
Prospect 300 Spear St (415) 247-7770

Ozumo 161 Steuart St (415) 882-1333
Yank Sing 101 Spear St (415) 957-9300

James Patterson, LCW Visiting Publisher/Author: Schedule of Events

Ferry Plaza Book Party: Joanna Biggar and Wanderland Writers

Book Party: Patricia Volonakis Davis

Literary Salon: Scott James

Ferry Plaza Book Party: Diane LeBow, MJ Pramik and Travelers’ Tales

Book Party: Joanna Biggar

Literary Salon: Faith Adiele

Literary Salon: Kevin Smokler

Book Launch: Tami Casias

Ferry Plaza Book Party: Patricia Ljutic

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