Left Coast Writers Book Launch: Sleep, Pray, Heal by Donna Fado Ivery 🗓

No Comments

LEFT COAST WRITERS BOOK LAUNCH:  Sleep, Pray, Heal by Donna Fado Ivery  

Saturday, October 12, 2019 || 7pm
Book Passage-Corte Madera|| 51 Tamal Vista Dr. Corte Madera ||
www.bookpassage.com

Don’t miss this chance to get spirited. This is going to be an evening of CELEBRATION!

When a 200-pound glass partition fell on Donna Fado Ivery’s head, causing brain injury and disability, her life was changed forever … but Donna did not let that stop her.

Sleep, Pray, Heal shares her struggle through medical and church prejudice, and her journey to recovery. Most of all, Sleep, Pray, Heal is a warm, surprisingly humorous, and insightful personal memoir that can enlighten the mind and lighten the heart of any reader.

Donna Fado Ivery is a United Methodist clergywoman whose pastorate was interrupted by disabling injuries sustained in a 1994 restaurant accident. While brain injury impaired her ability to speak, stand, concentrate, and remember, Donna painted her prayers. With pain too deep for words, Donna relied on the Spirit to lead her. Today Donna is a dynamic speaker whose keynote addresses and workshops have taken her across the U.S. 

Sleep, Pray, Heal is a modern sermon on faith — a beautifully articulated, joy-based sermon, full of ups and downs (more…)

Read More

Book Launch: KOBB by William Goodson 🗓

No Comments

LEFT COAST WRITERS BOOK LAUNCH:  KOBB by William Goodson

William Goodson

Saturday, September 14, 2019 || 7pm
Book Passage-Corte Madera|| 51 Tamal Vista Dr. Corte Madera ||
www.bookpassage.com

It’s easy to be distracted by explosions and miss the quiet, insidious changes that will alter manhood as we know it.

Shrouded in secrecy, 6-year-old Jack and his family relocate to drought-blighted, rural Nebraska. There Jack meets his grandfather, a mysterious man who only visits at night and never stays long. As Jack grows up, his one real friend is Millie, the granddaughter of a neighbor who visits every summer. Then on his sixteenth birthday, the past catches up with the family, and Jack must make decisions that will set the course for the rest of his life.

“… a whole new way forward for the environmental debate …”

—Prof. Philippa Darbre, University of Reading

William Goodson is an expert on how environmental chemicals affect human health. He has been a Professor at the University of California, a leader in medical and community organizations, author of over 100 scientific papers, and an invited speaker at multiple international meetings.A graduate of Harvard Medical School, he is a surgeon who has dedicated his career to improving the care of women with breast cancer and the author of It’s  body…ask!, (more…)

Read More

Ferry Plaza Book Party: David Hathwell, Author of The Power of Telling  🗓

No Comments

LEFT COAST WRITERS BOOK EVENT: David Hathwell, Author of The Power of Telling 

David Hathwell

Monday, September 9, 2019 || 6pm Book Passage || Ferry Building, San Francisco ||www.bookpassage.com

Join us Monday eve at a book event for David Hathwell, whose new poetry book The Power of Telling has received and outstanding review from Kirkus.
The review says it all:
“A collection of poetry focuses on everyday beauty and wonder.”

It continues:  “Over the course of 50 poems with straightforward titles, retired high school English teacher Hathwell (Between Dog and Wolf, 2017, etc.) explores the world around him. Nature is a touchstone of his poetry. In “Poplar,” he expertly describes the titular tree “catching a breeze, flutter sage and silver wings” while in “Sunflower,” he lingers on the “wide blank face” of the “saddest flower.” The author also showcases culture in his poems. “Fred’s Girl” is a propulsive ode to the Fred Astaire–Paulette Goddard duet in the film Second Chorus, and “Sunday at the Symphony” captures the ethereal experience of live classical music. But the poems aren’t limited to the author’s immediate surroundings. A visit to the Spanish Steps, where Keats died in 1821, is the subject of “Readiness Is Everything,” which encourages readers to “imagine the world without you.” Hathwell plays with humor in “Dust Is Winning,” about the futile fight to keep things clean, and shows his cynical side in “Red Dress,” which describes the “ruby radiance” of an ensemble depicted in advertising. The act of writing is another recurring theme in this collection. “Song” depicts a successful writing day, in which “I rise from my desk, / Majestic, and I dance,” while “Sure Thing” warns readers “that language is prepared to lie / When you ask it to.” Quiet moments are also rich material for the poet. Throughout, he matches his message to the pacing of the poem, creating an immersive experience for readers. In “Finding Myself in the Morning,” readers sink into Hathwell’s serene, solitary scene where he can finally “not wonder / who is speaking, or what comes next.” In “Ten O’Clock,” the audience can sense the descent into a “deep, forgiving sleep” … A volume of ambitious and engaging poems.”

(more…)

Read More

Book Launch: The Girl Who Said No by Natalie Galli 🗓

No Comments

BOOK LAUNCH: The Girl Who Said No: A Search in Sicily by Natalie Galli

Natalie Galli

Saturday, August 17th, 2019 || 7pm Book Passage-Corte Madera|| 51 Tamal Vista Dr. Corte Madera || www.bookpassage.com

Eighteen-year-old Franca Viola made history in 1966 as one of the first “#metoo” heroines of modern times, when she refused to go along with a centuries-old forcible marriage custom in Sicily. Having endured kidnap and rape, she publicly defied the expectation that she would marry the rapist to “restore her broken honor.” A social uproar occurred throughout the island—and beyond.

In Natalie Galli’s The Girl Who Said No, Viola’s remarkable story unfolds when the author arrives in Palermo to search for her, with little more than the memory of a tiny article she had spotted two decades prior. Galli wanted to know: whatever had become of this courageous girl who had overturned an ancient, entrenched tradition?

The riveting events after Franca pressed charges with the police form the core of this gripping memoir. Viola was subjected to public taunting whenever she appeared on the streets of her town; Mafia-orchestrated bullying threatened her entire family. Galli traced the dramatic tale to its conclusion, in spite of initial warnings from her own relatives not to break the Sicilian code of silence.

Throughout her search for the enigmatic Franca, Galli shares her own poignant and hilarious observations about a vibrant culture steeped in contradiction and paradox. Does she succeed in locating the elusive proto-feminist whose case forever changed Italian culture and history? Travel along on Galli’s engaging odyssey to find out.

Natalie Galli, a San Francisco native of Italian background, has penned two illustrated children’s books for Sunbath Studios: Ciao Meow and Spin the Hound Lost and Found, a Tale of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. She edited a (more…)

Read More

Book Launch: Daddykins by Kalpana Mohan 🗓

No Comments
Kalpana Mohan

BOOK LAUNCH: Daddykins by Kalpana Mohan

Saturday, July 13th, 2019 || 7pm Book Passage-Corte Madera|| 51 Tamal Vista Dr. Corte Madera || www.bookpassage.com

When journalist Kalpana Mohan’s elderly father falls ill in Chennai, she is on the next flight over from California and the home she has shared with her husband for three decades. Caring for her sometimes cranky, sometimes playful, and always adored father at his home in Chennai, Mohan sets out to piece together an account of her father’s life, from his poverty-stricken childhood in a village in south India, to his arranged marriage, to his first job in the city, all the while coming to terms with his inevitable passing.

Mohan’s tender, moving, and sometimes hilarious memoir is an account of a changing India captured in her father’s life, from the sheer feat of surviving poverty in I920s India of his birth, to witnessing key moments in the nation’s history and changing alongside them. Above all, Daddykins is an intimate and deeply relatable account of our relationships with our parents whatever our age, and the shared experiences of love and grief that unite us all. (more…)

Read More

Book Launch: Self-Portrait in Bloom by Niloufar Talebi 🗓

No Comments

BOOK LAUNCH: Self-Portrait in Bloom by Niloufar Talebi

Niloufar Talebi

Saturday, April 13th, 2019 || 7pm Book Passage-Corte Madera|| 51 Tamal Vista Dr. Corte Madera || www.bookpassage.com

Author and award-winning translator Niloufar Talebi offers a rare glimpse into her native Iran in Self-Portrait in Bloom, her part-memoir, part-biography, and part-history of literature in Iran, a “brutally honest memoir of a life built by words, destroyed by words, rebuilt by words,” (Firoozeh Dumas, New York Times best-selling author of Funny in Farsi and Laughing Without an Accent).

Iranian poets were increasingly instrumental in “freeing Persian poetry from the state of decline and stagnation” in the aftermath of World War II, when a new dynamism was taking shape in Persian poetry. Into this backdrop emerges the poet Ahmad Shamlou (1925-2000), an iconic cultural figure who spent much time in Talebi’s childhood home. “There are two books in this book, one portrait of me and one of Ahmad Shamlou. And they intersect,” Talebi writes of Self-Portrait in Bloom. Released in the 40th anniversary year of the Iranian revolution, it delves deep into culture, personal history, and pays homage to Tehran, the city of Talebi’s childhood. Told in fragments of prose, poetry, and photographs, this lyrical exploration reimagines the memoir form and in a dramatic climax sets free the details of a hurt that can no longer limit the blossoming of an artist.

Niloufar Talebi is a writer, award-winning translator, creator, and producer. Her work has been featured at the Kennedy Center, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and she has received commissions from Carnegie Hall, Cal Performances, and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Her projects include Belonging, Epiphany, The Persian Rite of Spring, and ICARUS/RISE. Her work has been published in World Literature Today, PBS Frontline, Rattapallax, and Poetry International. Her TEDxBerkeley talk on Match 9, 2019, is about the transformative power of translation and visibility. She is the author of Self-Portrait in Bloom (l’Aleph, 2019), and the creator/librettist of its related opera, Abraham in Flames, which world premieres in San Francisco on May 9-12, 2019. (more…)

Read More

Book Launch: The Sky Turned Green and the Grass Turned Blue by Diana Kelley 🗓

No Comments

BOOK LAUNCH: The Sky Turned Green and the Grass Turned Blue: Diane’s Story

Diana Kelley

Saturday, March 9th, 2019 || 7pm Book Passage-Corte Madera|| 51 Tamal Vista Dr. Corte Madera || www.bookpassage.comn

This will be an other-worldly evening, we’re sure, and we hope you decide to explore it with memoirist Diana Kelley author of The Sky Turned Green & The Grass Turned Blue. 

When Diane’s lover and friend, Jack, comes out seven years into their relationship expressing his well-kept secret desire to transition from male to female, Diane’s world turns upside down.  With little information to help answer the question “do I stay or do I go,” she searches for direction on her own. Navigating the murky waters of the unknown that accompany the challenges of Jack’s changing persona, Diane is guided by love, loyalty, and a willingness to sacrifice. Sharing her observations and reactions in this true story, Diane explores the underground world of BDSM, bondage/submission and sadomasochism, as well as, provides an intimate view into gay and lesbian lifestyles in her attempt to gauge what impact Jack’s changes might have to their relationship and to her own authentic self.

“… a very well-written book about the author’s true experiences, though it reads like a good novel; interesting characterizations, good dialogue, and a skillfully-crafted tension that draws the reader from one chapter to the next. This true story took place at a time, back in the 1990s and early 21st Century, when not much was known about transsexualism and it is very relevant today as not much has been written from the viewpoint of a person (more…)

Read More

Book Launch: A Sleuth in The Summer of Love 🗓

No Comments

BOOK LAUNCH: A Sleuth in The Summer of Love by Carol Sheldon

A Sleuth in the Summer of LoveSaturday, February 9th, 2019 || 7pm Book Passage-Corte Madera|| 51 Tamal Vista Dr. Corte Madera || www.bookpassage.com

As we approach Valentine’s Day, it’s all about LOVE. Well, in this case, The Summer of Love.

Please join us in a book party and launch celebration for Carol Sheldon and her new book, A Sleuth in The Summer of Love. Carol calls them exciting times involving folks like Janis Joplin, Peter Coyote, and believe it or not, the Hells Angels. “Peace and love were their mantras,” says Carol, “but murder and kidnapping happened too.” In her new book, Carol takes you to the darker side of the sunny sixties.

So put on your go-go boots, your extra short frock or your bell-bottom jeans and join us for the rewind. We will, of course, be serving wine and snacks, and Carol will be serving up a deliciously dark slice of sixties. It should be fun—a flashback and a whodunnit? all in one!

Carol Sheldon teaches Poetry, the Novel, and Memoir in her home, her church, Osher’s Lifelong Learning Institute (more…)

Read More

Book Launch: Wandering in Cuba: Revolution and Beyond 🗓

No Comments

LEFT COAST WRITERS BOOK LAUNCH: Wandering in Cuba: Revolution and Beyond. 

Saturday, December 8th, 2018 || 7pm Book Passage-Corte Madera|| 51 Tamal Vista Dr. Corte Madera || www.bookpassage.com

Wanderland Writers introduces WANDERING IN CUBA: Revolution and Beyond … the 6th anthology in the prize-winning Wandering series …

Once again workshop leaders Linda Watanabe McFerrin and Joanna Biggar take Wanderland Writers and head south to explore—this time to Cuba, an island country that has paid a high price for self-determination:  revolution, isolation and hardship. But somehow this nation and its amazing people continue to reinvent themselves and fascinate visitors with their marvelous creativity and vitality.

Contributors include Tania Romanov Amochaev, Adrienne Amundsen, Christine Berardo, Joanna Biggar, Sandra Bracken, Cyndi, Goddard, Douglas Hale, Thomas Harrell, Donna Hemmila, Linda Jue, Carol J. Kelly, Laurie McAndish King, Robert Markowitz, Linda Watanabe McFerrin, Mary Jean Pramik, Anne Sigmon, Jonathan A. Taylor and Anne Woods.

Wander with the contributors from city to countryside, enjoying the history, the rhythms, the tastes, the sights, and the soul of this intriguing island nation. Everywhere, of course, they encountered its Revolution and recorded their understanding of its triumphs and failures. They met and wrote about traditional Cuba: its heroes—José Martí, Fidel, Che, Hemingway—and its enduring culture as found in food, music and its African-based religion, Santería. But they also experienced Cuba in its present reality, beyond the Revolution. They found poets, artists, filmmakers and a whole generation of young people who embrace and are shaping Cuba’s future.

“I hope that, as you read the stories in this collection, a sense of that infinite potential inspires you to make that very short flight to our very misunderstood neighbor. You’ll find nothing intimidating (except, maybe, some of the salsa dancers) and much that is pure magic.

—Jeff Greenwald, Author of The Size of the World and Snake Lake

Linda Watanabe McFerrin and Joanna Biggar have floated down the Canal du Midi in France, danced in the sunlight of southern Greece, toasted the best of times in Ireland, devoured the culture and countryside of southern (more…)

Read More

Ferry Plaza Book Party: Porcelain Travels by Matthew Félix 🗓

No Comments

LEFT COAST WRITERS BOOK EVENT: Porcelain Travels by Matthew Félix

Matthew Felix

Monday, November 12th, 2018 || 6pm Book Passage || San Francisco 1 Ferry Building, San Francisco ||www.bookpassage.com

Please join us for an uproarious and sometimes rather farfetched evening with Matthew Félix as he debuts his latest book, Porcelain Travels.
Matthew Félix is not a luxury traveler. But even traveling on a budget fails to explain why he has so many unforgettable experiences on the toilet, in the tub, or under the shower.From Matthew’s unorthodox bathing practices in Paris and Istanbul to his nightmare while squatting in Morocco to the Dead Sea shower incident that led to an arrest, Porcelain Travels is sometimes hilarious, occasionally shocking, and always entertaining.
Matthew Félix is an author, podcast producer and host, and traveler.
Adventure, humor, and spirituality infuse his work, which often draws on his time living in Spain, France, and Turkey, as well as travels in over fifty countries. Matthew’s debut novel, A Voice Beyond Reason, is the story of how a young Spaniard’s awakening to his intuition gets him out of his head, so he can follow his heart. Matthew’s travel-story collection, With Open Arms, recounts his humorous and harrowing experiences on two trips to Morocco. His video podcast, Matthew Félix On Air, features guests discussing writing, travel, culture, and more. Matthew has also produced three podcasts based on his books.

(more…)

Read More

Join Us

To join Left Coast Writers you can either call Book Passage at (415) 927-0960 or make use of the button below.

Library

Browse and buy books by Left Coast Writers® members.

Calendar

Also on social media:

Archives