Ferry Plaza Book Party: Natalie: in the Shadow of the Swastika by Antoinette Constable 🗓

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LEFT COAST WRITERS BOOK LAUNCH:  Natalie: in the Shadow of the Swastika by Antoinette Constable

Antoinette ConstableMonday, February 10, 2020 || 7pm
Book Passage|| San Francisco Ferry Plaza ||
www.bookpassage.com

If you missed our event in Corte Madera celebrating Antoinette Constable’s new novel … even if you didn’t … join us on Monday evening at Book Passage in the San Francisco Ferry Plaza!

Author Antioniette Constable, who was a young girl in WWII France, has written a compelling coming-of-age novel for young adult readers. Natalie: in the Shadow of the Swastika. Set in 1940 occupied Paris, eight-year-old Natalie and her family—a Jewish mother, gentile father, and two sisters—cope with the harsh facts of war and Hitler’s occupying army. When her ailing father suddenly disappears, Natalie’s safe surroundings are forever changed. Her struggles with the painful family separation and the dangerous threats against her Jewish mother reveal a growing maturity in the face of confusing loss. Natalie’s fierce resolve to hold onto hope and her love of family leads her from innocence to understanding and resilience, despite the violence of war.

Born and raised in France, Antoinette Constable, a career nurse holding British and American degrees, has lived in the United States for many years, where she raised her four children as a single mother. Antoinette’s work has won the PENFirst Prize for Poetry, as well as the Ann Stanford Award from the University of Southern California, and has appeared (more…)

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LCW Book Launch: Natalie: in the Shadow of the Swastika by Antoinette Constable 🗓

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LEFT COAST WRITERS BOOK LAUNCH:  Natalie in the Shadow of the Swastika by Antoinette Constable

Antoinette ConstableSaturday, February 8, 2020 || 7pm
Book Passage-Corte Madera|| 51 Tamal Vista Dr. Corte Madera ||
www.bookpassage.com

Help us celebrate a landmark publication this coming Saturday! Author Antoinette Constable, who was a young girl in WWII France, has written a compelling coming-of-age novel for young adult readers. Natalie: in the Shadow of the Swastika. Set in 1940 occupied Paris, eight-year-old Natalie and her family—a Jewish mother, gentile father, and two sisters—cope with the harsh facts of war and Hitler’s occupying army. When her ailing father suddenly disappears, Natalie’s safe surroundings are forever changed. Her struggles with the painful family separation and the dangerous threats against her Jewish mother reveal a growing maturity in the face of confusing loss. Natalie’s fierce resolve to hold onto hope and her love of family leads her from innocence to understanding and resilience, despite the violence of war.

Born and raised in France, Antoinette Constable, a career nurse holding British and American degrees, has lived in the United States for many years, where she raised her four children as a single mother. Antoinette’s work has won the PENFirst Prize for Poetry, as well as the Ann Stanford Award from the University of Southern California, and has appeared (more…)

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LCW Literary Salon: Zoe Fitzgerald Carter, Songwriter and Author of Imperfect Endings 🗓

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Monday, February 3, 2020 || 7pm Book Passage-Corte Madera|| 51 Tamal Vista Dr. Corte Madera || www.bookpassage.com

We have an appropriately LOVE-ly treat planned for the February Left Coast Writers Literary Salon: Author and well-known songwriter and performer, Zoe Fitzgerald Carter will be brightening the month by sharing her take on how to turn life and love into lyrics.

As Zoe says, “In many ways my songwriting feels like it builds on everything I’ve done as a writer over my lifetime. It’s just another, more concentrated way to explore language and storytelling and, like all my first-person writing, draws on lived experience.
Zoe FitzGerald Carter will discuss how she decided to become a full-time songwriter and musician after working as a journalist and memoirist for 30 years. While the form is different, the challenge is the same: How to be a vivid—and economical—storyteller. Zoe will share her tips and we think she has some surprises in store, one of which involves a guitar.

Zoe FitzGerald Carter is an author, teacher and journalist who has published in The New York Times, Salon, Vogue and Newsweek among other places. Her 2010 memoir, Imperfect Endings, about her mother’s decision to end her life, was excerpted in O magazine and was a Barnes and Noble “Discover Great New Writers” pick. Since 2017, she has turned exclusively to music, writing and performing original songs with her band, Sugartown. Her first album, Waiting for the Earthquake, came out last year and she is about to record a full-length solo album of original songs. She teaches memoir at The San Francisco Writers Grotto and Left Margin Lit in Berkeley, where she also teaches a six-week course on songwriting. (more…)

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Ferry Plaza Book Party: Dr. Clark J. Chelsey, Author of The Radicalization of Thomas Jefferson 🗓

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LEFT COAST WRITERS BOOK PARTY: Dr. Clark J. Chelsey, Author of The Radicalization of Thomas Jefferson

Dr. Clark J. Chelsey

Monday, January 13, 2020 || 6pm Book Passage || Ferry Building, San F

rancisco ||www.bookpassage.com

Jefferson lived through world-altering upheavals in his lifetime. Not only was he one of the most important founding fathers, but he also served his new nation as one of the most influential precepts of civic responsibility in a democracy. All of this came at a time of three converging revolutions in history: the democratic revolution in America and France, the Scientific Revolution, and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. In The Radicalization of Thomas Jefferson, Dr. Clark J. Chelsey traces the living fabric of Jefferson’s ideas through these turbulent changes and how Jefferson modified, refined, and increasingly radicalized them in a coherent and systematic way. (more…)

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Left Coast Writers Book Launch: Wild Colors of the West by Elaine Miller Bond 🗓

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LEFT COAST WRITERS BOOK LAUNCH:  Wild Colors of the West by Elaine Miller Bond

Elaine Miller Bond

Saturday, January 11, 2020 || 7pm
Book Passage-Corte Madera|| 51 Tamal Vista Dr. Corte Madera ||
www.bookpassage.com

Is your favorite color warm and sunny, or is it cool like water? Does it appear with the rain, or does it glow and shine in the sun? In Wild Colors of the West, the latest board book from the author of Living Wild, photographs of animals in their natural habitats show young readers the prismatic hues found in nature, from the tangerine of monarch butterflies to the fresh green of new sorrel. Each page names and locates the Western park or city where author Elaine Miller Bond photographed the featured species. (more…)

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Left Coast Writers Book Launch: Pocket in the Waistcoat by RC Marlen 🗓

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LEFT COAST WRITERS BOOK LAUNCH:  Pocket in the Waistcoat: Scenes of Oregon County by RC Marlen

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

RC Marlen will share stories from and about her latest book on Saturday, December 9th, at Book Passage in Corte Madera.

When four girls from the Tillamook and Clatsop People befriended Joseph Gervais, he changed from the cantankerous French-Canadian fur trapper to become an amusing storyteller and hero. One day, he saved a Metis girl from being snatched by a stranger and earned respect from the Chinook and Clatsop Tribes as well as the love of a child who claimed she would become his wife. And she did.

It was a time of turmoil at Fort Astoria: the British and Americans vied for control of the Northwest, yet it was a time of rapport between the native people and the fur trappers. In fact, three daughters of Tyee Koboway, Chief of the Clatsop People, sought to marry white men; however, their Tillamook friend Pocket did not want to marry anyone; she strove to be a shaman and to speak English.

This story tells about the Native People living in the Northwest since time immemorial and how their lives and cultures once were harmonious with the Americans and Canadians.

RC Marlen spent her first forty years in St. Louis, Missouri and completed a degree from University of Missouri. She taught Mathematics and went on to earn a master’s from Webster University. After moving to Los Gatos, California she started a business, teaching adults how to utilize computers in the office, and fell in love with Henry Schele who took her to live in Chile and Argentina for fourteen years. In the year 2000 she finished the manuscript that would become her first three novels and three months later she became a widow. (more…)

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Ferry Plaza Book Party: Tania Romanov, Author of Never a Stranger 🗓

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LEFT COAST WRITERS BOOK PARTY: Tania Romanov, Author of Never a Stranger

Tania Romanov

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

Please join us on Monday, December 9th, for a heartwarming evening of adventure and connection with Bay Area travel writer and photographer Tania Romanov as she introduces her latest book, Never a Stranger.
From her past in Croatia and Russia, to finding a son in Bhutan, to befriending women in Africa, one woman’s stories of travel, connection, and self-discovery.
Tania Romanov hangs from the final limb of a family tree of generations of unintentional travelers—exiles, refugees, displaced people. She grew up with stories of exile—stories of adventure. Perhaps that’s why, as an adult, Tania started living her own adventures—and hasn’t stopped since.
In India, she learned that to Indians the way she mourned her husband was far less personal than their custom of dropping cremated bodies into a river; in Japan, that her ancestors could find her in the oddest of circumstances. In Bhutan, she found family, and in Namibia she learned to ease her fears of being trapped in her own past.
In Never a Stranger, Tania shares those experiences and more, unforgettable stories of travel, connection, and self-discovery.

(more…)

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LCW Literary Salon: Michael Shapiro, Author of The Creative Spark 🗓

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Literary Salon:  Michael Shapiro, Author of The Creative Spark in Conversation with Linda Watanabe McFerrin 

 

Michael ShapiroMonday, December 2, 2019 || 7pm Book Passage-Corte Madera|| 51 Tamal Vista Dr. Corte

Linda Watanabe McFerrin

Madera || www.bookpassage.com

How about this for a stellar way to end they year! We are having an end-of-the-year Celebration and a close look at creativity with well-known Bay Area journalist, Michael Shapiro and LCW Founder, Linda Watanabe McFerrin. Please join us for wine, scintillating conversation, and a book that looks at creativity in conversations with some of the best in every business.

 

Creativity: how do we access it, nurture it, and sustain it? This question propelled journalist Michael Shapiro during more than a decade of interviewing many of the foremost creators of our time. In The Creative Spark: How musicians, writers, explorers, and other artists found their inner fire and followed their dreams, his just-published collection of conversations with Amy Tan, Smokey Robinson, Barbara Kingsolver, Lucinda Williams, Francis Ford Coppola, Lyle Lovett, David Sedaris and so many others, Shapiro reveals how these luminaries fire up their creativity and sustain it throughout their lives. Prefaced by short biographies, these interviews serve as guideposts for how each one of us can kindle our own creative sparks.

Shapiro will appear in conversation with Linda Watanabe-McFerrin, author of Navigating the Divide: Selected Poetry and Prose, a career-spanning, multi-genre collection. In profoundly personal poetry and prose, Watanabe-McFerrin’s multi-faceted collection spans spiritual and physical, thought and desire, identity and others. A renowned writing instructor, Linda will speak with Michael about the life-affirming force that is creativity.

Michael Shapiro writes about the performing arts, travel, food, books, and environmental issues for U.S. newspapers and magazines including National Geographic Traveler and American Way. For four years he wrote a column for the San Francisco Chronicle’s travel section and now covers music and the arts for The Press Democrat.

Linda  Watanabe McFerrin is a poet, travel writer, novelist and contributor to numerous newspapers, magazines and anthologies.She is the author of two poetry collections and a winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction. Her novel, Namako:  Sea Cucumber, was named Best Book for the Teen-Age by the New York Public Library. In addition to authoring an award-winning short story collection, The Hand of Buddha, she has co-edited twelve anthologies. Her latest novel, Dead Love (Stone Bridge Press, 2009), was a Bram Stoker Award Finalist for Superior Achievement in a Novel.

Linda has judged the San Francisco Literary Awards, the Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence and the Kiriyama (more…)

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Ferry Plaza Book Party: Joanna Biggar, Author of Melanie’s Song 🗓

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LEFT COAST WRITERS BOOK PARTY: Joanna Biggar, Author of Melanie’s Song 

Monday, November 11, 2019 || 6pm Book Passage || Ferry Building, San Francisco ||www.bookpassage.com

Come to Book Passage in the Ferry Plaza and visit with an author and a character in her novel!

Joanna Biggar will be in conversation with one of her characters in Melanie’s Song: Evelyn, in the person of Ms. Chris Berardo. They will discuss what is real and what isn’t and what it feels like to become a character in a novel. What’s more: you can join in on the conversation, enjoy some wine and snacks and the Left Coast Writers literary vibe on the lovely San Francisco waterfront. Hope to see you there!

Joanna Biggar has traveled solo in the most remote areas of China, chaired a school board in Ghana, worked as a journalist in Washington, D.C., and taught school kids in Oakland, California. She is a member of the Society of Woman Geographers, mother of five, grandmother of eight, all of whom love books! Joanna’s first novel, That Paris Year, is written in English but captures that French novel feel in a truly classic style. If you’ve been to Paris, she will welcome you back, if you haven’t, (more…)

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Left Coast Writers Book Launch: The Unexploded Ordnance Bin by Rebecca Foust 🗓

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LEFT COAST WRITERS BOOK LAUNCH:  The Unexploded Ordnance Bin by Rebecca Foust  

Saturday, November 9, 2019 || 7pm
Book Passage-Corte Madera|| 51 Tamal Vista Dr. Corte Madera ||
www.bookpassage.com

LEFT COAST WRITERS presents a book launch celebration for a new chapbook, THE UNEXPLODED ORDNANCE BIN by longtime LCW member Rebecca Foust, joined by cover artist Lorna Stevens.

“The ticking IS the bomb,” Nick Flynn says, and the idea of events from our genetic, cultural, historic, and experienced past–coiled and waiting to explode in our lives–lies at the core of this Rebecca Foust’s new collection, winner of the 2018 Swan Scythe Press Chapbook Award. The Unexploded Ordinance Bin presents new poems that ignite a long, sparking fuse about contemporary culture, society, and political events now dividing families and creating a generation of lost children. The author will be joined by the book’s cover artist, Lorna Stevens, who has collaborated with Foust on a number of books and projects marrying image with text.

Rebecca Foust’s books include The Unexploded Ordnance Bin and Paradise Drive, winner of the Press 53 Poetry Award and reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement and widely elsewhere. Recognitions include the CP Cavafy and James Hearst poetry prizes, the Lascaux and American Literary Review fiction prizes, the Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize, and fellowships from The Frost Place, Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and Sewanee. Foust was Marin County Poet Laureate in 2017-19 and works now as Poetry Editor for Women’s Voices for Change, an assistant Editor for Narrative Magazine, and co-producer of a new series about poetry for Marin TV, Rising Voices. (more…)

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