Celebrate the publication of our latest anthology, The Other Side of Violet.
Featuring contributors and special guests Jessica Barksdale, Natasha Dennerstein, Carol Dorf, Julian Mithra, SB Stokes, and Ken Saffran
Hosted by Richard Loranger and Jane Ormerod
Plus short open mic
Free but please support the venue by purchasing drink and food. Take a look at their menu.
The Other Side of Violet is an exhilarating collection of contemporary poetry and short fiction by established and emerging writers from across the United States and beyond. The anthology also contains interviews with Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Paul Harding and award-winning poet and novelist Tim Z. Hernandez.
Submissions for our next anthology open October 15 2017
Jessica Barksdale’s fourteenth novel, The Burning Hour, was published by Urban Farmhouse Press in April 2016. Her short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in, or are forthcoming, in Waccamaw Journal, Salt Hill Journal, Little Patuxent Review, and So to Speak. She is a Professor of English at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, California, and teaches novel writing online for UCLA Extension. In addition, Jessica holds an MA in English Literature from San Francisco State University and an MFA from the Rainier Writers Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University.
Carol Dorf is the author of the chapbooks Theory Headed Dragon (Finishing Line Press) and Some Years Ask (Locofo Chaps, Moria Press.) Her poetry appears in Sin Fronteras, Antiphon, The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, Scientific American, Maintenant, and Best of Indie Lit New England. Carol is poetry editor of Talking Writing and teaches mathematics in Berkeley.
Natasha Dennerstein was born in Melbourne, Australia, to a family originating in Belarus. She worked as a psychiatric nurse for many years, which gave her an interesting perspective on the human condition. She has an MFA from San Francisco State University and her work appears in journals including Snorkel, Bloom, Transfer, Red Light Lit, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Foglifter. Her poetry collections Anatomize (2015) and Triptych Caliform (2016) were published by Norfolk Press in San Francisco, who will also be publishing her novella-in-verse About a Girl in late 2017. Her recent chapbook Seahorse (2017) was published by Nomadic Press in Oakland.
Julian Mithra, primarily a performance artist, hovers between genre and gender, border-mongering and mongreling. Resisting essentialisms, they roll out monologues, collage black & white zines, clip poem videos, and rubber stamp imprints. They hold an MA in Folklore from UC Berkeley. Their work has been featured in Gendertrash Café, Milvia Street, Storm Cellar, Whirlwind, Sharkpack Review, and enough/enough
Ken Saffran has had poems in Ambush, San Francisco Peace and Hope, and Amsterdam Quarterly. He lives in San Francisco because he can’t afford it.
SB Stokes, the author of A History of Broken Love Things (Punk Hostage Press), lives and writes in the hills behind the lake in Oakland. One of the core founders of Beast Crawl, Oakland's free annual literary festival, he holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University.