James Arthur and Traci Chee April 19

 Peninsula Literary presents

An Evening of Poetry and Prose Friday, April 19, 2013, 7:00 p.m. At  Gallery House, 320 South California Avenue, Palo Alto @ Birch Street, through Printer’s Inc. Cafe Featuring:  James Arthur and Traci Chee                                                          

With Guest Readers: Mary Felstiner, John McDonough, Hee-June Choi, Stuart Langs Produced By Carrie Hechtman and Jean Znidarsic  

James Arthur’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Poetry, Ploughshares, and The American Poetry Review. He has received the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholarship, a Stegner Fellowship, a Discovery/The Nation Prize, and a residency at the Amy Clampitt House. He is currently a Hodder Fellow at the Lewis Center for the Arts in Princeton. His first book, Charms Against Lightning, is available through Copper Canyon Press.

Traci Chee writes and teaches, teaches and writes. Her debut short story collection, Consonant Sounds for Fish Songs, is available through Aqueous Books. Recently, she has been collaborating with visual and performing artists and reading at various literary events in the San Francisco Bay Area. The play “Philia,” based on one of her short stories, will be performed at the San Francisco Fringe Festival in September 2013. Chee keeps a blog at tracichee.blogspot.com and you can follow her on Twitter @tracichee. She likes fish and ships.

 
Authors will have books for sale at the reading.

Jacqueline Berger and Rayme Waters, 7p.m.Friday January 25

Peninsula Literary presents – an evening of poetry and prose.

Friday January 25, 2013, 7:00 p.m.

At Gallery House, 320 South California Avenue, Palo Alto

Featuring: Jacqueline Berger and Rayme Waters with Guest Artist Edith Sommer   Donation $5 -10

And Presenting Guest Readers:

Aimee Norton, Jeanne Watson, Joel Katz and John Felstiner

 

Produced by Carrie Hechtman  and Jean Znidarsic

(photo by Nathan Hechtman)

Rayme Waters

Born in San Francisco, Rayme Waters grew up in Northern California and Linköping, Sweden. Her short stories, from the collection The Island of Misfit Girls,have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Dzanc Award, and awarded a storySouth Notable Story distinction. Her debut novel, The Angels’ Share, is the story of a young woman rebuilding her life while working at a small Sonoma County

winery. She lives in Palo Alto, and is working on her next novel, Quicksilver.

Jacqueline Berger

Jacqueline Berger’s latest book, The Gift That Arrives Broken, won the 2010 Autumn House Poetry Prize. Poems from the book were featured on Garrison Keillor’s Writers Almanac. Her poetry has been published in numerous anthologies and journals, including The Iowa Review, American Poetry: The Next Generation, On The Verge, Old Dominion Review, Rhino, River Styx, and Nimrod.

She is the director of the Master of Arts in English program at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont. She lives in San Francisco.

For information on Gallery House – http://www.galleryhouse2.com         

Reading July 13, 2012 7:00 PM

Blue Dicks in Oak Woodland – Trevlyn Williams

                    
At Gallery House, Palo Alto

320 South California Avenue,
@ Birch Street, through Printer’s Inc. Cafe
Featuring: Alice LaPlante and Elizabeth Percer
with guest artist Trevlyn Williams
and guest readers:
Diane Moomey, Mary Petrosky, Patrick Letellier, Lisa Rosenberg                        Donation $10
JOIN US FOR AN EVENING OF POETRY, PROSE, AND ART!
Produced by Carrie Hechtman and Jean Znidarsic

Aaron Shurin and Bruce Snider, April 20

 

Photo by Peter Schenk

Peninsula Literary presents

 an evening of poetry and prose.

7:00 pm Friday, April 20

 Featuring Aaron Shurin and Bruce Snider,

guest Artist Peter Schenk

And guest readers:
Jerry Dyer, Maria Greene, John Nimmo, and Yanshuo Zhang

 Produced by Jean Znidarsic and Carrie Hechtman

and Peninsula Literary interns: Claire Hallatt, Marisa Kanemoto, Nathan Hechtman and Michael Znidarsic

Find books by Peninsula Literary writers at Kepler’s Bookstore in Menlo Park.
Aaron Shurin is the author of eleven books, including the poetry collections Involuntary
Lyrics (Omnidawn, 2005) and The Paradise of Forms (Talisman House, 1999), a Publishers
Weekly Best Book; and most recently, Citizen published by City Lights. His prose collections
include King of Shadows, a collection of personal essays (City Lights Books, 2008); and
Unbound: A Book of AIDS (Sun & Moon, 1997). His work has appeared in over thirty national
and international anthologies, and has been translated into seven languages. Shurin’s honors
include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, the
San Francisco Arts Commission, and the Gerbode Foundation. He is a Professor in the MFA in
Writing Program at the University of San Francisco.
About Citizen: Widely acclaimed for his lyrical language and innovative verse, Aaron Shurin
brings the prose poem into new richness and complexity in Citizen. Through shape-shifting
sentences and sensuous imagery he explores the nuances of civic and domestic life, the twists and
turns of desire, and the mysterious shimmer of objects. Traveling across the borders of cities and the
boundaries of form, he crafts a dazzling vision of daily life as a citizen of the imagination.

Bruce Snider is the author of the poetry collections, Paradise, Indiana (LSU Press), winner of
the 2011 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize, and The Year We Studied Women, winner of the
Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the American
Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Gettysburg Review and Best American Poetry 2012. Originally
from Indiana, he was a Wallace Stegner fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, and
has been writer-in-residence at both the James Merrill House and Amy Clampitt House. He will
be the Jenny McKean Moore Fellow at George Washington University in DC for 2012-2013.
About Paradise, Indiana: A father and son shovel snow from a driveway; a boy accidentally
sets himself on fire; two boys fish for bluegill; a young drag queen returns home to die. At the
center of it all, a teenage boy’s suicide resonates through the lives of those closest to him. The
poems in Bruce Snider’s Paradise, Indiana describe a place where mundane events neighbor the
most harrowing. Shaped by the author’s experiences growing up in rural Indiana, Paradise,
Indiana envisions a seldom recorded rural America, one where everything exists side by side: the
county fair and an abandoned small town gay bar, farmers and cross-dressers, death and hope,
beauty and despair.

NDNU Reading February 15 at 7:30 p.m.

  Creative Writers Series: Zara Raab and Jeanne Wagner
February 15 at 7:30 p.m.
Wiegand Gallery

NDNU Events

 

Zara Raab lives in Berkeley, but she grew up on the North Coast, where her ancestors farmed, raised cattle and harvested tan oak. Her poems appear in River Styx, Crab Orchard Review, Evansville Review, and elsewhere. Her most recent book is Swimming the Eel (David Robert Books, 2011).

Jeanne Wagner is the recipient of several national awards, including the MacGuffin Poet Hunt, the Ann Stanford Prize, the Briar Cliff Review Award and the 2011 Inkwell Prize, judged by Mark Doty. Her poems have appeared in Spoon River Poetry Review, RHINO, Cincinnati Review, Alaska Quarterly Review and PBS website’s Poem of the Week. She has five collections of poetry, the most recently, In The Body Of Our Lives, was released by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2011.

For further information about this event, please contact the English Department at (650) 508-3730 ext.2.

Creative Writers Series: Christopher Buckley and Gary Young
March 22 at 7:30 p.m.
Wiegand Gallery

Creative Writers Series: Michelle Richmond
April 4 at 7:00 p.m.
Wiegand Gallery

Brittany Perham and Casey FitzSimons, January 27, 7:00 pm

 Peninsula Literary presents

 an evening of poetry and prose.

 Featuring Brittany Perham and Casey FitzSimons

 With guest Artist Wendy Fitzgerald

 And guest readers Teri Carter, Virginia Bellis, Jessica Hahn and Richard Lawson

 Series Organizers Jean Znidarsic and Carrie  Hechtman

Find books by Peninsula Literary writers at Kepler’s Bookstore in Menlo Park.

Painting by Wendy Fitzgerald

Casey FitzSimons’ poetry appears in print and online in The Newport Review, Hobo Camp Review, EarthSpeak, The Prose-Poem Project, flashquake, Leveler, and others. She has been a finalist in the River Styx and Writecorner Press poetry competitions. She has collected her works annually in chapbooks, most recently No Longer Any Need (2011) and Altering the Lay of Land (2010). Casey taught art in San Francisco for many years, publishing her studio drawing book, Serious Drawing, with Prentice Hall, and reviewing many exhibitions for Artweek. She has a master’s degree in Fine Arts from San Jose State University.

Brittany Perham is the author of “The Curiosities” (Parlor Press 2012). Her recent work may be found in Southern Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, Lo-Ball, Linebreak, and elsewhere. She is a Jones Lecturer in poetry at Stanford University, where she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow from 2009-2011. She is a founding member of the word/music project Nonstop Beautiful Ladies and she lives in San Francisco.

Peter Orner and Andrew Tilin Reading October 21, 7:00

Peninsula Literary Series Presents
A Reading on Friday, October 21, 2011, 7:00 p.m.
 
At  Gallery House, 320 South California Avenue, Palo Alto
@ Birch Street, through Printer’s Inc. Cafe
 
Featuring: Peter Orner and Andrew Tilin, 
with guest artist Dan McLean 
Carrie Hechtman and Jean Znidarsic,series organizers
 

Andrew Tilin has written for many publications, including

The New York Times, Wired, Runner’s World, Rolling Stone,

GQ, Men’s Journal, and Yoga Journal. He was a senior editor

at Business 2.0 and Outside magazines, and is a contributing

editor for Outside.  Tilin’s book The Doper Next Door recounts

a year of his life on performance-enhancing drugs. During his yearlong
odyssey, Tilin is transformed. He becomes stronger, hornier, and more
aggressive. He wades into a subculture of doping physicians, real estate
agents, and aging women who believe that Tilin’s type of legal “hormone
replacement therapy” is the key to staying young. He also lives with the price
paid for renewed vitality—worrying about his health, marriage, and cheating
ways as an amateur bike racer. Equal
parts coming-of-middle-age memoir and sports tell-all, Tilin will have you
reading–and wondering who the dopers really are.

For more info on The Doper Next
Door, visit: http://www.facebook.com/thedopernextdoor.

Peter Orner is the author of the novel,
The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo
(Little, Brown, 2006), winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, and the story
collection, Esther Stories (Houghton
Mifflin, 2001). Orner also edited a book of oral histories, Underground America: Narratives of
Undocumented Lives, published in 2008 by McSweeneys, for the Voice of
Witness Series. His new novel, Love and
Shame and Love, published by Little, Brown is coming out this fall. His work has appeared in

Best American Stories, was twice awarded a Pushcart prize, and has been a
finalist for the Pen Hemingway Award. His story “The Raft” is being
made into a film starring Ed Asner. Orner is an associate professor at San Francisco
State. His books are available at bookstores and on Amazon.com

About Orner’s forthcoming
novel Love and Shame and Love:  A keen-eyed observer of American life and
history, Peter Orner strips every layer of pretense from his characters, not to
diminish but rather to reveal them. What’s exposed–what they have been hiding
from one another and from themselves–surprises, one suspects, even the
characters themselves. This is a real and memorable America. –Yiyun Li, author of The Vagrants, and Gold
Boy, Emerald Girl.