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.

Reading July 15, 2011 7:00 PM

(Painting by Trevlyn Williams)

Featuring Lisa Catherine Harper and Randall Mann

With guest Artist Trevlyn Williams

And guest readers Catherine Sharpe, Peter Caroll, Anna Teeples and Tommy Mouton

Series Organizers Jean Znidarsic and Carrie Hechtman

Lisa Catherine Harper is the author of A Double Life, Discovering Motherhood, which won the 2010 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize.   Publishers Weekly has called the book, which merges personal narrative with research “universal, moving, and relevant.”  Her writing has appeared in books, online and in print, in places including San Francisco Chronicle, Poetry Foundation, Huffington Post, Babble, Glimmer Train, Literary Mama, Offsprung, Gastronomica, Mama, PhD, and the forthcoming Educating Tastes.   She holds a B.A. from Princeton University and an MA and PhD from University of California, Davis. She is currently Adjunct Professor of Writing in the MFA program at the University of San Francisco and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, and their two children. You can find her online at http://www.LisaCatherineHarper.com.

Randall Mann is the author of two collections of poetry, Breakfast with Thom Gunn, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and California Book Award, and Complaint in the Garden, winner of the Kenyon Review Prize.  His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Poetry, The New Republic, and The Paris Review. He lives in San Francisco.

Trevlyn Williams is watercolor artist who is currently obsessed with painting images from the local natural environment.  Trevlyn comes to this with a bigger interest in wishing for us all to be knowledgeable about our local environment. This awareness along with an environmental and ecological literacy is what we, as a society and individuals, need to take our world forward in a sustainable manner. Apart from painting subjects of environmental interest Trevlyn volunteers with a couple local parks as a docent naturalist. Paintings of the local environment are a small contribution towards creating dialogue and focus of our precious natural resources and the ways in which we use them.

Reading Friday, April 22, 2011, 7:00 p.m.At Gallery House, 320 South California Avenue,

 

Photograph by Jennifer Fraser

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Peninsula Literary Series Presents

A Reading on Friday, April 22, 2011, 7:00 p.m. At Gallery House, 320 South California Avenue, Palo Alto                                                             

@ Birch Street, through Printer’s Inc. Cafe   Featuring:  K.M. Soehnlein, Peter Kline,                                                            

and guest artist Jennifer Fraser  Authors will have books for sale at the reading. Donations of $5-10 gratefully accepted.  

JOIN US FOR A GREAT EVENING OF POETRY AND PROSE!  Carrie Hechtman and Jean Znidarsic, Series co-organizers   

About Featured Authors K.M. Soehnlein and Peter Kline

  

K.M. Soehnlein is the author of three novels: Robin and Ruby, just released, which follows characters introduced in his award-winning debut,

The World of Normal Boys; and You Can Say You Knew Me When. His fiction has been translated into three languages and optioned for film.

Recent essays appeared in the anthologies Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times; Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys;

and Love, Castro Street; and in San Francisco Magazine, 7x7 Magazine, The Village Voice, Out and other publications.

He lives in San Francisco, and he teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco. Visit http://kmsoehnlein.com .

 Peter Kline's poetry has appeared in Tin House, Poetry, Ploughshares, Crab Orchard Review, Crazyhorse, Drunken Boat, and elsewhere. 

He has been honored with a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and the 2010 Morton Marr Prize from Southwest Review.  He is currently the

William Chace Lecturer of Creative Nonfiction at Stanford University, and lives in San Francisco.

 About Gallery House
Gallery House was founded in 1958 as part of the Palo Alto Consumers' Co-op to provide

holiday sales of local artists' works; however, within two years the members established

a permanent venue to show their works on the peninsula. Gallery members include painters,

sculptors, printers, ceramicists, jewelers, photographers and mixed media artists who

exhibit in styles ranging from photo-realism to impressionistic to abstraction,

demonstrating the wide diversity and high quality of local artistic work.
For more information visit www.galleryhouse2.com .

 

Reading Friday January 14

Peninsula Literary Series Presents
A Reading on Friday, January 14, 2011, 7:00 p.m.
At  Gallery House, 320 South California Avenue, Palo Alto
                                                              @ Birch Street, through Printer’s Inc. Cafe
 
Featuring: Patrick Daly, Lee Rossi, 
                                                           and guest artist, Martha Castillo
 
With Guest Readers:   Richard Lawson, Diane Lee Moomey, 
                                                     Al Riske and Kelly Cressio-Moeller

Authors will have books for sale at the reading. Donations of $5-10 gratefully accepted. 
 
JOIN US FOR A GREAT EVENING OF POETRY AND PROSE!
Carrie Hechtman and Jean Znidarsic, Series co-organizers
 Fault Lines by Martha Castillo