Oakland Review of Books calendar of (not just) literary events, November 10–15
Usually Thursdays at Thee Stork Club are either an unofficial OR official (depending on the Thursday) trans hangout night, and/but/or/also THIS Thursday it’s also the site of a Very Official ORB happy hour from five to seven pm. For all my ecopoets and enviroartists, you have ten days to apply to be an artist in residence in the estuary, and the CODEX folks are hosting a typesetting workshop where you can learn what leading really means while printing a poem by Truong Tran as a broadside (and come back on the 20th for a free reading by the poet). It’s dark early evenings now which means it’s NOIRvember (get it?) at The New Parkway, and Cal Performances are ramping it up with William Kentridge’s The Head & the Load over on the campus in Greater North Oakland. It’s Craft Fair season everywhere and I loved Coyote Media’s guide to Holiday Fairs last year so fingers crossed they point my money in the right direction again soon or everyone’s getting baskets made from ivy and filled with bay nuts: you’ve been warned. For now, I’ve got the Kaiser Center’s Fellowship of Craft Fair and (thanks to Humphrey’s Bushrod Flyer) the La Peña Persimmon and Moon Craft Fair on my radar at the end of the month. I woke up early to fog this fine Monday morning and felt so snugged in as it clung and lingered, puddling underfoot and under finger. Then, delivering a few totes etc up high in the hills, I saw more clearly than usual how much we in the flats live in a completely different environment from the hill people. Up there above 13, across the Hayward Fault, it was quiet and clear, the peak of Mount Tam curled up to by the cats’ paw of fog and the entirety of town blanked out by the palest grey quilt drawing the ocean up to the redwoods. Then I tumbled downhill to home, sliding back into the grey, into my loud and comfortable world buzzing with artists and children and neighbors, half-finished projects and half-drunk cups of tea, grateful that the hill people are paying to be part of ORB, hoping to see you and hear you all around Oakland all week long. —MS
Tuesday, November 10
Courtland Creek Park Community Clean-Up, noon, Courtland Creek Park (Maxwell Park). Last year ORB vibe reported the park opening and the way that a creek changes its meaning as a city changes, and the thing that is true with place is that one-time interventions are not how any ecologies or infrastructures work. You have to keep coming back, keep putting hands on a place, with weeding and trash pick ups and hellos to neighbors. Place is made through the ritual of return. So come back, long after Mayor Lee cut the ribbon, and keep the creek alive and the park a respite for everyone. [melrose27xneighborhoodcouncil]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Culture Slop Live!, 2:30pm, TIAT (Union Square). Depending on how you feel about slop and cozying up to the money that’s slurping and spilling its AI-generated servility over everything, you might be into what these tech-adjacent culturemongers are doing, I dunno. There’s interesting people having interesting conversations here but just stay aware of the money and politics at play in certain art markets, and the media spin around it. [thecultureslop.com]
The Hidden Impacts of Highway Construction, 5pm, 81st Avenue Branch OPL (Deep East). You know where a great place is to reach a community? The neighborhood branch library, which has meeting rooms and all. And this one is hosting a conversation about freeways, the defining infrastructure of Oakland since Eisenhower. It’s a good conversation to have right now as the question of allowing trucks on 580 gets outrage from the hills, where their property values and personal health were entirely premised on freight transport staying on 880 and which are now, quelle horreur, subject to change in the name of no longer making the flats a sacrifice zone. So go find out and speak out, East Oakland. [CBE]
Jordan Ritter Conn on “American Men”, 5:45pm, North Gate Hall (Cal). Tender are the men who opened their throats and hearts, bodies, and minds to Jordan Ritter Conn to dwell in questions of masculinity. Tender the meat and tender the heart that hide behind a performance of masculinity, that delicate mask that pummels both men and women in order to keep it intact. Conn comes back to Cal and converses with his homophonic counterpart Jennifer Kahn about what it means to be a man in America, and how the sweet baby boys who nuzzle our breasts for milk as long as their feet are soft as pillows become hollowed and hardened, stuffed full of refusals to feel and ways to seek power instead of connection. Conn finds the men who have escaped the destinies of American masculinity to show us how it could be otherwise, and the gentle ways they could offer if stripped of the shellacking we too often demand our men paint themselves into corners with. [UC]
An Anthology of the Berkeley Renaissance—A Poetry Launch Celebration, 6:30pm, Pegasus Books (Downtown Berkeley). The Berkeley Renaissance was a semi-ironic name that Jack Spicer gave to what he cultivated in his rocketship couple decades of making poetry and poetic community in the Bay during the postwar era. Alongside Robin Blaser and Robert Duncan and a bucketload of alcohol, he wrote some unforgettable poetry and created the fertile conditions for the Beats. And now, shortly after the Collected Spicer has been released by Wesleyan UP, we’ve got the full Berkeley Renaissance universe getting built out by anthology editors Ben Mazer and Blake Campbell. Duncan, Jack Spicer, Landis Everson, Robin Blaser, Mary Fabilli, Virginia Admiral, Sanders Russell, and Charles Olson will be played tonight by Steve Dickison, Laura Moriarty, Brandon Brown, Marthine Satris, Radha Stern, Lily Grodzins, and Brent Cunningham, variously and not in order. Be transported, one poet at a time. [Pegasus Bookstore]
Witness from the West Bank, 7pm, Sansaar Books (El Cerrito). We can bear witness and offer support with our eyes, attention, and time (not to mention money). A recently returned ally comes to the East Bay from the West Bank to share direct observations with photographs and stories about life under occupation, the joys and terrors of the everyday as settler and military violence continues, before, after and during ceasefire. Sansaar was started to expressly make space for stories like this: come listen and understand why calls for Palestine liberation must not end. [insta]
Also: The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There with Owen Zidar at Jarvis Auditorium (Cal) / Making Stories: FOr Kids at Rockridge Branch OPL (College Ave) / SPUR Housing Advocacy 101: Understanding Policy and Making Your Voice Heard with Cecilia Lunaparra at Local Economy (Rockridge) / Stagebridge Presents: Tell Your Story! at Montclair Branch OPL (The Hills) / Performance by Aine Nakamura: Breath in this World at Hearst Field Annex (Cal) / Diwali Treats with Priyanka Kothari at Rockridge Branch (College Ave) / Jennifer Croft / Notes on Postcards: A Memoir at City Lights Bookstore (West Bay)
Wednesday, November 11
No Bioengineering Seminar Today, midnight, Nowhere (Cal). It ain’t happening, and doesn’t that make your Wednesday? [UC]
Glue Stick Social: Nosferatu, 6pm, Spire (West Oakland). I do not know exactly why you would put your junk in your journal, but I have been told they are going to do that here, while watching old creepy movies in a church. Is this like the goth version of netflix and chill? If you miss tonight, you have three more chances, one of which involves Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, to journal with your junk. [darkparloursociety.com]
Dorothy Lazard: “Behind the Desk at the Main”, with Jeneé Darden, 7pm, Pegasus Books (Downtown Berkeley). Dorothy Lazard has left the Oakland city environs, traveled north to Berkeley, where (as her book will tell you), she worked as a librarian for many years before coming to Oakland’s public library! Today Dorothy talks with Jeneé Darden, KALW reporter on East Oakland and host of the weekly arts segment Sights & Sounds. Hear from two longtime local Black women on what makes Oakland an arts hub and the library’s role in the community’s understanding of itself. [pegasusbookstore.com]
Also: Art and Craft Night: Uncanny Collage at ARTogether Center (Downtown) / Monthly Book Swap at There/There (Uptown) / The Science of Longing with Scott Lambridis and Yance Wyatt at Clio’s Books (The Lake) / The Berkeley Slam ft. Allie Jones at The Starry Plough Pub (Berkeley)
Thursday, November 12
California and the Nation Vote: A Post-Mortem on the 2026 Midterm Election, 4pm, Philosophy Hall (Cal). Join ORB in asking why the fuck our incredibly well-researched, argued, explained voting guide didn’t sway every single heart and mind for the obviously correct and necessary 40 and against the stupid blunders of 42 and EE? It’s already time for a postmortem, y’all, so let’s dissect the body politic together. Panelists will also talk about the Greater South Oakland neighborhood of LA and their new DSA mayor and lots more political things in case you’re not sick of those topics by now. [UC]
ORB Happy Hour, 5pm, Thee Stork Club (Telegraph). Have a drink with us, get some free books, hear about ORB’s plans for 2027, pitch us a vibe report or a book review or a deep investigation into why Piedmont defined its boundaries by where their shit was flowing downhill. [ORB]
[West Bay Bonus Event]. Mother Jones—50 Years of Fearless Journalism, 5pm, SFPL (Civic Center). Good things started in 1976, like Mother Jones, muckraking magazine cofounded by discerning ORB reader Adam Hochschild, who believes in supporting local journalism to expose all the exploding Pintos of our time. An early forerunner of nonprofit public-interest news, Mother Jones still does that work, now led by Clara Jeffery, who will be in conversation with Hochschild, moderated by journalist Jamil Smith. Nosh and sip first, then the panel is at 6:30, and there’s an exhibit of 50 years of the magazine at the library you can visit any time. [SFPL]
SOLD OUT Wikicurious: Rooted in Oakland, 5:30pm, Bay Rising Movement Hub (Oakland). On the plus side, everyone has a lot of things they want to say about local Oakland facts and history, artisanally crafted by people typing it letter by letter into the internet. The only downside is the fact that all the spots are taken and it’s booked the hell up! But on the OTHER plus side, wikipedia can be edited by anyone anytime and on the other OTHER plus side, the local Oakland wiki, which our man Gene helps keep ticking along, would love your contributions today and any other day. Make your own cool wiki-improving hang at the Oakland History Center and invite ORB along. [eventbrite]
Holloway Poetry Series | Jennifer Soong Reading, 5:30pm, Maud Fife Room (Cal). Jennifer Soong says “Nothing gets past me now / except your being everything / beyond my love,” or there’s a different kind of nothing: “I go to work and the nothingness / fills the insides of my fingers, my eyeballs / of nothingness, my heart.” Her work has a forgetting to it, an I don’t remember, and she converses in her lyrics and in her criticism with Stein and Hejinian, our east bay godmothers of difficult poetry, who demand we stay in the present of each word, forgetting what came before and refusing to predict the future of the sentence. Let yourself be surprised, forget what you expect. [UC]
ZYZZYVA Issue #133 Release Party, 6pm, Womb House Books (Temescal Alley). Hurrah for print literary culture and the lit mags that keep spinning that wheel! Zyzzyva (pronounced like a wasp got caught in your mouth) shall feed and drink you and stuff you full of poems and prose by local luminaries like North Bay rockstar in prose Leilani Clark, East Bay coyote calendar caliph and speculator in fiction Reo Eveleth, and poet in lower case, hector son of hector. Wave hi to Marthine, who will be there listening to these voices after the ORB happy hour! [eventbrite]
Writing the Body in Memoir: How to Work with What Our Bodies Know, 6pm, Local Economy (Rockridge). Savala Nolan guides a memoir workshop that begins from embodiment. How do we know the world if not through its touch on our skin; how do we know ourselves if not through what knots our stomach in anxiety and shivers our spine in unexpected pleasure? Read about bodies, write about bodies: the mind is electricity and hormones and rattles around as part of a sensing organism pulling pulses of meaning from outside into our core, and also practice dealing with what bodies mean in a social context that ranks these juicy, leaky vessels in perceived value, regardless of the thrilling work they all do just by being porous to the world. [luma]
David D. Schmidt—San Francisco Bay Area: An Environmental History, 6pm, Oakland Main Library (The Lake). Six hundred pages of stories about the Bay Area’s environmental history will be distilled for the day into a relatively brief presentation, with a particular focus this time around on Oakland and the East Bay, as he very much should. [OPL]
And If I Die Before I Wake: George M. Johnson , 6:30pm, Marcus Books (Longfellow). Diagnosed with HIV at twenty-five, George M. Johnson, whose first book All Boys Aren’t Blue told their story up until age twenty-one, now is writing the next chapter, and the tumult of life as a young Black gay man drawing on the love of friends and family to see their way through addiction, grief, and backlash to their truth-telling work as an author who wants young people to know they aren’t alone in their shame and fear and confusion. In conversation with Maggie Tokuda-Hall, who knows what it takes to stand against book bans like those that have flagged Johnson’s work for removal all over the nation. [litquake]
Black Lawrence Press Writers Panel, 6:30pm, Books Inc. (Alameda). Black Lawrence Press is based in New York but, after taking on the back catalogue of Nomadic Press, has a hefty number of authors based in Oakland and the Bay, too. Today local Black Lawrence poets James Cagney and Tureeda Mikell support pressmate Tayyba Kanwal on her visit to the Bay to share Talking with Boys, her book of linked short stories that emerge from the milieu she knows deeply, in her bones and blood and in the sweat of the gulf air: the Pakistani diaspora that clustered in the heat of Houston. [eventbrite]
Queer Erotics Open Mic, 7pm, There/There (Uptown). Love letters, Stein/Toklas cow-coded role play, the gayest yearnings, and the smuttiest smut you ever did smut: all are welcome by host Kevin Madrigal Galindo who wants to hear it all! Featured poets are Jaz Sufi the Poet Laureate of San Ramon and Brandon Logans the rectangular sheet of honey. Keep Oakland sexy between the Sultry Sessions y’all. [insta]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Lone Glen 50: Days After Book Launch, 7pm, Et al. (The Mission). I have heard that Lone Glen is an East Bay backyard reading series but have yet to see it in action—I am skeptical but I want to believe. So this West Bay manifestation of the cryptid hints that there would be more, a whole family of fleeting readings. Today, Lone Glen exists, if we want it to, for the sake of Adam Stutz’s new poetry collection, Days After. He writes, sometimes, “I could hold a majesty of grief lines I am the masquerade of a scripture I am a need to survive” and what he is I am I am I am. To hold up the other two sides of the poetic triangle, here come MK Chavez and Ann Pedone, making a community in lyric. [insta]
[West Bay Bonus Event] The Story Behind The Story: Behind-The-Scenes Book Talk, 7pm, Black Bird Bookstore and Cafe (Outer Sunset). One more hit from Black Bird! We love a curtain raiser, so hear from Devon Halliday who made it all the way here from the far Oakland exurb of Brooklyn to show us the sausage of bookmaking. She’s sold books as an agent, now she’s written a whole novel all by herself and gotten it published too, by McSweeney’s! Talking with fellow McSweeney’s author Rebecca Handler and the store’s fiction buyer Christina Pappas, who knows a bit about the book as artistic expression and market object herself. [Black Bird SF]
Also: Portraits of Unbelonging: Returning and Belonging, On Ottoman Armenians with Zeynep Devrim Gürsel at Dwinelle (Cal) / The Revolutionary Center: The Lost Genius of Liberalism at Philosophy Hall (Cal) / Diwali Celebration with Henna and Diya Lamp Craft at Piedmont Avenue Branch (Piedmont Ave) / Creative Translation of the Troubadours and Guillaume Machaut, with Marisa Galvez at Morrison Hall (Cal) / Carmen Argote: “Conversings: Playing with materials and improvisational gestures in art and life” at Anthropology and Art Practice Building (Cal) / Building on Discontent: AI and the Arts, Sciences and Humanities at UC Berkeley at The Faculty Club (Cal) / Black Parents of Berkeley Writing Circle with Milani Pelley at Tarea Hall Pittman Branch (South Berkeley) / Psalm & Stardust: An Artist Talk at SFAC Main Gallery (West Bay)
Friday, November 13
Paul Reitter chatting about the literariness of Marx’s Capital, noon, Dwinelle Hall (Cal). Paul Reitter was the main translator for the new translation of Capital that came out to much ado a few years ago. One of the main things all the reviewers emphasized was how much literary style the Reitter translation brought out, and so on Friday, he’ll be talking about how he zhuzhed it up. [UC]
José María Heredia and US Spanish-Language Print Culture, noon, Spanish & Portuguese Library (Cal). Every once in a while, “America” is a word we use to mean The Americas, including all the Spanish-speaking parts of it. In this talk, Rodrigo Lazo is gonna be that kind of Americanist, talking about a Cuban poet who thought the Niagara Falls were pretty goddamn interesting. His book from a few years ago was all about Spanish-language writing produced by Spanish American exiles, travelers, and immigrants who settled and passed through Philadelphia in the 19th century, when “Filadelfia” was a central hub for that kind of thing. [UC]
The Village Is Already Here: A Coming Together for Education in East Oakland’s 40x40, 4:30pm, Sankofa Sanctuary (Deep East). Now THIS is more like it (if you didn’t see my headshaking on Monday [which exists if you become a virtual neighbor] regarding the mayor celebrating East Oakland librarians and educators by empanelling them in North Oakland, your soul’s probably better for it). Be in and of your community and celebrate its strength today. Gather with Black educators and families to support each other and learn what everyone needs and how the community of East Oakland can work together in the 40x40 to make home safe, healthy, and resourced. Where has Oakland been, where is it going, and how can the Black community in Oakland strengthen each other across the generations is the feast for contemplation and conversation. Be in fellowship and maybe Mayor Lee will show up here too (who’s going to give odds on that). [humanitix]
Tritone Poetry! 6pm, Tamarack (Downtown). The poets are gathering, much like the crows, in greater flocks now that the season has turned. Tonight, with guest host Marthine Satris (hi!) trying to do polite things to the mic to convince it to cooperate with the FOUR brilliant poets who have written so many books between them: Gillian Osborne, Gillian Conoley, Mia Ayumi Malhotra & Carlina Duan. Gillian O. likes plants, poetry and possibly Poe; Gillian C. likes postmodernism and peace, pillows, pain, and patience; Mia likes her poetry sticky, milky, and salty; and Carlina spangles survival with small and sacred moments. Doors at 6 pm, poetry at 6:30, see you there!
Valksgiving, a championship season celebration, 6pm, Local Economy (Oakland). Maya Goldberg-Safir leads a celebration of sportsball for tall ladies only, and there will be nostalgia for the season that literally just ended and discussion of how they won lots of games and the hearts of a Bay Area with a dearth of sportsball teams these days. We love Maya, so watch ORB for more from her, and maybe she’ll have some baseball-shaped solutions for my A’s abandonment wound some day that do not involve the word “scrappy” occurring anywhere at all. [luma]
John Carpenter’s They Live Movie Night Fundraiser, 6pm, EBDSA Headquarters, 1610 Harrison St. (Lakeside). East Bay DSA is always rallying, because victory at the polls is only one way to make a difference: what matters more is action in the community. So come to see a movie about a working-class guy who realizes the manager class are all aliens and raise some funds for unhoused Oaklanders. Admission is sliding scale, but if you pony up $10 you get one drink of an unspecified nature AND one raffle ticket (love an illegal raffle; nearly all raffles are illegal). $20 gets you two drinks and three illegal raffle tickets. This slid into our inbox and has no link so you just have to trust us that it exists. [IRL]
Bay Area Punk Archives: Tom McEnaney, Judith Peraino, Anna Brown, 6:30pm, Pegasus (Downtown Berkeley). Liam who makes East Bay Yesterday is a punk at heart, and so here he is with a bunch of punks to remember the whole scene together: Daniel Sea, Martín Sorrondeguy, and Tommy Gear will hang out with recent authors of books about punk music, Tom McEnaney and Judith A. Peraino, and Anna Brown. Follow this up with more ’90s punk memories on Sunday with James Spooner too, and you’ll probably recognize some faces headbanging in both crowds. [pegasusbookstore.com]
Idea Generation for Fiction Writers, 7pm, Goodness (Piedmont Ave). There’s a new community space for gathering in Oakland! It has a name with unfortunate echoes of the unmourned Cafe Gratitude, but otherwise is your shared living room for group hangs and creative community. Hell yes! More please! Tonight local writer Erin Gravely guides your imagination with readings and craft talk so you can fictionalize all those strange things unfolding in your life and mind and apply some kind of sense to it. Fill your story with friends who ghosted you, but kill ’em to make ’em real ghosts. Turn your slough of despond into a marshland that your Mary Sue is restoring to ecological health. Most importantly, get words on the page and keep writing. [findgoodness.org]
Also: Church of John Coltrane Convocation and Jazz Night at Central Berkeley Library (Downtown Berkeley) / Jon Scieszka Reading and Book Signing at Dark Carnival Bookstore (Claremont) / What is a Forest Worth? The evolving value of forests from timber to multifunctional landscapes at Barbara and Gerson Bakar Gateway (Cal) / Refusing Erasure: Indigenous Women, Memory, and the Future of Story at Brava! for Women in the Arts (West Bay) / Empowering Women of Color Open Mic at La Peña (Oakland Part of Berkeley)
Saturday, November 14
History, Art, and Architecture Tour of Lake Merritt, 10am, Henry J. Kaiser Center for the Arts (The Lake). This is a half-day tour that goes about as fast as a mushroom walk, which is to say, very slow, since you will spend your half day walking from the Kaiser Center to OMCA which is on the other side of the Kaiser Center’s parking lot. There’s a lot of detail in the facade of the Kaiser Center so bring some binoculars and prepare to crane your neck upward for a while. [insta]
Neighborhood Housing Tour, 10am, 81st Ave Library (Deep East). Meet at the library and get on a bus to cruise the streets of East Oakland together with Oakland United Coalition to envision safe, healthy, community-responsive housing, especially around the Coliseum, that can be built by thinking ahead to sea level rise pushing the Bay inland and the creeks back up through their burial plots in the sewers and under streets. [google doc]
Festival of Black Doll Show, 10am, African American Museum and Library (Old Oakland). At this doll show you could win a Chaka Khan doll while you listen to live jazz, that’s how Black it is. [OPL]
MECA’s 23rd Annual Palestinian Holiday Crafts Bazaar, 10am, 1200 Fourth St (Berkeley). Lunch and crafts and coffee and poetry all day! Zeina Hashem Beck, back and forth sonneteer, reads at 2pm, and stick around to support Palestinian traditions and people with your dollars and your attention: put keffiyehs under the tree or the menorah for everyone this year. [humanitix]
BPL 4th Annual Comic Con!, 10:30am, Central Berkeley Library (Downtown Berkeley). A whole day of art, artists, writers, and readers who love comics and graphic novels and anything else with a binding and pictures next to the words! Come say hi to everyone, hear panels, do workshops, and find your fellow nerds at the library, where we were always waiting for you. I bet Xander will be lurking somewhere around there. [BPL]
Cake Coalition, 11am, 456 40th St (Temescal). Voting may be over and so may voter guiding, but democracy marches forward, fueled by cake. I saw this flyer on a pole and you know ORB rules: goes in the calendar. So if you too burn for more politics to go with your frosting, join the Democracy Forward group that someone named Audrey is organizing and get to rage or joy baking, depending on how you’re feeling about California’s blueishness. [partiful]
Community Archive Day: BIPOC Musicians, Dancers, Theater Artists and Cultural Educators, 11am, EastSide Arts Alliance (Rancho San Antonio). Make an appointment to celebrate the history of the artistic community that’s been shaping Oakland for decades. Tell stories, bring programs and flyers, share what you remember about being a person of color dancing, singing, or teaching your heart out around The Town. Your memories will be captured, your items photographed or scanned, and your time and travel will be compensated. [ESAA]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Devendra Banhart, noon, Book Passage Ferry Building (Embarcadero). SFAI-drop out Devendra Banhart hasn’t done much of note since slinking out of the city during the dot-com bust, but he’s finally gaining some attention now that Unnamed Press has published his new book of poetry Four Nose Jobs A Day. It’s really true what I’ve been saying: poets are the unacknowledged rock stars of the legislature. [insta]
Trivia Bee 2026, noon, First Presbyterian Church of San Leandro (Deep South Oakland). Pizza and a Historical Society board meeting will get you to the trivia section. Make sure to catch up on East Bay Yesterday so you’re ready to dominate on all things local and historical in this “friendly” competition in the former sundown town (if that piece of trivia doesn’t make it into the bee, be sure to bring it up). [eventbrite]
Community Giveback with LSPC, noon, CycleBar Berkeley (Berkeley). Instead of biking to nowhere, bike to being part of a longstanding commitment to providing kids with bicycles on behalf of their incarcerated parents, who are earning an average of 50 cents an hour for their mandatory labor (rhymes with slavery to me but you do you, California). Every year, this effort begun by Dorsey Nunn decades ago continues to spread love and freedom to kids in the Bay Area, so hop on. [insta]
Black Feminist Book Club: Lose Your Mother by Saidiya Hartman, 1pm, The Sanctuary (Upper Broadway). Lose Your Mother by Saidiya Hartman is a memoir and a history, a journey along a slave route in Africa and a journey through time and lost connections to homeland and the longing to reconnect. Henry Louis Gates loved it, and now I kind of wonder if this 2008 book spurred Skip Gates to start Finding Your Roots... in any case, find some of your people here, in a space for Black women to think and feel through story and community. [meetup.com]
Emotional Intelligence: Conversations Between Black Women and Men, 2pm, Fluid510 (Downtown). Most conversations about emotional intelligence don’t start with a workshop about BDSM tools and toys, but this one does. If you’re ready to dive into the deep end of power, control, pleasure, trust, vulnerability, and what I would think would be a very fraught historical association with physical bondage that should be handled with a lot of care, this could be the place for you and your kinkiest partner to chat on a Saturday afternoon about what you’ll be doing Saturday night. [eventbrite]
Intro to AI and Its Harms Youth Workshop and Art Build, 2pm, Dimond Branch OPL (Lower Dimond). East Oakland Communities for a Better Environment invites curious kids to learn more about the material impacts of spinning up fan art on Gemini and ChatGPT, about the infrastructure churning through water and straining the grid, and about the joys of hand-painting the blank side of their ORB tote bag instead. [insta]
Flor Y Canto for Gaza, 3pm, 484 9TH ST (Old Oakland). Maha Hashwi brings her new book of poems The Pomegranate is a Grenade to Oakland for one day, though you can buy the book and keep it forever. Hanif Abdurraqib says of her collection of words, “What a gift,” and in the circle of support for poets and their unflinching gaze at the horrors that persist in exploding our peace are fellow readers arnoldo colibrí, Beau Beausoleil, Deema K. Shehabi, Elizabeth Jiménez Montelongo, Persis Karim, Manar Harb, and tiny gray-garcía. [art of the commune]
Author talk at Sansaar Books: A Chronicle of Our Land, 5pm, sansaar books (El Cerrito). The anonymous author of a book of stories emerging from the village of Wadi Foquin in the West Bank comes to Sansaar to read from their book and share the love and community that Palestinians are making despite the crushing weight of land appropriation, movement control, and expanding settlements by Israel. Ordinary people still eat and dance, care for each other and their land, and persist, despite it all. [insta]
Jae Nichelle & KB Brookins In Conversation One Night Only, 6pm, Nomadic Bookshop (Uptown). Two writers are talking! Oakland poet and memoirist Brookins was most recently at Tamarack, today walks over to uptown because “my therapist says take it easy as if capitalism is listening” and as a Black trans poet reasonably thinks “America is the worst group project.” They chat at Nomadic with spoken word poet Jae Nichelle, visiting from Portland to launch her book Grownfolk Blues: a musical in poems, bringing song to the page the way Black people made the musical as a form exist. [insta]
[West Bay Bonus Event The Second] Sara Calvosa Olson & Crystal Wahpepah in Conversation, 6:30pm, Telegraph Hill Lit (North Beach-ish). The tiny bookstore with a metric ton of books in Italian hosts a series of Indigenous writers this month, and today it’s two Bay Area Indigenous food advocates, the owner of Oakland’s Wahpepah’s Kitchen and author of the intertribal cookbook A Feather and a Fork Crystal Wahpepah (Kickapoo and Sac and Fox) and Karuk tribal member Sara Calvosa Olson, whose cookbook Chími Nu’am adapts traditional California cuisine to the contemporary kitchen. [insta]
[West Bay Bonus Event The Third] Samar: SWANA Dykes, 7pm, Kearny Street Workshop (Leather District). If you are still catching up on the acronyms, SWANA is a way of gesturing geographically toward the “Middle East” without the Orientalist vibe of the familiar phrasing. Samar is a SWANA-and-friends series that centers writers whose families come from Europe’s favorite places to fight wars in, and today it’s also very gay in celebration of a new anthology. Janine Mogannam says Free Palestine and sometimes writes from right to left; Mahru Elahi laughs in Oakland and essays around the literary scene; Tala Khanmalek found her great-grandmother in an orchid and has two books forthcoming; Zara Jamshed’s Neither Created Nor Destroyed (Game Over Books) is out now; and Arwa Alsamarae looks at eyes up close for a living and looks at poetry and writing by fellow SWANA writers for pleasure. [insta]
Also: Native Plant Ecosystem Shoreline Walk and Workshop: Super El Niño & Local Storm Preparedness at Oro Loma Sanitary District (San Lorenzo) / Storytime at the Farmers Market at Grand Lake Farmers Market (Grand Lake) / Lake Merritt Cleanup & Cocktail Party at Sailboat House & Bar Skula (The Lake) / Club de Lectura en Español: Sendas Extraviadas por Valdez at Fruitvale Branch OPL (Fruitvale) / For Kids: Love Notes for the Future Workshop at BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley) / Harvesting Color: Botanical Dye & Ecoprinting Workshop at Mills Community Farm (Millsmont) / Ghost in the Machine: Film screening and panel discussion Wendy Liu, Adam Becker, Tamara Kneese, and Khari Johnson at Main Library (The Lake-ish) / Ballet Folklorico de Ricardo Velazquez Performance at Elmhurst Branch OPL (Deep East) / Stories Only You Can Tell: A Memoir Workshop with Katharine Harer at Claremont Branch BPL (Berkeley) / History Roadshow, Ashby/Adeline Corridor/Lorin District at Lacis Museum of Lace and Textiles (Ashby) / Skip the Small Talk Night at Fluid510 (Downtown) / Raindrops on Roses: A Favorite Things Mixtape at Telematic Media Arts (West Bay) / SOLD OUT Little Forest with Yim Soon-rye in Person at BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley)
Sunday, November 15
Speculative Commoning Artist Collaborative Basket Circle and Potluck, 10am, Dimond Park (Sausal Creek Watershed). IF and only IF you also spent a Sunday pulling ivy from trees, swinging your body weight until the vines snapped, and calling your kids over to be the extra ninety pounds you needed to haul down the ones thick as your thumb, THEN you too can sit and weave. BYOVines. Hopefully the blisters have healed and your fingers are ready to ache in a different way, from tugging and threading and twisting all the tendrils that have been drying since you were tumbling around in the dirt and the creek. [Speculative Commoning Artist Collaborative (SCAC)]
Bay Area Sketchcrawl 2 Year Anniversary, 11am, The Lake Chalet at Lake Merritt (The Lake). Walk and draw at the lake! If you’re one of those people who thinks best when moving your feet and your hands, you’re going to to have a million new ideas by the end of this two hours of sauntering and sketching. [insta]
Ecologies of Resistance: A Conversation with Authors Umi Vaughan, Tiffany Yap and Robert Liu-Trujillo, noon, Oakland Asian Cultural Center (Chinatown). Talk play and inclusion, education and story with three local authors who spin creativity around the weight of history and responsibility to invite readers of all ages into deeper understanding. With dancing to Sambafunk after! [oacc.cc]
It Starts with Anger, 1pm, Marcus Books (Longfellow). James Spooner, founder of AfroPunk, starts his story both in anger and at his first punk show in California’s high desert and quickly escapes into being a teen crashing in punk houses all around the country, trying to find his way as a mixed-race teen in the very white ’90s scene, in his new memoir It Starts With Anger. When you’re an outsider among outsiders, and you find your way to success, is that selling out and just making it? The punk and graphic novelist will be talking about showing up as a Black guy in unexpected places with Fred Noland, contributor to ORB’s ongoing series of hat noticings, whose most recent book is a graphic biography about historic Black cyclist Major Taylor. [Spooners of No Fun]
Spotlight Sundays: Japanese American Legacies of Resistance, 1pm, OMCA (The Lake). Speakers Satsuki Ina and Miya Sommers will speak about the generational trauma of internment on their families and how they’ve been moved by their own families’ experiences to stand in solidarity with other oppressed peoples, in conversation with host Joemy Ito-Gates, ethnic studies teacher at BUSD. There will also be tote bags, because that’s how we do. [OMCA]
The Art of Suspense, 1pm, Goodness Cafe (Piedmont the Avenue Not The Ethnic Enclave). Today the California Writers Club hangs out at the newest public living room in town, talking tension with Margaret Lucke, and how to keep your readers up all night dreading and delighting in the unknown world you’re drawing them into. [eventbrite]
Vividly Lit! a What Most Vividly Poetry Event, 4pm, Et al., etc. Gallery & Bookshop (San Francisco). New poetry journal alert! What Most Vividly, edited by West Bay poet Tod Edgerton, is publishing poems that do something, whose form is part of the play of language on the mind and eye, poems with a body to touch and taste. The first issue includes Rosemarie Waldrop, so you know where you are on the poetics spectrum, as well as the folks who will be reading here tonight: Megan Breiseth thinking of the symmetries of plants, Gillian Conoley is flooded and salvaged, Tiff Dressen’s sending postcards from pelican nests and little rivers, and Maw Shein Win appears with objects, observing, and breathing. [insta]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Artist Lecture Series: Kija Lucas and Rachel Phillips, 5pm, Bayfront Theater (Fort Mason). Kija Lucas and Rachel Phillips both use photography to attend to the places where humans touch nature, captured in Lucas’s lush and tender images of gardening implements and both native and cultivated plants. The richness of lemons and the gnarled tendrils of oak roots, and the occasional technological glitches that occur in the capturing of such images in Lucas’s work, then converse with Phillips’s delicate spider webs and weavings layered on clouds, which mischievously rematerialize the metaphors of computing. Photographs of objects, photographs as objects, the living relationships that layering images can convey: this will be a rich conversation (for a preview of Lucas’s deep work with plants, check out her dialogue last year with Banu Subramaniam). [photoalliance]
Dashka Slater presents The Wild Season: The Remarkable True Story of A Rabbit Rescue, 5pm, Local Economy (Rockridge). Flora Madrigal interviews a local author about a book, just like daddy. [luma]
Dope is Death Movie Night, 6pm, Moments Co-op (Downtown). Documentarian Mia Donovan made a movie about the alternative healthcare movement coming from within the Black Power movement in the 1970s. This movie, showing courtesy of Nostalgic For Nothing Cinema, is particularly focused on Mutulu Shakur (who broke Assata Shakur out of prison and after years on the run spent several decades in prison for orchestrating the Brink truck robbery) and his work in the ’70s providing acupuncture as a treatment during an intense period of heroin addiction in NYC (always historicize: heroin addiction took off in the 1970s after access to the drug was cheap and easy in Viet Nam during the war and the craving came home with the army grunts). [note to eds: could I call this the original needle exchange or is that just too bad a joke to make?] [insta]
Also: Unfinished Business: The Letters We Need to Write with Frish Brandt at Grace Cathedral (West Bay) / RAIL ROAD STUDIO SALE at 1210 26th St (West Oakland) / Communal Land Care with TERREMOTO and Test Plot at BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley) / Inside the Free Speech Movement: Inner Workings to the Aftermath, Screening and Discussion at Veterans Memorial Building (Berkeley) / Can I Get a Witness? a really open mic at Upon RSVP (Oakland) / Hong Kong Cinema: Just Like Weather at BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley) / Kwento Across Waters Writing Session at Malaya Botanicals (Alameda) / 11th annual game of literary telephone at Adobe Books (West Bay)
