This Friday 10/3: Innovative Fiction Reading

Back by Popular Demand
SPT Presents An Innovative Fiction Event

featuring: Jaime Cortez, Sesshu Foster, R. Zamora Linmark, Kate Schatz, and Leni Zumas.

Friday, October 3, 7:30 p.m.


Jaime Cortez is a San Francisco Bay Area artist, writer and cultural worker. He was raised between Mexicali, Baja California and Watsonville, Alta California. Jaime’s extensive experience includes work in AIDS prevention, education, and arts management. His graphic novella, Sexile, about a transgender HIV activist from Cuba, was nominated for an American Library Association Award, and the HIV prevention comic anthology Turnover, which he edited, was a finalist for the Independent Publishers award. Jaime has exhibited his visual art at venues across the Bay Area including the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Oakland Museum of California, The Lab, and other alternative art spaces. He has been working on a short story collection slated for publication in 2008 by Suspect Thoughts Press.

Sesshu Foster has taught in East L.A. for twenty years, as well as at the University of Iowa, the University of California, Santa Cruz and the California Institute for the Arts. His work has been anthologized in The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry and, recently, Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond. His local readings are archived at www.sicklyseason.com. His most recent books are the novel Atomik Aztex (City Lights Books, 2005) and World Ball Notebook (City Lights Books, 2009).


R. Zamora Linmark is the author of the novel Rolling The R’s, which he’s adapted for the stage, and two poetry collections, Prime Time Apparitions and the just-published The Evolution of a Sigh. A recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, his prose, poetry, and essays have appeared in journals and anthologies in the U.S. and the Philippines. Currently at work on another novel and a collaborative book project with Lisa Asagi, Justin Chin, and Lori Takayesu,Linmark divides his time between Manila and Honolulu.


Kate Schatz lives in Oakland and is the author of Rid of Me: A Story, published by Continuum Press as part of their acclaimed 33 1/3 series. She’s a co-founder and editor of the Encyclopedia Project, and her work can be found in Bitch!, Denver Quarterly, LTTR, Kitchen Sink, and various other publications. She received her MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University, and a double BA in Women’s Studies/Literature with a Creative Writing concentration from UCSC. Kate is currently working on a novel about electroshock therapy and Christian Science, and a story collection called Help You To See Forever Too.

Leni Zumas is the author of the story collection Farewell Navigator (Open City, 2008). Her work has appeared in New York Tyrant, Quarterly West, Harp & Altar, New Orleans Review, and elsewhere. A 2008 Fellow in Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts, she teaches creative writing at
Hunter College.

Unless otherwise noted, events are $5-10 sliding scale
and begin at 7:30 PM in Timken Lecture Hall,
at the California College of the Arts,
1111--8th Street, San Francisco.

This Friday: Aaron Shurin & Anne Waldman with Ambrose Bye

Friday, September 26, 7:30 p.m.

Aaron Shurin’s new book is King of Shadows, a collection of narrative essays, just out from City Lights. Other books include Involuntary Lyrics (Omnidawn, 2005), A Door (Talisman House, 2000) and The Paradise of Forms: Selected Poems (Talisman House, 1999). His honors include National Endowment, California Arts Council, and San Francisco Arts Commission literary fellowships. A longtime Bay Area educator, he directs and teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the University of San Francisco.







Anne Waldman is an internationally celebrated poet, performer, professor, editor and cultural/political activist and the author, most recently of Red Noir (Farfalla, McMillen & Parrish), In the Room of Never Grieve (Coffee House Press), Structure of the World Compared To A Bubble (Penguin Poets), and Outrider (La Alameda Press). She also co-edited The Angel Hair Anthology and Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action. She founded (with Allen Ginsberg and Diane diPrima) the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa University in Boulder, the first Buddhist-inspired school in the western hemisphere. Her CDs include Battery: Live at Naropa and The Eye of The Falcon (with Ambrose Bye) and Matching Half (with Ambrose Bye & Akilah Oliver). She has participated in festivals in Berlin, Wuhan, (China), and Mumbai in the past year. Forthcoming: Humanity/Manatee, and the complete Iovis trilogy.

Ambrose Bye, musician (keyboard, guitar, voice) and composer, son of poets Anne Waldman and Reed Bye, grew up in the environment of The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, counting Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs as “poetic” godfathers. He graduated from The University of California, Santa Cruz and has studied at the music/production program at the Pyramind Institute in San Francisco. He has performed on stage with Anne Waldman and Bob Holman in New York’s Issue Project Room in a program that included Steve Buscemi reading form the work of William Burroughs and accompanied Anne Waldman at The Boulder Theatre’s “Music and Poetry for Progressives” headlined by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, and Jello Biafra. He is working on new project which includes the poet Amiri Baraka.

At SPT, Anne Waldman and Ambrose Bye will perform selections of Matching Half, their exciting 2008 CD with poet-performer Akilah Oliver, which mixes poetry and experimental music. These original compositions & soundscapes bring a new dynamic to “spoken word.”

D.S. Marriott & Anselm Berrigan this Friday 9/19

Small Press Traffic is thrilled to present:

Anselm Berrigan and D.S. Marriott

Friday, September 19th 7:30 p.m.
Timken Lecture Hall
Refreshments will be served

Anselm Berrigan's most recent publication is Have A Good One (Cy Press, 2008), an entrail-length serial work. Books include Some Notes on My Programming, Zero Star Hotel, and Integrity & Dramatic Life, all published by Edge Books. A Non Sequitur-commissioned collaborative piece with composer David Frist was performed in NYC at The Flea Theater this past August as part of a four-night run of composer/poet collaborations. Berrigan lives in New York City, and is Co-Chair of Bard College's inter-disciplinary summer MFA writing program - a teaching gig with no classwork.

D.S. Marriott was born in the UK and was educated at the University of Sussex. He has taught there and currently teaches at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has written many articles on poetics and is the author of On Black Men (Edinburgh/Columbia, 2000); Haunted Life (Rutgers University Press, 2008); and Incognegro (Salt Publications, 2006). Hoodoo Voodoo is his latest book of poetry (Shearsman, 2008).




Unless otherwise noted, events are $5-10, sliding scale, free to
current SPT members and CCA faculty, staff, and students.
There's no better time to join SPT!

Unless otherwise noted, our events are presented in Timken Lecture Hall
California College of the Arts 1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco
(just off the intersection of 16th & Wisconsin).

Small Press Traffic
Literary Arts Center at CCA
1111 -- 8th Street
San Francisco, CA 94107
415.551.9278

Geyser!, a new play by Kevin Killian & Wayne Smith - this Friday!

Friday, September 12, 7:30pm
Please arrive early; all seats $10 as a benefit for Small Press Traffic.

Join us for refreshments prior to the event.

Small Press Traffic
Timken Lecture Hall at California College of the Arts
1111 8th Street
San Francisco, California 94107
415 551 9278

with
Stephen Boyer
Taylor Brady
David Brazil
Gerald Corbin
Craig Goodman
Glen Helfand
Cliff Hengst
Scott Hewicker
Tanya Hollis
Colter Jacobsen
Kevin Killian
Mac McGinnes
Anne McGuire
Karla Milosevich
Rex Ray
Laurie Reid
Jocelyn Saidenberg
Wayne Smith
Suzanne Stein
Margaret Tedesco


The small town of Geyser, Oregon was once the setting for a television series that attempted to combine elements of family drama and science education. The show was in its second season in 1978 when a tragedy on set caused it to shut down midseason, and now that it’s been released on DVD, Geyser! has found new fans to join the tiny cult audience it’s known since its untimely cancellation—and they’re all flocking to Oregon this summer, as the brave little town welcomes back members of the original cast and the worldwide fan club at a Geyser! festival. But the town has secrets. Mayor Constance Strode, struggling with her own family drama, tries to promote tourism while fending off the attentions of Bobo, leader of a radical clown collective on the outskirts of town. Screen actor Dennis Quaid, who first sprang to national attention as the young hero of Geyser! returns to the scene of the series with the bewildering knowledge that all of his female recent co-stars, from Reese Witherspoon to Ellen Barkin, have been swept away to sea. Rival TV talk show hosts Rick Penny and Kitty Potter return to wring every scrap of drama and nostalgia to the airwaves, while Marjorie Cantrell, the first lady of the American theater and star of the lamented TV show, Geyser!, emerges from a 30 year retirement in grand Sunset Boulevard fashion with her loyal butler, Crimmins. As excited fans gather from round the world, the hot water coursing through the deep underground caverns below them gurgles, groans and steams to the surface. It’s all in a town—and a show—called Geyser!

Kevin Killian is a poet, novelist, critic and playwright whose recent work includes “Kiki: The Proof Is in the Pudding,” a retrospective exhibition at Ratio 3, a book of reviews Selected Amazon Reviews (2006), a collection of poetry, Argento Series (2001), two novels, Shy (1989) and Arctic Summer (1997), a book of memoirs, Bedrooms Have Windows (1989), and two books of stories, Little Men (1996) and I Cry Like a Baby (2001). He has also edited a collection of short stories by the late Sam D’Allesandro, The Wild Creatures (2005). For the San Francisco Poets Theater Killian has written over thirty plays, including Stone Marmalade (1996, with Leslie Scalapino) and Often (2001, with Barbara Guest).

Wayne Smith is a visual and sound artist who lives and works in San Francisco. He collaborated with Berlin-based artist D-L Alvarez on a sound and video installation shown at the Derek Eller Gallery, New York, in April 2007. New work will be shown at 2nd Floor Projects, San Francisco, in November 2008. Recording as Aero Mic’d, he has released four CDs, the latest being “I Think You’re Great.” In August 2008, joined by Cliff Hengst and Scott Hewicker, Aero Mic’d performed at the Schindler House in Los Angeles as part of the “sound.” series, organized by SASSAS (The Society for the Activation of Social Space through Art and Sound).