Join us every Thursday at 6:30 p.m. in our Readers Bookstore Fort Mason for our weekly FREE poetry series! Browse books while listening to internationally acclaimed poets and artists such as Jonathan Richman, David Meltzer, Diane di Prima and California Poet Laureate Al Young. The series is  curated by Friends’ Resident Poet Jack Hirschman. For a full line-up and more information please visit our calendar of events.

Proceeds from our bookstores benefit the San Francisco Public Library

This Thursday, August 4th, we are excited to have  Julie Rogers and Adrian Arias read!

Photo Credit: Chuck Koton

Julie Rogers began reading her poetry in San Francisco cafes in the late 1970’s. She has published six chapbooks, and a Buddhist end-of-life manual titled, ‘Instructions for the Transitional State’ (Vimala, 2007), around which she founded a non-profit program last year, ‘TLC Transitional Life Care’. Her recent books are a full-length selected, ‘House of the Unexpected’ (Wild Ocean Press, 2012) and Street Warp (Omerta Publications 2013). She has read her work on public radio, television, and at many venues in the northwest. Her poems have appeared in various magazines, literary journals and anthologies such as Beatitude – Golden Anniversary 1959 – 2009, Poetry Flash, Sparring with Beatnik Poets, Big Scream, The Cafe Review, Abalone Moon, the Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, and others. Last year, she and her husband, SF Beat Poet David Meltzer, put out a CD, ‘Two-Tone Poetry & Jazz‘, with saxophonist Zan Stewart. “Few poems are written as close to the heart — no extra words just soul meanings…” Michael McClure, beat poet, novelist, artist. Visit the website at www.julrogers.com.

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Join us every Thursday at 6:30 p.m. in our Readers Bookstore Fort Mason for our weekly FREE poetry series! Browse books while listening to internationally acclaimed poets and artists such as Jonathan Richman, David Meltzer, Diane di Prima and California Poet Laureate Al Young. The series is  curated by Friends’ Resident Poet Jack Hirschman. For a full line-up and more information please visit our calendar of events.

Proceeds from our bookstores benefit the San Francisco Public Library

This Thursday, July 14th,  we are excited to have  Devereaux Baker & Sharon Doubiago read!

Sharon Doubiago, a native of Southern California, was first moved to poetry by Jack Hirschman in the mid 60s, through a close friend of his, her Cal State/LA professor, Peter Marin. She experienced two readings by Jack that impacted her. Still, it was ten years before she became friends with Jack, by way of a significant poetry event in Point Arena, California. She has published many poetry and prose books since, Hard Country, The Book of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes, South America Mi Hija, Psyche Drives The Coast, Body and Soul, Love on the Streets —those from the University of Pittsburgh perhaps the most significant. Currently she is working on five books, all ten years so far in process. She and Devreaux Baker have been near life-long poet sisters.

Devreaux Baker is a 2011 recipient of the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Poetry Award, a 2012 Hawaii Council on Humanities International Poetry Award and the Women’s Global Leadership Poetry Award. She is a 2014 recipient of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation Poetry Prize for her poem, In The Year Of The Drone. She has received fellowships to the MacDowell Colony, Hawthornden Castle, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. She has taught poetry in the schools and produced The Voyagers Radio Program of original student writing for public radio. She has led writing workshops in the United States, France and Mexico.  Her books of poetry include Light at the Edge, Beyond the Circumstance of Sight, Red Willow People, and out of the bones of earth.

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We love local businesses! And we love when local businesses support the San Francisco Public Library!

Join Maker & Moss on Saturday, July 23rd for their annual “Giving Back Upholstery Event.” Champagne, shopping & library love!

Maker & Moss will be donating 5% of their upholstery sales through the month of July and will be DOUBLING their contribution to 10% on the day of the event.

Help spread the word and join the event here: Giving Back Upholstery Facebook Event

Interested in partnering with Friends to cross promote your business and support the Library? Please get in touch with Laurie Berk at (415) 477-5227 or laurie.berk@friendssfpl.org.

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Join us every Thursday at 6:30 p.m. in our Readers Bookstore Fort Mason for our weekly FREE poetry series! Browse books while listening to internationally acclaimed poets and artists such as Jonathan Richman, David Meltzer, Diane di Prima and California Poet Laureate Al Young. The series is  curated by Friends’ Resident Poet Jack Hirschman. For a full line-up and more information please visit our calendar of events.

Proceeds from our bookstores benefit the San Francisco Public Library

This Thursday, June 30th, we are excited to have  Melba Abela & David Meltzer read!

Melba Abela is a Filipno-American immigrant artist and poet.  Her early work has been shown in galleries and published in art and literary anthologies in the United States. Currently her work centers on text + images that comment on breaking news-worthy problematic events.  She has also undertaken the translation into English of some poems in Pilipino by  E. San Juan, Jr., a world- renown Filipino-American academic, writer, poet and activist.

David Meltzer’s most recent publications include: Stuntman (Omerta Press), S.F. Beat: Talking With the Poets (City Lights), When I Was a Poet (City Lights, Pocket Poet 60), and Two Way Mirror: A Poetry Note-Book (City Lights).

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Join us every Thursday at 6:30 p.m. in our Readers Bookstore Fort Mason for our weekly FREE poetry series! Browse books while listening to internationally acclaimed poets and artists such as Jonathan Richman, David Meltzer, Diane di Prima and California Poet Laureate Al Young. The series is  curated by Friends’ Resident Poet Jack Hirschman. For a full line-up and more information please visit our website at www.friendssfpl.org.

Proceeds from our bookstores benefit the San Francisco Public Library

Tonight we are excited to have  Chun Yu & Kevin Simmonds read!

Kevin Simmonds is a poet and musician originally from New Orleans. His poetry collections include Mad for Meat, Bend to it, and the edited anthology Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion & Spirituality. He composed the score and cowrote the text for the Japanese noh-inspired theater work Emmett Till a river, commissioned by the Creative Work Fund and debuted at San Francisco’s Theatre of Yugen. He’s also collaborated extensively with poet Kwame Dawes, setting a number of his works to music, including Wisteria: Twilight Songs of the Swamp Country, HOPE: Living and Loving with HIV in Jamaica, which won an Emmy Award, and Voices of Haiti, which debuted at the National Black Theatre Festival and became an award-winning interactive e-book. He’s received fellowships and commissions from Cave Canem, the Community of Writers, Fulbright, Napa Valley Writers Workshop, San Francisco Arts Commission, and the Edward Stanley Award from Prairie Schooner. He lives in San Francisco and Tokyo.

Chun Yu is the author of the award-winning memoir Little Green: Growing Up During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and one of the authors of the award-winning anthology Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace. She will be reading from her new collection of bilingual poetry in English and Chinese which merges science, art, and spirituality. This work is supported by a cultural equity grant from San Francisco Arts Commission.

Poetry after the jump:

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This month we caught up with 2016 Library Laureate Brian Christian to discuss all things poetry and what makes libraries so valuable in this day and age.

Brian Christian is the author of The Most Human Human, which was named a Wall Street Journal bestseller and a New Yorker favorite book of the year.  Christian has been featured on The Daily Show, Radiolab, and The Charlie Rose Show, and his work has won several awards, including fellowships at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. Check out his latest book, Algorithms to Live By.

What are you reading right now?

I recently started Sarah Schulman’s The Gentrification of the Mind, a book which I learned about the old-fashioned way: by shamelessly eavesdropping on two readers discussing it at the table next to mine over brunch.

Who, currently, are your favorite living poets?

I was so stunned to hear of C. D. Wright’s passing, and I still can’t quite come to terms with that. Forrest Gander was my mentor at Brown and my gateway drug to contemporary poetry. Ben Lerner is electric on the page, and I devour his novels but hope we haven’t seen the last of his verse. Arthur Sze’s work is somehow both meditative and haunting, an unusual combination, in the best of ways.

Which poet of past would you most like to share a drink with?

Maybe this is cheating, but my first thought is Eliot, because the rest of the Lost Generation would probably be drinking with him. Also because I’d be in Paris. In the 20s.

How do you envision libraries in the future?

I’m reminded of the quote by Thoreau about college. “Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made.”

I agree: while the lectures were what I ostensibly paid for, the real value was in the one-to-one off-hours mentorship of several of my advisers, and even more so in the fellowship of my peers—both of which were ostensibly free. Through this lens, I take a skeptical view of the online education movement, though I do think people around the world benefit from better access to information.

This is how I think of the future of the library as well. Mentorship and fellowship will require physical spaces whether or not the consumption of information does. In these the institution of the library has a unique and important role to play—now and for a very long time.

What projects are you working on right now?

Last month was the publication of my second book of nonfiction, a collaboration with a good friend of mine, Tom Griffiths. The book is called Algorithms to Live By and uses computer science as a lens for thinking about human decision-making. In short, we think of things like choosing between our favorite things and new ones, wrangling mess, and managing time as uniquely human problems. They’re not. I’m extremely proud of it and can’t wait to see it make its way to readers’ hands and minds.

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Barbara Berman with her husband Cliff.

Meet Barbara Berman: Friends supporter, Library advocate, literary lover and a member of our Mary Louise Stong Society Legacy Circle.

“Like far too many people,  my husband and I put off making our wills.  When we finally decided to start the process,  our first concerns were the futures of our beloved young grand nieces.   Next came the non-profits we care about the most. Friends of the San Francisco Public Library embodies our values of leveling the playing field in innovative ways.  Librarians are a brave lot, acting against censorship and supporting the communities where they work and live.

In making Friends of the San Francisco Public Library part of our estate plan , we say yes to the conviction that -long after we are gone – the Library and it’s supporters will live up the challenges they face.”

Join Barbara today to create a lasting impact! You can choose to designate support for general purposes of the Library, or your favorite section or function of the Library, such as children’s programming, exhibitions, library staff development, etc. Either way, you will feel deeply rewarded by the knowledge that your investment will have a beneficial impact on our  community for years to come.

Legacy giving provides the resources necessary to sustain excellence and preserve the future of the San Francisco Public Library.

For more information on how you can make a lasting impact, please contact our Executive Director, Marie Ciepiela, at (415) 477-5220 or marie.ciepiela@friendssfpl.org.

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Join us every Thursday at 6:30 p.m. in our Readers Bookstore Fort Mason for our weekly FREE poetry series! Browse books while listening to internationally acclaimed poets and artists such as Jonathan Richman, David Meltzer, Diane di Prima and California Poet Laureate Al Young. The series is  curated by Friends’ Resident Poet Jack Hirschman. For a full line-up and more information please visit our website at www.friendssfpl.org.

Proceeds from our bookstores benefit the San Francisco Public Library

Tonight we are excited to have  SF Poet Laureate Alejandro Murguia & Trang Cao read!

Join us for this special reading, as this may be the last reading of the current Poet Laureate, Alejandro Murguia at the Readers Bookstore before he becomes the Emeritus P.L., as the process of electing the next one is well underway.

Alejandro Murguía is the author of This War Called Love, City Lights Books (winner of the American Book Award,) and The Medicine of Memory: A Mexica Clan in California, University of Texas Press. Last year City Lights Books released his new book Stray Poems. In May 2014 the SF Weekly named him Best Local Author. He is the author of the short story “The Other Barrio” which was filmed in the Mission District. Currently he is a professor in Latina/Latino Studies at San Francisco State University. He is the Sixth San Francisco Poet Laureate and the first Latino to hold the post.

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Join us every Thursday at 6:30 p.m. in our Readers Bookstore Fort Mason for our weekly FREE poetry series! Browse books while listening to internationally acclaimed poets and artists such as Jonathan Richman, David Meltzer, Diane di Prima and California Poet Laureate Al Young. The series is  curated by Friends’ Resident Poet Jack Hirschman. For a full line-up and more information please visit our website at www.friendssfpl.org.

Proceeds from our bookstores benefit the San Francisco Public Library

Tonight we are excited to have  Jami Proctor-Xu & Mauro Fortissimo read!

Jami Proctor Xu 徐贞敏 is a poet, essayist, translator, and mother, who writes in English and Chinese. Her chapbook of Chinese poems Shimmers 轻轻的闪光 was published in 2013 as part of the EMS: Du Shi Poetry Series and her full-length Chinese collectionSuddenly Starting to Dance 突然起舞 was published by Yi 翼 Press in 2016. Her chapbook of English poems, Hummingbird Ignites a Star, was published in 2014. A collection of Sylvia Plath’s poems she co-translated with Zhou Zan is forthcoming from Yi Lin Press. She was a visiting scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and a writer-in-residence at the Chengdu Gao Di artists village. In 2016, she co-organized the event, Poetry Across Languages, Dialogue and Translation Between Chinese and International Poets, which was held at the BNU International Writing Center. She has read at international poetry festivals in China, India, Vietnam, Bangladesh, and the US, and her poems and translations have appeared in journals and anthologies in the US, China, and India. Her poetry is currently part of the exhibit Void/Express(ion) at the Suzhou Biennial. She is a recipient of a 2013 Zhejiang Poetry Award for a non-Chinese poet who has made a contribution to contemporary Chinese poetry.

Mauro Aprile Zanetti  is a San Francisco-based storyteller, filmmaker and writer—stringer for the Italian national newspaper, La Stampa. Born in Sicily (Italy, 1974). Thanks to his film critic paper on Martin Scorsese’s remake, Cape Fear, he is selected to join the national jury at the Mostra Internazionale del Cinema di Venezia. He writes the master thesis of his Italian Laurea degree on Gilles Deleuze philosophy, and his experimental docudrama, The Joy. Carnations and Siesta (2002). In 2004, Mille Piani publishes his homonym book-catalog. He writes and directs a docudrama on people with disabilities, DiversabilMente Uguali, editing a monologue after poet, Dario Tumino. In 2006, he collaborates with Italian singer-song writer, Vinicio Capossela for the creation of a video-clip series, Ovunque proteggi, and later directing the live-drama, Nel Niente Sotto il Sole. He writes La Natura Morta de La Dolce Vita—A Mysterious Morandi in the Matrix of Fellini’s Vision (NYC, 2008). In 2013 he moves to San Francisco, where he interviews poet and activist, Lawrence Ferlinghetti for the 2013 Year of Italian Culture in US. He creates and directs a short video series, Cultural Ambassadors Circle, dedicating one to Mr. Ferlinghetti. On 2015 he curates Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s painting exhibition: Fluxare – The European Connexion, editing the booklet, Il Verbo Fluxare.

 Work by the poets after the jump:

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On Saturday, July 9th our Book Donation Center will be selling over 40,000 comic books for only .25 cents a piece! Mark your calendar and don’t miss out on one of the biggest comic book sales in the city.

There will be tons of boxes of Sci-Fi television and film glossy magazines, so now is the time to indulge your passion for Supernatural, Doctor Who, Battlestar Galctica, Star Trek (TNG, TOS, and Voyager), Farscape, Charmed, and much more!

Our stash is excellent for comic collectors and fans of all ages.

All proceeds support the San Francisco Public Library.

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