Live Poetry ft. Francesca Bell, Patrick Phillips, and Atsuro Riley

February 18, 2023 @ 5:00 pm

Venue:

The Hotel Utah Saloon, 500 4th Street San Francisco, CA 94107

Join three incredible Bay Area poets at the famed Hotel Utah Saloon for an evening of live poetry!
Atsuro Riley is the author of Heard-Hoard (University of Chicago Press, 2021), winner of the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, a finalist for PEN America’s Voelcker Poetry Award, a Boston Globe Best Book of 2021, and a Bookworm Top 10 Book of the Year.

His first book Romey’s Order was the winner of the Whiting Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, The Believer Poetry Award, the Witter Bynner Award from the Library of Congress, and a Lannan Literary Award.

Riley is the editor of Revel, a literary journal. He lives in San Francisco.

Patrick Phillips is currently a fellow of the Cullman Center for Writers at the New York Public Library, as well as a Carnegie Foundation Fellow. His first book of nonfiction, Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America, was published by W. W. Norton and named a best book of the year by The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and Smithsonian. Elegy for a Broken Machine appeared in the Knopf Poets series in 2015, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. A past fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggennheim Foundation,

Phillips is also the author of Chattahoochee, Boy, and Song of the Closing Doors, which is forthcoming from Knopf in 2022. His work has appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Nation. Phillips lives in San Francisco and teaches writing and literature at Stanford.

Francesca Bell is a poet and translator. Her debut collection, Bright Stain (Red Hen Press 2019), was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Julie Suk Award. Her work appears widely in literary journals, and she has received a Neil Postman Award for Metaphor from Rattle and an Honorable Mention in Nimrod’s Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize. Bell grew up in Washington and Idaho and did not complete middle school, high school, or college. She lives with her family in Novato, CA.

Details

Date:
February 18, 2023
Time:
5:00 pm
Cost:
Free
Event Categories:
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Event Tags:
Website:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/live-poetry-ft-francesca-bell-patrick-phillips-and-atsuro-riley-tickets-518011485297

WeHo Reads Returns for an Inspiring Fall 2022 Season

We’re back! After a summer hiatus, BookSwell returns with three events on the ROAD TO JOY!


9/20 WeHo Reads: Expansive Vistas and Hidden Corners

The next WeHo Reads event is Expansive Vistas and Hidden Corners on Tuesday, September 20, 2022, at 6 p.m. Artists and writers explore concepts of places, how they’re made, and how we understand, remember, and memorialize them.

Lynell George is a journalist and essayist based in Los Angeles, who tells the city’s story one sentence at a time. Her book, After/Image: Los Angeles Outside the Frame (Angel City Press 2018), is an exploration of the city in text and photography, and she explores the extraordinary creative life of Octavia E. Butler in A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky, published by Angel City Press in 2020. She will be in discussion with Marisela Norte, an American writer, poet, and artist living in Los Angeles and known for poetry that explores the unseen city, including her poetry collection Peeping Tom Tom Girl (Sunbelt Publications 2008). Together, they will explore hidden corners of Los Angeles and the poetry of the city in images and text.


10/5 WeHo Reads: Poets Laureate Across America

There will also be a special October 2022 event featuring a selection of poets from the Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship Program. These poets laureate were all chosen by the Academy to receive a $50,000 award to help support creative work and community engagement projects, and several of them will gather to share about the projects they created.

WeHo Reads: Poets Laureate Across America takes place on Wednesday, October 5, 2022, at 6 p.m.  In 2020, the Academy of American Poets awarded more than $1 million to 23 poets laureate as part of a year-long Fellowship to support their creative and organizing work. One of these awards went to City of West Hollywood City Poet Laureate Brian Sonia-Wallace who also serves as this event’s host. This reading brings together a group of these Fellows from across the country in the aftermath of their Fellowships to share what they did, read their writing, and reflect on the state of poetry across the United States.


11/15 WeHo Reads: Light in Our Hearts

Light in Our Hearts concludes the 2022 WeHo Reads season on Tuesday, November 15, 2022, at 6 p.m. 

The culminating event in the series will bring together poets, writers, and artists who live and create at the intersection of joy and hope and reckoning with pain. bridgette bianca is a poet and educator from South Central Los Angeles. Her debut book of poetry, be/trouble, is a powerful love letter to oft-overlooked Los Angeles, one that offers as much danger as it does glamour and as much grit as beauty. traci kato-kiriyama is a multi-disciplinary artist, writer/author, actor, arts educator & community organizer. Her recently published book from Writ Large Press, Navigating With(out) Instruments, is a collection of poetics, micro essays, and notes to self (and other)—a journey of several years, navigating through death moments, past/present tensions of war and violence, trauma and ideation, excavation, and memory. Cassandra Lane is a writer and editor based in Los Angeles. Her first book, WE ARE BRIDGES: A Memoir, weaves personal and historical geographies, lineages, upbringings, and upheavals into a complete tapestry, validating her glorious existence as a Black mother. There will also be closing remarks from series opener Shonda Buchanan.