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Litquake
Litquake is San Francisco's annual literary festival. Originally named Litstock, the festival events took place in a single day in Golden Gate Park in the spring of 1999. It now has a two-week run in mid-October, as well as year-round programs and workshops. Litquake consists of readings, discussions, film screenings, and themed events held at hundreds of Bay Area venues, in an attempt to bring as many disparate types of literary art to as many people as possible. The festival now features over 100 events and around 600 authors, and draws over 21,000 attendees annually. In 2021, 96% of all events were free and open to the public. History Jack Boulware and Jane Ganahl are the co-founders and operate the festival as Executive Director and Artistic Director. Hatched over beers at the Edinburgh Castle pub in 1999, Litquake debuted as "Litstock" a free one-day reading series in a fog-bound Golden Gate Park. In 2002, the festival was rechristened Litquake and began expanding its progr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
City Lights Bookstore (Night)
City Lights is an independent bookstore-publisher combination in San Francisco, California, that specializes in world literature, the arts, and progressive politics. It also houses the nonprofit City Lights Foundation, which publishes selected titles related to San Francisco culture. It was founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin (who left two years later). Both the store and the publishers became widely known following the obscenity trial of Ferlinghetti for publishing Allen Ginsberg's influential collection ''Howl and Other Poems'' (City Lights, 1956). Nancy Peters started working there in 1971 and retired as executive director in 2007. In 2001, City Lights was made an official historic landmark. City Lights is located at 261 Columbus Avenue. While formally located in Chinatown, it self-identifies as part of immediately adjacent North Beach. History Founding and early years City Lights was the inspiration of Peter D. Martin, who relocated from New ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jeff Chang (journalist)
Jeff Chang is an American historian, journalist, and music critic on hip hop music and culture. His 2005 book, '' Can't Stop Won't Stop'', which won the Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award, chronicles the early hip hop scene. His writing has appeared in ''URB'', ''BOMB'', ''San Francisco Chronicle'', ''The Village Voice'', ''San Francisco Bay Guardian'', ''Vibe'', ''Spin'', ''The Nation'', and ''Mother Jones''. He has also been featured on NPR. Chang was the executive director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts + Committee on Black Performing Arts at Stanford University. He also served as the executive director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford. In June 2018, the Institute announced that Chang would leave to become the first vice president of Narrative, Arts, and Culture at Race Forward. Chang resides in the San Francisco Bay Area. Early life and education Born of Chinese and Native Hawaiian ancestry, Chang was born and raised in H ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Freeman (author)
John Freeman (born 1974) is an American writer and a literary critic. He was the editor of the literary magazine ''Granta'' until 2013, the former president of the National Book Critics Circle, and his writing has appeared in almost 200 English-language publications around the world, including ''The New York Times Book Review'', the ''Los Angeles Times'', ''The Guardian'', and ''The Wall Street Journal''. He is currently an executive editor at the publishing house Knopf. Early life John Freeman was born in Cleveland, Ohio, grew up in New York, Pennsylvania and California, and graduated from Swarthmore College in 1996. Career Freeman's first book, ''The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand Year Journey to Your Inbox'', was published in 2009. (It was published in Australia under the title ''Shrinking the World: The 4,000-year story of how email came to rule our lives''.) Freeman's second book, a collection of his interviews with major contemporary writers titled ''How to Read a No ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Karen Joy Fowler
Karen Joy Fowler is an American author of science fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction. Her work often centers on the nineteenth century, the lives of women, and alienation. She is best known as the author of the best-selling novel ''The Jane Austen Book Club'' that was made into a movie of the same name. Biography Fowler was born in Bloomington, Indiana, and spent the first eleven years of her life there. Her family then moved to Palo Alto, California. Fowler attended the University of California, Berkeley, and majored in political science. After having a child during the last year of her master's program, she spent seven years devoted to child-raising. Feeling restless, Fowler decided to take a dance class, and then a creative writing class at the University of California, Davis. Realizing that she was never going to make it as a dancer, Fowler began to publish science fiction stories, making a name for herself with the short story "Recalling Cinderella" (1985) in '' L R ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ben Fong-Torres
Benjamin Fong-Torres ( 方 振 豪; Cantonese: Fong Chan Ho; born January 7, 1945) is an American rock journalist best known for his association with ''Rolling Stone'' magazine (until 1981) and the ''San Francisco Chronicle'' (from around 1982). Biography Due to the Chinese Exclusion Act, Fong-Torres's father Ricardo (born Fong Kwok Seung), changed his surname to Torres and posed as a Filipino in order to immigrate to the United States. The family later adopted the hyphenated surname, ''Fong-Torres''. Ben is the brother of the late Shirley Fong-Torres. Fong-Torres, who graduated from San Francisco State University in 1966 with a B.A. in radio-TV-film, was a writer and senior editor of ''Rolling Stone'' nearly from the magazine's inception. In 1972, Fong-Torres lost his older brother, Barry, a probation officer and community worker, when he was murdered. Barry was passionate about working with the Chinese community. In the Netflix documentary about Ben’s work with Rolling Stone, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti (March 24, 1919 – February 22, 2021) was an American poet, painter, social activist, and co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. The author of poetry, translations, fiction, theatre, art criticism, and film narration, Ferlinghetti was best known for his second collection of poems, ''A Coney Island of the Mind'' (1958), which has been translated into nine languages and sold over a million copies. When Ferlinghetti turned 100 in March 2019, the city of San Francisco turned his birthday, March 24, into "Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day". Early life Ferlinghetti was born on March 24, 1919, in Yonkers, New York. Shortly before his birth, his father, Carlo, a native of Brescia, died of a heart attack; and his mother, Clemence Albertine (née Mendes-Monsanto), of Portuguese Sephardic Jewish descent, was committed to a mental hospital shortly after. He was raised by an aunt, and later by foster parents. He attended the Mount Hermon School for Boys ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jeffrey Eugenides
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides (born March 8, 1960) is an American novelist and short story writer. He has written numerous short stories and essays, as well as three novels: ''The Virgin Suicides'' (1993), ''Middlesex'' (2002), and'' The Marriage Plot'' (2011). ''The Virgin Suicides'' served as the basis of a feature film, while ''Middlesex'' received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in addition to being a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, and France's Prix Médicis. Biography Eugenides was born in Detroit, Michigan to a father of Greek descent and a mother of English and Irish ancestry. Eugenides is the youngest of three sons. He attended Grosse Pointe's private University Liggett School and then Brown University (where he became friends with contemporary Rick Moody). He graduated from Brown in 1982 after taking a year off to travel across Europe and volunteer with Mother Teresa in Calcutta, India. Of his decision to study a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Akwaeke Emezi
Akwaeke Emezi is a Nigerian fiction writer and video artist, best known for their novels ''Freshwater'', '' Pet,'' and their ''New York Times'' bestselling novel ''The Death of Vivek Oji''. Emezi is a generalist who writes speculative fiction, romance, memoir and poetry for both young adults and adults with mostly LGBT themes. Their work has earned them several awards and nominations including the Otherwise Award and Commonwealth Short Story Prize. In 2021, ''Time'' featured them as a Next Generation Leader. Early life and education Akwaeke Emezi was born in Umuahia in 1987 to an Igbo Nigerian father, and a mother who was the daughter of Sri Lankan immigrants living in Malaysia. Emezi grew up in Aba. Emezi started reading fantasy books and with their sister Yagazie used storytelling to escape the riots, dictatorship, and dangerous reality of their childhoods. Emezi was a "voracious" reader during childhood and they began writing short stories when they were five years old. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
James Ellroy
Lee Earle "James" Ellroy (born March 4, 1948) is an American crime fiction writer and essayist. Ellroy has become known for a telegrammatic prose style in his most recent work, wherein he frequently omits connecting words and uses only short, staccato sentences, and in particular for the novels ''The Black Dahlia'' (1987), ''The Big Nowhere'' (1988), ''L.A. Confidential'' (1990), ''White Jazz'' (1992), ''American Tabloid'' (1995), ''The Cold Six Thousand'' (2001), and ''Blood's a Rover'' (2009). Life Early life Lee Earle "James" Ellroy was born in Los Angeles, California. His mother, Geneva Odelia (née Hilliker), was a nurse. His father, Armand, was an accountant and a onetime business manager of Rita Hayworth. His parents divorced in 1954, after which Ellroy and his mother moved to El Monte, California. At the age of 7, Ellroy saw his mother naked and began to sexually fantasize about her. He struggled in youth with this obsession, as he held a psycho-sexual relationship with h ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dave Eggers
Dave Eggers (born March 12, 1970) is an American writer, editor, and publisher. He wrote the 2000 best-selling memoir ''A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius''. Eggers is also the founder of ''Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern'', a literary journal; a co-founder of the literacy project 826 Valencia and the human rights nonprofit Voice of Witness; and the founder of ScholarMatch, a program that matches donors with students needing funds for college tuition. His writing has appeared in several magazines. Early life and education Eggers was born in Boston, Massachusetts, one of four siblings. His father, John K. Eggers (1936–1991), was an attorney, while his mother, Heidi McSweeney Eggers (1940–1992), was a school teacher. His father was Protestant and his mother was Catholic. When Eggers was still a child, the family moved to the suburb of Lake Forest, near Chicago, where he attended public high school and was a classmate of actor Vince Vaughn. Eggers's elder brother ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Steve Earle
Stephen Fain Earle (; born January 17, 1955) is an American singer-songwriter, record producer, author, and actor. Earle began his career as a songwriter in Nashville and released his first EP in 1982. Initially working in the country music genre, Earle branched out into multiple genres of rock music, bluegrass, folk music and blues. His breakthrough album was the 1986 debut album '' Guitar Town''; the eponymous lead single peaked at number 7 on the ''Billboard'' Hot Country chart. Since then Earle has released 20 more studio albums and received three Grammy awards each for Best Contemporary Folk Album; he has four additional nominations in the same category. "Copperhead Road" was released in 1988 and is his best selling single; it peaked on its initial release at number 10 on the Mainstream Rock chart, and had a 21st century resurgence reaching number 15 on the Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart, buoyed by vigorous online sales. His songs have been recorded by Johnny Cash, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Doe (musician)
John Nommensen Duchac (born February 25, 1953), known professionally as John Doe, is an American singer, songwriter, actor, poet, guitarist and bass player. Doe co-founded LA punk band X, of which he is still an active member. His musical performances and compositions span rock, punk, country and folk music genres. As an actor, he has dozens of television appearances and several movies to his credit, including the role of Jeff Parker in the television series '' Roswell''. In addition to X, Doe performs with the country-folk-punk band the Knitters and has released records as a solo artist. In the early 1980s, he performed on two albums by the Flesh Eaters. Career Music Doe moved to Los Angeles, California, and in 1976 met guitar player Billy Zoom through an ad in the local free weekly paper, ''The Recycler.'' As a musician with X, Doe has two feature-length concert films, several music videos, and an extended performance-and-interview sequence in ''The Decline of Western C ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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