Skylight Books Podcast Series

Carol Muske-Dukes

Twin Cities (Penguin)

California Poet Laureate Carol Muske-Dukes returns to Skylight to read and sign her new poetry collection, Twin Cities. Carol Muske-Dukes is the current Poet Laureate of California and a professor at the University of Southern California. She is also a co-editor of two anthologies and an author of eight books of poetry, four novels, and two essay collections.  She is a regular critic for the New York Times Book Review and the LA Times Book Review. Her work appears everywhere from the New Yorker to L.A. Magazine and she is anthologized widely, including in Best American Poems, 100 Great Poems by Women and many others.  She is professor of English and Creative Writing and founding Director of the new PhD Program in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California.  She has received many awards and honors, including a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, an Ingram-Merrill, the Witter Bynner award from the Library of Congress, the Castagnola award from the Poetry Society of America and several Pushcart Prizes. THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS SEPTEMBER 7, 2011.

Dan Fante

Fante: A Family's Legacy of Writing, Drinking and Surviving (HarperCollins)

Novelist and poet Dan Fante will discuss and sign his new family memoir Fante, covering the lives of his Italian-born grandfather, his famous-writer father John Fante (Ask the Dust), and his own life, writing, and personal struggles. "If writing is fighting, then Dan Fante goes fifteen rounds and stays standing. This is a fascinating story about two hard-edged men, survival and the passion to live and to write."--Michael Connelly Dan Fante is the son of novelist John Fante. He was born and raised in Los Angeles. At nineteen he hitchhiked across the country, eventually ending up in New York City where he was a cab driver for seven years and held a hundred other jobs in order to survive. Fante battled with alcoholism for many years and was arrested many times for his numerous stupidities. After getting sober, and in hope of remaining permanently indignant, Fante took up writing novels in his mid-forties. Today Dan Fante is sober and lives in Los Angeles with his wife Ayrin and his six-year old son Michelangelo Giovanni Fante. Fante is the author of the novels 86’d, Chump Change, Mooch, Spitting Off Tall Buildings, the short story collection Short Dog; two books of poetry, and the plays “The Boiler Room” and “Don Giovanni.” He continues to write every day.

THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS SEPTEMBER 2, 2011.

FIRE IN MOONLIGHT: STORIES FROM THE RADICAL FAERIES

The Fire in Moonlight: Stories from the Radical Faeries (White Crane Books)

Selected contributors will read from their pieces in the important new anthology The Fire in Moonlight, including anthology editor Mark Thompson, Stuart Timmons, associate editor Richard Neely, Allen Page, David Cohen, Trebor Healey, Michael David, and Ian MacKinnon (schedule permitting). The most valuable possession a people have is their story...their history. Many years in the making, with over fifty contributors from around the world, Fire in the Moonlight is the first anthology of its kind. Beginning with Walt Whitman and Edward Carpenter in the nineteenth century and moving through the liberation movements of the late twentieth, Fire in the Moonlight speculates far into the twenty-first. It offers a timely compendium of culture wisdom, provocative wit and challenging sensuality. This collection gives witness to a groundbreaking movement that painstakingly emerged from the Gay Liberation era. Rooted in the history of radical visionaries, this little known, essential community informs the modern world with new meaning, offering fresh definitions of faith, identity, purpose and gender. Fire in the Moonlight is a series of personal reflections on who the Radical Faeries are, where they've been and where they are going: Radical Faeries in their own words. It is about how a movement has changed lives--and how Radical Faeries contribute to healing a fractured Earth. THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS AUGUST 13, 2011.