Enjoy recent author events, interviews, and bookseller series. Visit our website to learn more: www.skylightbooks.com
Episodes
Wednesday Mar 18, 2020
SEAWITCHES, VOL. 4 w/ Olivia VanDamme & Margaret Seelie
Wednesday Mar 18, 2020
Wednesday Mar 18, 2020
Seawitches is a bi-annual print publication with the eternal theme of water. Within the water theme we’ve explored menstruation, mental health, white privilege, technology, environmental issues, and more.
Every issue has an Artist In Residence (AIR), including Leah Koransky (1), Caitlin Mattisson (2), and Savannah Rusher (4). Writers include Easkey Britton, Serena Renner, Kehinde Apara, Margaret Seelie, Maureen Murphy, Coco Peezy, and more. Artists include Amelia Coplan, Andrew Kaineder, Bleen Photography, Chris Duncan, Cristine Blanco, Elizabeth Pepin Silva, Rebecca Schillinger, Kaylee Savage-Wright, Kimberly Rose Wendt, Luke Allen, Marley Reynosa, Paige Laverty, Preston Richardson, Sarah Beeby, Susan Mattisson, Yoni Matatyaou, and more.
Whether you love oceans with wild waves, lakes that leave your skin smelling of fresh dirt, pools with sunlight slithering across blue paint, or a good soak in the tub – we think you'll like what you find with Seawitches.
Tuesday Mar 17, 2020
BEST WOMEN'S EROTICA OF THE YEAR, VOL. 5
Tuesday Mar 17, 2020
Tuesday Mar 17, 2020
In Best Women’s Erotica of the Year, Volume 5, award-winning editor Rachel Kramer Bussel takes readers on an outrageous journey into the world of female fantasy and desire. These sexy stories offer up wild, hot, and steamy tales from today’s top authors. You’ll be swept away by the sexiest business deal ever, break the rules in a future world where skin-on-skin contact is forbidden, and discover the art of getting off by phone sex. From threesomes to mermaid sex, fetishes, sex parties, and much more, these authors steam up the pages with tales of trysts, love, and lust where nothing is held back. If you’re looking to escape from the everyday and discover what happens when women are ready to get totally outrageous, this book is for you. With new stories by beloved authors including Joanna Angel, Balli Kaur Jaswal, CD Reiss, Sierra Simone, and Sabrina Sol, along with newcomers to the genre, you’ll savor every sizzling page.
Tuesday Mar 10, 2020
WRITEGIRL 4 Group Reading
Tuesday Mar 10, 2020
Tuesday Mar 10, 2020
WriteGirl is an innovative nonprofit organization that empowers teen girls through creative writing. Join us for this special chance to hear WriteGirl teens speak their minds and read their original poetry and prose. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and you’ll be surprised—you won’t want to miss it!
In WriteGirl’s new award-winning anthology, This Moment: Bold Voices from WriteGirl, 180 teens share stories, poems, memoirs, scripts and songs about their hopes and fears, loves and losses, amigas and pan dulce, as they navigate a challenging present and uncertain future with determination and grace. Their words inspire reflection and ignite action. The book includes a Creativity Starter Kit with 15 fresh writing activities to inspire young writers. This Moment is available for purchase at Skylight Books.
Thursday Nov 07, 2019
Monique Truong, "THE SWEETEST FRUITS" w/ Diep Tran
Thursday Nov 07, 2019
Thursday Nov 07, 2019
The Sweetest Fruits introduces readers to a trio of tenacious, brave, and inspiring women who have largely been left out of the historical record—until now. In her beautifully crafted and captivating work, Monique Truong retells the remarkable life story of 19th century writer, wanderer, and epicurean Lafcadio Hearn through the eyes of those who cared for him and made his work possible.
Truong is in conversation with Diep Tran, chef and former owner of Good Girl Dinette in Los Angeles.
Monday Sep 09, 2019
DRAG QUEEN STORYTIME w/ Sadie Pines
Monday Sep 09, 2019
Monday Sep 09, 2019
We hosted the oh-so-fabulous Sadie Pines, the woMAN behind writer/comedian H. Alan Scott. Sadie is the first and only drag queen fully inspired by The Golden Girls (it’s true, don’t bother Googling it). Sadie was born out of H. Alan’s years of interacting with Golden Girls fans through the podcast Out on the Lanai. Now she’s out living her golden life, and guess what? She’s here to make yours a little brighter too. For more, follow her at @SadiePines.
Sadie will read Mary Wears What She Wants, by Keith Negley, and lead the kiddos in some fun activities. The event is free and open to the public. Any donations will go towards the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital.
Friday Aug 30, 2019
Chavisa Woods, "100 TIMES" w/ Michelle Tea
Friday Aug 30, 2019
Friday Aug 30, 2019
Lambda-nominated and Shirley Jackson Award-winning author Chavisa Woods presents one hundred personal stories of sexism, harassment, discrimination, and assault. Recounting her experiences with gender-based discrimination, unsolicited groping, and sexual violence--beginning in childhood, through the present--Woods lays out clear and unflinching vignettes that build in intensity as the number of times grows. Individually, and especially taken as a whole, these stories amount to powerful proof that sexual violence and discrimination are never just one-time occurrences, but part of a constant battle women and non-binary people face every day.
In these extraordinary pages, sexual violence and gendered-discrimination happen to people regardless of their age, in all parts of society, in rural and urban areas alike, in the US and abroad, from the time they are very young and through adulthood. Demonstrating how often people are conditioned to endure sexism and harassment, and how thoroughly men feel entitled to women’s spaces and bodies, 100 Times challenges the common, damaging belief that sexism and misogyny are no longer problems within our society.
Woods is in conversation with michelle tea, the author of the young adult novels Mermaid in Chelsea Creek and Girl at the Bottom of the Sea, as well as numerous books for grown-ups.
Tuesday Apr 30, 2019
Johanna Fateman and Amy Scholder, "LAST DAYS AT HOT SLIT"
Tuesday Apr 30, 2019
Tuesday Apr 30, 2019
Radical feminist author Andrea Dworkin was a caricature of misandrist extremism in the popular imagination and a polarizing figure within the women's movement, infamous for her antipornography stance and her role in the feminist sex wars of the 1980s. She still looms large in feminist demands for sexual freedom, evoked as a censorial demagogue, more than a decade after her death. Among the very first writers to use her own experiences of rape and battery in a revolutionary analysis of male supremacy, Dworkin was a philosopher outside and against the academy who wrote with a singular, apocalyptic urgency.
Last Days at Hot Slit brings together selections from Dworkin's work, both fiction and nonfiction, with the aim of putting the contentious positions she's best known for in dialogue with her literary oeuvre. The collection charts her path from the militant primer Woman Hating (1974), to the formally complex polemics of Pornography (1979) and Intercourse (1987) and the raw experimentalism of her final novel Mercy (1990). It also includes "Goodbye to All This" (1983), a scathing chapter from an unpublished manuscript that calls out her feminist adversaries, and "My Suicide" (1999), a despairing long-form essay found on her hard drive after her death in 2005.
Friday Nov 02, 2018
Danielle Krysa, "A BIG IMPORTANT ART BOOK (NOW WITH WOMEN)"
Friday Nov 02, 2018
Friday Nov 02, 2018
Walk into any museum, or open any art book, and you'll probably be left wondering: where are all the women artists? A Big Important Art Book (Now with Women) offers an exciting alternative to this male-dominated art world, showcasing the work of dozens of contemporary women artists alongside creative prompts that will bring out the artist in anyone!
This beautiful book energizes and empowers women, both artists and amateurs alike, by providing them with projects and galvanizing stories to ignite their creative fires. Each chapter leads with an assignment that taps into the inner artist, pushing the reader to make exciting new work and blaze her own artistic trail. Interviews, images, and stories from contemporary women artists at the top of their game provide added inspiration, and historical spotlights on art "herstory" tie in the work of pioneering women from the past. With a stunning, gift-forward package and just the right amount of pop culture-infused feminism, Danielle Krysa is sure to capture the imaginations of aspiring women artists.
Tuesday Oct 30, 2018
Nadya Tolokonnikova, "READ & RIOT" w/ Shepard Fairey
Tuesday Oct 30, 2018
Tuesday Oct 30, 2018
Feminist artist, political activist, and Pussy Riot founder Nadya Tolokonnikova has written a timely guide to radical protest and provides the words, actions, and inspiration to ignite the power of individuals to passionately resist and proactively plan our way to the change we want to see. In Read & Riot: A Pussy Riot Guide to Activism, the revered international activist draws upon her own hard-won wisdom to share her core principles for opposing leaders and governments that threaten to suppress individual rights and freedoms. Cutting through the pessimism, fear, uncertainty, and hopelessness, Read & Riot is an empowering tool for civil disobedience that encourages us to question the status quo, reject the litany of injustices and refuse to let apathy take hold, and above all, to make political action exciting, to be approached with a sense of humor, and an ultimately make it an integral part of our daily lives. Fusing punk and positivity to create a culture of protest that inspires and connects us, Read & Riot includes actions, suggestions, and resources for creating an empowered movement of resistance.
Tolokonnikova is in conversation with fellow artist-activist Shepard Fairey.
Tuesday Sep 18, 2018
Gabriella Herstick, "INNER WITCH"
Tuesday Sep 18, 2018
Tuesday Sep 18, 2018
This isn’t your great-great-great-great grandmother’s guide to witchcraft. Inner Witch: A Modern Guide to the Ancient Craft, by Nylon’s Ask A Witch columnist Gabriela Herstik, invites everyone into the coven, modernizing the ancient craft and creating a space for all to come and express their sacred self.
As uncertainty rages across the globe, many have a turned to the sacred, ancient crafts—witchcraft, astrology, crystals, and similar practices—to find balance, especially young women. Inner Witch grants practitioners from all walks of the life the freedom to assume their place in the universe while connecting with a force far greater than themselves.
Monday Sep 17, 2018
Clementine Ford, "FIGHT LIKE A GIRL" w/ Alexandra Tweten
Monday Sep 17, 2018
Monday Sep 17, 2018
Through a mixture of memoir, opinion and investigative journalism, Clementine Ford exposes just how unequal the world continues to be for women. An incendiary debut taking the world by storm, Fight Like a Girl will make you laugh, cry and scream — but above all it will open your eyes to a way forward, a brighter future, and a society where both men and women can flourish equally– something worth fighting for.
Friday Aug 31, 2018
Kate Schatz and Miriam Klein Stahl, "RAD GIRLS CAN"
Friday Aug 31, 2018
Friday Aug 31, 2018
In Rad Girls Can, you'll learn about a diverse group of young women who are living rad lives, whether excelling in male-dominated sports like boxing, rock climbing, or skateboarding; speaking out against injustice and discrimination; expressing themselves through dance, writing, and music; or advocating for girls around the world. Each profile is paired with the dynamic paper-cut art that made the authors' first two books New York Times best sellers. Featuring both contemporary and historical figures, Rad Girls Can offers hope, inspiration, and motivation to readers of all ages and genders.
This episode features a conversation between authors Kate Schatz and Miriam Klein Stahl.
Tuesday Jul 10, 2018
Joy Press, "STEALING THE SHOW"
Tuesday Jul 10, 2018
Tuesday Jul 10, 2018
In Stealing the Show: How Women are Revolutionizing Television, journalist and television critic Joy Press celebrates the women who broke through male-dominated Hollywood and helped change the face of television forever.
Drawing on scores of interviews with key participants in this revolution, Stealing the Show is a revelatory story about the women who changed not just what we see on television but the culture in which we live.
Friday May 25, 2018
CARINA CHOCANO DISCUSSES HER BOOK YOU PLAY THE GIRL WITH KRISTINA WONG
Friday May 25, 2018
Friday May 25, 2018
In this smart, funny, impassioned call to arms, a pop culture critic merges memoir and commentary to explore how our culture shapes ideas about who women are, what they are meant to be, and where they belong.
Who is “the girl?” Look to movies, TV shows, magazines, and ads and the message is both clear and not: she is a sexed up sidekick, a princess waiting to be saved, a morally infallible angel with no opinions of her own. She’s whatever the hero needs her to be in order to become himself. She’s an abstraction, an ideal, a standard, a mercurial phantom.
From the moment we’re born, we’re told stories about what girls are and they aren’t, what girls want and what they don’t, what girls can be and what they can’t. “The girl” looms over us like a toxic cloud, permeating everything and confusing our sense of reality. In You Play the Girl, Carina Chocano shows how we metabolize the subtle, fragmented messages embedded in our everyday experience and how our identity is shaped by them.
From Bugs Bunny to Playboy Bunnies, from Flashdance to Frozen, from the progressive ’70s through the backlash ’80s, the glib ’90s, and the pornified aughts—and at stops in between—Chocano blends formative personal stories with insightful and emotionally powerful analysis. She explains how growing up in the shadow of “the girl” taught her to think about herself and the world and what it means to raise a daughter in the face of these contorted reflections. In the tradition of Roxane Gay, Rebecca Solnit, and Susan Sontag, Chocano brilliantly shows that our identities are more fluid than we think, and certainly more complex than anything we see on any kind of screen.
Praise for You Play the Girl
“You Play the Girl by Carina Chocano blew my mind. Like a goldfish realizing that water existed, I instantly came alive to the air and the atmosphere of how my Otherness informed my girlhood. Each and every message of being asked to stand still so that I could be seen by the cultural product of male-made entertainment made me scream with recognition. In particular, the Flashdance chapter time-travelled me back to my youth, but holding hands with a clear-eyed, brilliant, hilarious friend. Re-looking at Stepford Wives, I Dream of Jeannie, Bewitched and all of the other hypnotic suggestions about my supposed woman-hood made me feel alive and energized and ready to topple the patriarchy. The world is changing for women and girls and here is one of the first steps—going back to do archaeology about what the heck happened to us, how we got colonized. If information is power, You Play the Girl is amsuperpower.”—Jill Soloway, writer, director, creator of Transparent
“Carina Chocano is a brilliant thinker, a dazzling stylist and an intellectual in the truest sense of the word. An important critical work as well as an entertaining personal story, You Play the Girl looks at old archetypes in new and often astonishingly insightful ways and establishes Chocano as a unique talent and crucial voice in the cultural conversation.”—Meghan Daum, author of The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion
“Carina Chocano unearths the little horrors of our culture’s pervasive, insidious sexism in essays so brilliant and witty you’ll wish her book would never end. Chocano is one of our sharpest, most original cultural observers, and You Play the Girl is as engrossing as it is unforgettable.”—Heather Havrilesky, author of How to Be a Person in the World
Carina Chocano is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine and Elle, and her writing has appeared in Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. A former staff film and TV critic at the Los Angeles Times, she has also worked as a TV and book critic at Entertainment Weekly and a staff writer at Salon. She lives in Los Angeles.
Kristina Wong is solo performer, writer, actor, educator, “culture jammer”, and filmmaker. Kristina’s background in education, art for social change, and community work informs the content of her performances and writing which are both entertaining and thought provoking.
She was awarded the Creative Capital Award in Theater and a Creation Fund from the National Performance Network to create her third full-length solo show Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest exploring the remarkably high incidence of suicide among Asian American women in a world that’s more nuts than we are. She is completing a novel started with the PEN USA Rosenthal Emerging Voices Fellowship.
Tuesday May 22, 2018
ALICIA MALONE DISCUSSES HER BOOK BACKWARDS AND IN HEELS WITH MAUDE GARRETT
Tuesday May 22, 2018
Tuesday May 22, 2018
"After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels..." - Ann Richards
Women have been instrumental in the success of American cinema since its very beginning. One of the first people to ever pick up a motion picture camera was a woman. As was the first screenwriter to win two Academy Awards, the inventor of the boom microphone and the first person to be credited with the title Film Editor. Throughout the entire history of Hollywood women have been revolutionizing, innovating, and shaping how we make movies. Yet their stories are rarely shared.
This is what film reporter Alicia Malone wants to change. "Backwards and in Heels" tells the history of women in film in a different way, with stories about incredible ladies who made their mark throughout each era of Hollywood. From the first women directors, to the iconic movie stars, and present day activists. Each of these stories are inspiring in the accomplishments of women, and they also highlight the specific obstacles women have had to face. "Backwards and in Heels" combines research and exclusive interviews with influential women and men working in Hollywood today, such as Geena Davis, J.J. Abrams, Ava DuVernay, Octavia Spencer, America Ferrera, Paul Feig, Todd Fisher and many more, as well as film professors, historians and experts.
Think of Backwards and in Heels as a guidebook, your entry into the complex world of women in film. Join Alicia Malone as she champions Hollywood women of the past and present, and looks to the future with the hopes of leveling out the playing field.
Alicia Malone is a film reporter, host, writer and self-confessed movie geek. She first gained notice hosting movie-centric shows and reviewing films in her native Australia, before making the leap to Los Angeles in 2011.
Since then, Alicia has appeared on CNN, the Today show, MSNBC, NPR and many more as a film expert. Currently, she is a host on FilmStruck, a cinephile subscription streaming service run by the Criterion Collection and Turner Classic Movies, and she is the creator and host of the weekly show, Indie Movie Guide on Fandango.
Alicia is passionate about classic films, independent movies and supporting women in film. In 2015, Alicia gave a TEDx talk about the lack of women working in film and why this is important to change. In 2017, she was invited to give a second TEDx talk, where she spoke about the hidden stories of the earliest women working in Hollywood. Alicia has also spoken at conferences around America, and because of this, was named of one the 100 Worthy Women of 2016.
Alicia has traveled the world to cover the BAFTAs, the Oscars, the Cannes Film Festival, Toronto Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival and SXSW. She is a member of the Broadcast Film Critics Association, and over the years has interviewed hundreds of movie stars and filmmakers.
She also wrote this bio, but knew it would sound way less egotistical if written in third person.
Maude Garrett has spent over a decade as a host on all forms of media including television, radio and digital on an array of shows, but she tries her hardest to keep creating content about her favorite topic: geekdom, founding Geek Bomb back in 2012. Maude's other claim to fame is being best friends with Alicia Malone…