Skylight Books Podcast Series

ISA CHANDRA MOSKOWITZ discusses and signs her cookbook ISA DOES IT

Isa Does It: Amazingly Easy, Wildly Delicious Vegan Recipes for Every Day of the Week (Little, Brown & Company)

Bestselling vegan cookbook author Isa Chandra Moskowitz visits Skylight to discuss and sign her latest cookbook, Isa Does It.

How does Isa Chandra Moskowitz make flavorful and satisfying vegan meals from scratch every day, often in 30 minutes or less? It's easy! In Isa Does It, the beloved cookbook author shares 150 new recipes to make weeknight cooking a snap. Mouthwatering recipes like Sweet Potato Red Curry with Rice and Purple Kale, Bistro Beet Burgers, and Summer Seitan Saute with Cilantro and Lime illustrate how simple and satisfying meat-free food can be.

The recipes are supermarket friendly and respect how busy most readers are. From skilled vegan chefs, to those new to the vegan pantry, or just cooks looking for some fresh ideas, Isa's unfussy recipes and quirky commentary will make everyone's time in the kitchen fun and productive. 

Isa Chandra Moskowitz is the best-selling author of the hit books Veganomicon: The Ultimate Vegan Cookbook,Vegan With a Vengeance, and many other titles. She is currently a Bust magazine columnist where she writes about cooking on a limited budget, and she has written for Vegetarian Times, Time Out NY, Natural Health and VegNews. She lives in Omaha, Nebraska.

JAY MARTEL reads from CHANNEL BLUE

Channel Blue (Head of Zeus)

From the executive producer of "Key & Peele" comes a comic novel that may strike a little too close to home. 

 

Earth used to be Galaxy Entertainment's most lucrative show. The inhabitants of the Western Galaxy - the saviest, richest demographic in the Milky Way - just couldn't get enough of the day-to-day details of the average Earthling's live.

But Channel Blue's ratings are flagging and its producers are planning a spectacular finale. In just three weeks, their TV show will go out with a bang. The trouble is, so will Earth.

Only one man can save our planet and he's hardly a likely hero...

Jay Martel is an executive producer and writer for "Key & Peele" on Comedy Central. He's created various TV shows, written screenplays with UCB cofounder Ian Roberts, gardened for Richard Nixon, and was once arrested for confronting Jeb Bush about Florida's death penalty program. He's also written comic pieces for "The New Yorker" and "Rolling Stone." Channel Blue is his first novel. For more info on Channel Blue and Jay's writing, please check out facebook.com/authorjaymartel.

UC RIVERSIDE MFA STUDENTS, joined by alum ERIC SHONKWILER reading from ABOVE ALL MEN

Above All Men (Midwestern Gothic)

Join us for a special evening as the members of Gather: The UC Riverside MFA reading series share their work alongside former student Eric Shonkwiler, reading from his debut novel.

Years from now, America is slowly collapsing. Crops are drying up and oil is running out. People flee cities for the countryside, worsening the drought and opening the land to crime. Amid this decay and strife, war veteran David Parrish fights to keep his family and farm together. However, the murder of a local child opens old wounds, forcing him to confront his own nature on a hunt through dust storms and crumbling towns for the killer.

ANNABELLE GURWITCH reads from I SEE YOU MADE AN EFFORT, with special guests

I See You Made An Effort: Compliments, Indignities and Survival Stories from the Edge of 50 (Blue Rider Press)

Is 50 the new 40 or is 50 still 50? Maybe. In this wickedly funny new collection of essays, I See You Made An Effort, actress and writer Annabelle Gurwitch explores the hazards of turning 50, outsourcing your endocrine system, and falling in lust at the Genius bar. From the woman the Washington Post calls “hilarious,” this new book is the ultimate coming-of middle-age story and a must-read for women everywhere.

The panic began to set in when Annabelle turned 49. The solicitations from the AARP began flooding her mailbox as she weighed going back to school, getting divorced and raising llamas. She couldn’t afford a vacation, so she was taking a lot of naps. A visit to her gynecologist ended not with one of his usual benign send-offs—stay healthy, stay happy, stay hydrated—but instead with the slightly ominous: "Stay funny."

In this new collection of essays, Annabelle Gurwitch has taken her gynecologist's advice to heart. Whether she's navigating the extensive anti-aging offerings in the department store beauty counter or negotiating the ins and outs of acceptable behavior with her teenage son, Gurwitch bravely turns an unflinching eye towards the myriad of issues women can expect to encounter in their middle years. 

For tonight's reading Annabelle Gurwitch will be joined by members of the Suite 8 Writer's Collective, Jillian Lauren, Heather Havrilesky and Joshua Wolf Shenk.

Annabelle Gurwitch is an actress and author of You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up, a self-hurt marital memoir co-written with her husband, Jeff Kahn, now a theatrical play in its third national tour; and Fired! Tales of the Caned, Canceled, Downsized & Dismissed. Her Fired! documentary premiered as a Showtime Comedy Special and played film festivals around the world. Gurwitch gained a loyal comedic following during her numerous years co-hosting the cult favorite, Dinner & a Movie; her acting credits include Dexter, Boston Legal, Seinfeld, Melvin Goes to Dinner, The Shaggy Dog and Not Necessarily The News on HBO. Most recently, she starred in the adaptation of Grace Paley’s A Coney Island Christmas by Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Donald Margulies at The Geffen Playhouse. Live appearances include New York Comedy Festival, 92nd St Y, Upright Citizens Brigade and story salons in both New York and Los Angeles. She has served as a regular commentator on NPR and a humorist for TheNation.com. Her writing has appeared in More, Marie Claire, Men's Health, Los Angeles Times and elsewhere. Gurwitch is a passionate environmentalist, a reluctant atheist, and lives with her husband and son in Los Angeles.

Jillian Lauren is the author of the novel Pretty and the New York Times bestselling memoir Some Girls: My Life in a Harem. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Los Angeles Magazine, Salon, The Rumpus and The Moth Anthology, among others. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and son.

Heather Havrilesky is a regular contributor to the New York Times Magazine, The Awl and Bookforum, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness. You can also follow her on Twitter at @hhavrilesky.

Joshua Wolf Shenk is an essayist, author, and creative strategist based in New York City. He is a correspondent for Slate.com, and a contributor to The Atlantic Monthly, Time, Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and the national bestseller Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression, edited by Nell Casey. 

RACHEL PASTAN reads from ALENA

Alena (Riverhead Books)

In an inspired restaging of Daphne du Maurier's classic Rebecca, a young curator finds herself haunted by the legacy of her predecessor.

At the Venice Biennale, an aspiring young curator is given the career break of a lifetime when she meets Bernard Augustin, the wealthy, enigmatic founder of the Nauk, a cutting-edge art museum on Cape Cod. Would she like to take the reins at the museum—a position that has remained vacant since the tragic death of the charismatic Alena, Augustin’s childhood friend and muse? Shaking off her Midwestern past, our heroine—nameless, as is du Maurier’s original—jumps at the chance, only to find herself well beyond her depths. Like du Maurier’s Manderley, the Nauk echoes with phantoms of the past—a past obsessively preserved by the sinister, Mrs. Danvers-like business manager who was passionately devoted to Alena. The shadow of her predecessor hangs over the narrator as she tries to shift the Nauk away from the extreme art favored by Alena and to express her own sense of what art is. When new evidence calls into question the circumstances of Alena’s death, however, her loyalties, integrity, and courage are put to the test and shattering secrets come to the surface.

A delicious restaging of one of the most popular novels of the 20th century (later an Academy Award-winning Hitchcock film), Alena is also a stirring exploration of the role of beauty and the nature of originality.

Rachel Pastan is the author of two previous novels, Lady of the Snakes and This Side of Married, and has won numerous prizes for her short fiction. A member of the core faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars, she is also Editor-at-Large for the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, where she writes the blog Miranda.

KEM NUNN reads from CHANCE

Chance (Scribner)

When Kem Nunn’s debut novel Tapping the Source was published, the Los Angeles Times Book Review wrote: "Kem Nunn is the bright son of a very good family. His 'parents' include Hammett, Chandler, Raoul Whitfield, Paul Cain, James M. Cain, Horace McCoy, and yes, Ross MacDonald. What Kem Nunn has done is what every good parent yearns for and is afraid of: he has surpassed them all." Now, with Chance, Nunn surpasses even himself. Half Coen Brothers, half Dashiell Hammett, Kem Nunn has written a gritty, twisted psychological thriller centered on a lonely, brilliant, forensic neuropsychologist in San Francisco.

Dr. Eldon Chance has a track record of becoming involved with the wrong women. As he enters a mid-life crisis brought on by the failure of his marriage, a series of bad decisions lead him into a relationship with Jaclyn Blackstone, a patient suffering an apparent dissociative identy disorder. And unfortunately her abusive husband, an Oakland homicide detective, is the jealous type. At the same time, Chance meets a young man named “D,” a self-styled Samurai who Chance thinks is a war veteran, but is really more of a deranged loner. As Chance finds his life twisting more and more uncomfortably into Jaclyn Blackstone’s world, D acts as Chance’s guide to the underbelly of San Francisco and his coach for the looming show-down with Jaclyn’s psychotic husband. In his own cool, gray City of Love, amid its fluid, ever-changing beauty and shifting fogs, Dr. Chance will be forced to live up to his name.

By turns horrific and darkly comic, suspenseful and thought provoking, Chance is a head trip through the fun house from “one of the most interesting writers working the coast” (San Diego Union Tribune) and confirms Kem Nunn’sreputation as a master of suspense and a novelist of the first rank. 

Kem Nunn is a third-generation Californian and the author of six novels, including the National Book Award NomineeTapping the Source, Tijuana Straits, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Best Mystery/Thriller, The Dogs of Winter, Pomona Queen, and Unassigned Territory. In addition to writing novels, he writes screenplays for television and film, most notably John from Cincinnati which he co-created with David Milch, Deadwood, and currently, Sons of Anarchy. He lives in Southern California.

CECIL CASTELLUCCI reads from TIN STAR

Tin Star (Roaring Brook Press)

Skylight Books' very own Cecil Castellucci returns to launch her newest YA novel, a sci-fi adventure for the ages.  Cecil will follow a reading from her novel with a Q&A with JPL scientist Steve Collins!

On their way to start a new life, Tula and her family travel on the "Prairie Rose," a colony ship headed to a planet in the outer reaches of the galaxy. All is going well until the ship makes a stop at a remote space station, the Yertina Feray, and the colonist's leader, Brother Blue, beats Tula within an inch of her life. An alien, Heckleck, saves her and teaches her the ways of life on the space station.

When three humans crash land onto the station, Tula's desire for escape becomes irresistible, and her desire for companionship becomes unavoidable. But just as Tula begins to concoct a plan to get off the space station and kill Brother Blue, everything goes awry, and suddenly romance is the farthest thing from her mind.

Cecil Castellucci is a two-time MacDowell Colony fellow, an award-winning author of five books for young adults, and the YA and children's book editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. Born in New York City, Cecil lives in Los Angeles. For the research of Tin Star, Cecil attended LaunchPad, a NASA funded workshop intended to teach writers of science fiction about the most up-to-date and correct space science.

Steve Collins is an Attitude Control engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.  Most recently Cruise ACS System Engineer for the Mars Curiosity Rover, Steve has worked on numerous NASA/JPL missions including Epoxi, Dawn, Deep Impact, MER, Deep Space One, Galileo and Mars Observer.  In flight, Steve's job includes keeping the spacecraft pointed in the right direction, performing trajectory corrections and figuring out "what the heck just happened??"  When he's not flying a robotic spacecraft around the solar system, Steve can be found playing soccer, racing his Miata, jamming on the Theremin with the band Artichoke, or acting on-stage with TACIT, Caltech's resident theater company.

RON ATHEY presents PLEADING IN THE BLOOD

Pleading in the Blood: The Art and Performances of Ron Athey (Intellect Books)

Ron Athey is a central figure in the development of performance art since the early 1990s, and this is the first book devoted to his practice. Pleading in the Blood (ed. by Dominic Johnson) foregrounds the prescience of Atheyʼs work, exploring how his visceral practice foresaw and precipitated the central place afforded sexuality, identity, and the body in art and critical theory in the late twentieth century. This landmark publication includes Atheyʼs own writings, and commissioned essays by maverick artists and leading academics. It showcases full-colour images of Atheyʼs art and performances since the early 1980s, including extensive documentation of solo performances and ensemble productions, and his photographic collaborations with other visual artists.

Pleading in the Blood also includes three newly commissioned essays on different aspects of Atheyʼs work by Adrian Heathfield, Amelia Jones, and Dominic Johnson. These scholarly essays are complemented by shorter texts byHomi K. Bhabha, Jennifer Doyle, Tim Etchells, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Matthew Goulish, Lydia Lunch, Juliana Snapper, Julie Tolentino, Alex Binnie, Catherine
(Saalfield) Gund, Bruce LaBruce and Catherine Opie, along with a hand-written text from Robert Wilson.

Including new pieces and hard-to-find archival texts. The publication is lavishly illustrated with full-colour images by photographers including Catherine Opie, Manuel Vason, Elyse Regher, Slava Mogutin, Dona Ann McAdams, Bruce LaBruce, Rick Castro, Sheree Rose, Edward Colver, Jennifer Precious Finch, and others, and includes a foreword to the publication written by Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons.

Praise for Pleading in the Blood:

"At long last, Dominic Johnsonʼs book begins the dauntingly exhilarating task of assessing the richly provocative art of Ron Athey. Incorporating Atheyʼs own prose version of his extraordinary childhood, astute critical essays, and moving appreciations from other artists, Pleading in the Blood advances Performance Studies and Art History by forging a mode of commentary expansive enough to address an artist who consistently works to expand the intricate drama of human embodiment. Atheyʼs art refuses the usual distinctions between pleasure and pain, or faith and doubt, and has been both blamed and celebrated for its radical inquiries into the limits and possibilities of queer bodies. Athey emerges from these pages as one of the most compelling theatre artists of our time."--Peggy Phelan, Standford University

Ron Athey is an iconic figure in the development of contemporary art and performance. In his frequently bloody portrayals of life, death, crisis, and fortitude in the time of AIDS, Athey calls into question the limits of artistic practice. These limits enable Athey to explore key themes including: gender, sexuality, SM and radical sex, queer activism, post-punk and industrial culture, tattooing and body modification, ritual, and religion.

EDMUND WHITE reads from INSIDE A PEARL: MY YEARS IN PARIS

Inside A Pearl: My Years in Paris (Bloomsbury Publishing)

From the celebrated author of The Flaneur and City Boy, comes a fabulous new memoir from the iconoclastic Edmund White.

When Edmund White moved to Paris in 1983, leaving New York City in the midst of the AIDS crisis, he was forty-three years old, couldn’t speak French, and only knew two people in the entire city. But in middle age, he discovered the new anxieties and pleasures of mastering a new culture. When he left fifteen years later to take a teaching position in the U.S., he was fluent enough to broadcast on French radio and TV, and in his work as a journalist, he’d made the acquaintance of everyone from Yves Saint Laurent to Catherine Deneuve to Michel Foucault. He’d also developed a close friendship with an older woman, Marie-Claude, through which he’d come to understand French life and culture in a deeper way.

The book’s title evokes the Parisian landscape in the eternal mists and the half-light, the serenity of the city compared to the New York White had known (and vividly recalled in City Boy). White fell headily in love with the city and its culture: both intoxicated and intellectually stimulated. He became the definitive biographer of Jean Genet; he wrote lives of Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud; and he became a recipient of the French Order of Arts and Letters. Inside a Pearl recalls those fertile years for White. It’s a memoir which gossips and ruminates, and offers a brilliant examination of a city and a culture eternally imbued with an aura of enchantment.

Edmund White is the author of two previous memoirs, My Lives and City Boy, and a previous book on Paris, The Flâneur. His many novels include the autobiographical A Boy’s Own Story and, most recently, Jack Holmes & His Friend. He is also known as a literary biographer and essayist. White lives in New York and teaches at Princeton University. 

SCOTT O'CONNOR reads from HALF WORLD

Half World (Simon & Schuster)

A jaw-dropping page-turner based on real-life events, Half World by Scott O’Connor, a B&N Discover Great New Writers Award winner, is a riveting literary thriller from an author poised for a long and impressive career.

From its official sanction in 1953 to its shutdown in 1973, the CIA clandestinely conducted methods of mind control on unwitting American and Canadian citizens. This covert and illegal operation, Project MKUltra, made national headlines upon the declassification of thousands of documents in 2001. Inspired by these events, O’Connor came to write HALF WORLD, the gripping story of Henry March, a fraying CIA analyst who conducts secret mind-control experiments in San Francisco. With each passing day that Henry spends supervising the hapless men lured into his facility with no idea of what they’re about to endure, his controversial task weighs on him as he struggles between his duty to his country and his responsibility to his wife and children. When the point comes when he can no longer separate himself as the company man from the family man, he makes a decision to vanish into the night, abandoning his family forever and becoming a CIA mystery.

Two decades later, Dickie Ashby, a young, drug-addled CIA agent, is sent to Los Angeles to infiltrate a group of bank-robbing radicals who claim to have been abused in a government brainwashing operation years earlier. While the members of the group can’t trust their memories, they know that they need to find Henry March, and that the only bridge to Henry is Hannah: Henry’s once-precocious, sensitive daughter who now owns a photography gallery in the city. Tempted to believe that the burglars are telling the truth, Dickie finds himself torn between doing his job and protecting Hannah, as he is dragged deeper and deeper into the stunning legacy of the Henry’s past experiments.

Scott O’Connor was born in Syracuse, New York, the son of an air-traffic controller and a preschool teacher. An alum of SUNY Brockport, Scott is a co-founder of GO Studios, a post-production and motion graphics design firm, and the author of two novels: Among Wolves and Untouchable, for which he was awarded the 2011 Barnes & Noble Discover Award for fiction. He lives with his family in Los Angeles. Discover more about Scott and Henry March at www.scott-oconnor.comand www.whoishenrymarch.tumblr.com.

WRITEGIRL reads from the anthology YOU ARE HERE

You Are Here (WriteGirl)

WriteGirl is a creative writing and mentoring organization that promotes creativity, critical thinking and leadership skills to empower teen girls. Founded in 2001, WriteGirl pairs under-served girls, ages 13-18, with professional women writers for one-on-one mentoring, workshops and college readiness activities. Through public readings and publication in award-winning, nationally-distributed anthologies girls develop critical writing and public speaking skills and the confidence to make an impact on the world around them.

In 2013, WriteGirl was honored with the National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award, the highest national honor awarded to such programs. Executive Director Keren Taylor and mentee Jacqueline Uy, age 16, personally accepted the award from First Lady Michelle Obama at the White House.

SAM HARRIS reads from HAM: SLICES OF A LIFE

Ham: Slice of Life: Essays and Stories (Gallery Books)

ham (noun) [haem] 
1 the hind leg of a hog, salted, smoked, and cured 
2 second son of Noah 
3 somebody who performs in an exaggerated showy style 
-always hamming it up

Just when you thought you knew everything about ham, you discover that ham is also: 
4 a reason to laugh about everyday life, and 
5 an irresistible collection of humorous essays from a man who was born to entertain us.

In sixteen brilliantly observed true stories, Sam Harris emerges as a natural humorist in league with David Sedaris, Chelsea Handler, Carrie Fisher, and Steve Martin, but with a voice uniquely his own. Praised by the Chicago Sun-Times for his "manic, witty commentary," and with a storytelling talent the New York Times calls "New Yorker- worthy," he puts a comedic spin on full-disclosure episodes from his own colorful life.

What better place to find painfully funny material than in growing up gay, gifted, and ambitious in the heart of the Bible belt? And that's just the first cut: From partying to parenting, from Sunday school to getting sober, these slices of Ham will have you laughing and wiping away salty tears in equal measure with their universal and down-to-earth appeal. After all, there's a little ham in all of us.

Sam Harris's diversified career has run the gamut from multi-million-selling sinder and songwriter to Tony-nominated actor to writer, director and producer. After winning over a weekly audience of more than 25 million viewers as the first winner of Star Search, Sam has toured extensively in concert. He resides in Los Angeles with his husband and their son.

ANDERS NILSEN reads from RAGE OF POSEIDON and MICHAEL DEFORGE reads from ANT COLONY

Rage of Poseidon (Drawn & Quarterly) + Ant Colony (Drawn + Quarterly)

Anders Nilsen & Michael DeForge join forces for a can't-miss reading and presentation.

Imagine you are Poseidon at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The oceans are dying and sailors have long since stopped paying tribute. They just don’t need you anymore. What do you do? Perhaps, seeking answers, you go exploring. Maybe you end up in Wisconsin and discover the pleasures of the iced latte. And then, perhaps, everything goes wrong.

Anders Nilsen, the author of Big Questions and Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow, explores questions like these in his newest work, a darkly funny meditation on religion and faith with a modern twist. Rage of Poseidon brings all the philosophical depth of Nilsen’s earlier work to bear on contemporary society, asking how a twenty-first-century child might respond to being sacrificed on a mountaintop, and probing the role gods like Venus and Bacchus might have in the world of today. Nilsen works in aunique style for these short stories, distilling individual moments in black silhouette on a spare white background. Above all, though, he immerses us seamlessly in a world where gods and humans are more alike than not, forcing us to recognize the humor in our (and their) desperation.

In the few short years since he began his pamphlet-size comic book series Lose, Michael DeForge has announced himself as an important new voice in alternative comics. His brash, confident, undulating artwork sent a shock wave through the comics world for its unique, fully formed aesthetic.

From its opening pages, Ant Colony immerses the reader in a world that is darkly existential, with false prophets, unjust wars, and corrupt police officers, as it follows the denizens of a black ant colony under attack from the nearby red ants. On the surface, it's the story of this war, the destruction of a civilization, and the ants' all too familiar desire to rebuild. Underneath, though, Ant Colony plumbs the deepest human concerns--loneliness, faith, love, apathy, and more. All of this is done with humor and sensitivity, exposing a world where spiders can wreak unimaginable amounts of havoc with a single gnash of their jaws. Michael DeForge's striking visual sensibility--stark lines, dramatic color choices, and brilliant use of page and panel space--stands out in this volume.

Anders Nilsen is an award-winning cartoonist and visual artist. He is the author of several books, including Don't Go Where I Can't Follow and the magnum opus Big Questions, for which he was awarded the 2012 Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize by the Pennsylvania Center for the Book and the Ignatz Award, and was nominated for the top prize at the Angouleme International Comics Festival. Nilsen's works have been translated into a number of languages, and he has exhibited his drawing and painting internationally. He lives and works in Minneapolis.

Michael DeForge was born in 1987 and grew up in Ottawa, Ontario. After a few years of experimenting with short strips and zines, he created Lose #1, his first full-length comic, which won Best Emerging Talent at the Doug Wright Awards. He has since published a handful of comic books, which have received industry praise and two Eisner Award nominations. His illustrations have been published in The New York Times and Bloomberg View; his comics have appeared in Believer, Maisonneuve, and the Adventure Time comic book series.

ANDREA PORTES reads from BURY THIS

Bury This (Soft Skull Press)

If twenty-five years can discover the internet, the cell phone, this thing called the iPod, can twenty-five years discover the secret of a girl murdered, abandoned, by the side of the road? That is the haunting premise of Bury This, an impressionistic literary thriller about the murder of a young girl in small-town Michigan in 1979.

Beth Krause was by all intents a good little girl - member of the church choir, beloved daughter of doting parents, friend to the downtrodden. But dig a little deeper into any small town, and conflicts and jealousies begin to appear. And somewhere is that heady mix lies the answer to what really happened to Beth Krause. Her unsolved murder becomes the stuff of town legend, and twenty-five years later the case is re-ignited when a group of film students start making a documentary on Beth's fateful life. The town has never fully healed over the loss of Beth, and the new investigation calls into light several key characters: her father, a WWII vet; her mother, once the toast of Manhattan; her best friend, abandoned by her mother and left to fend for herself against an abusive father; and the detective, just a rookie when the case broke, haunted by his inability to bring Beth's murderer to justice. All of these passions will collide once the identity of Beth's murderer is revealed, proving once again that some secrets can never stay buried.

Adrea Portes was born in rural Nebraska, and spent her early years living in Illinois, Texas, North Dakota, North Carolina, Rio de Janiero, and Brasilia. Portes attended Bryn Mawr and received her MFA from UC San Diego. She is the author of the semi-autobiographical novelHick, and has also completed the comic book series Super Rad, which will be released in September 2013 by Dark Matter.

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS 100th BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION

Join us for a celebration of William Burroughs' life and work together with the cast and creators of Jon Bastian's Bill & Joan, a haunting new drama inspired by the conflicting accounts of what truly happened in 1951 when William S. Burroughs shot his wife Joan.

1951. Mexico City. Writer William S. Burroughs awakes to find himself in jail,
being questioned about the shooting of his wife Joan Vollmer. Their drunken game of “William Tell” went horribly wrong, and now the Mexican detectives are probing Burroughs’ heroin-hazed, tortured mind for the truth.

Filled with Burroughs’ hallmark vulgarity, voracious wit and provocative characters,
Jon Bastian’s Bill & Joan is a phantasmagorical journey in search of what truly happened on that night when a speed freak and a junkie walked into a metaphorical bar, but only one walked out.

Performances of Bill & Joan will be held at
Sacred Fools Theater
660 N. Heliotrope Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90004
Fridays and Saturdays at 8 pm

The Sacred Fools Theatre Company is dedicated to creating and fostering a dynamic, empowered artistic community in Los Angeles. Notable previous productions include the Buster Keaton comedic biography Stoneface, the award-winning action-comedy Watson, the award-winning musical Louis & Keely, and recent hit Neverwhere. Run solely by the ensembled artists, the company’s smashing 17th season continues its ongoing commitment to the development of new plays and projects, which challenge traditional expectations of the theatrical experience. Its goal is to produce work, which invigorates, enlightens and entertains.