Enjoy recent author events, interviews, and bookseller series. Visit our website to learn more: www.skylightbooks.com
Episodes
Monday Feb 01, 2021
SKYLIT: Kim Young, "TIGERS" w/ Sandra Hunter
Monday Feb 01, 2021
Monday Feb 01, 2021
Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.
Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.
Monday Jan 11, 2021
Monday Jan 11, 2021
Lory Bedikian’s first collection The Book of Lamenting was awarded the 2010 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. She earned an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon, where she was awarded the Dan Kimble First Year Teaching Award for Poetry. Her work has been selected several times as a finalist in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition and in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award Competition and has received grants from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial fund and AFFMA. Poets & Writerschose her work as a finalist for the 2010 California Writers Exchange Award. Additionally, her poetry was included in the anthology Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond, Beyond Baroque Books, 2015 and chosen as a finalist in the 2015 AROHO Orlando Competition. Bedikian’s newer work has been published in Miramar, has been featured on the Best American Poetry blog as part of the “Where My Dreaming and My Loving Live: Poetry & the Body”; series, is included in the Fall 2018 issue of Tin House and appears in recent issues of The Los Angeles Review and MORIA, as well as on Poets.org. Her poem “The Mechanic,” is included in the recently released anthology Border Lines: Poems of Migration, Knopf, 2020. Also, her poem “On the Way to Oshagan,” will be featured by Pádraig Ó Tuama in a forthcoming Poetry Unbound podcast.
Dorianne Laux's sixth collection, Only As the Day is Long: New and Selected Poems was named a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her fifth collection,The Book of Men, was awarded The Paterson Prize. Her fourth book of poems, Facts About the Moon, won The Oregon Book Award and was short-listed for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Laux is also the author of Awake; What We Carry, a finalist for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award; Smoke; as well as a fine small press edition, The Book of Women. She is the co-author of the celebrated text The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry.
Wednesday Dec 16, 2020
SKYLIT: Sudeep Sen, "LITERATURES OF THE ATHROPOCENE" w/ Kiran Bhat
Wednesday Dec 16, 2020
Wednesday Dec 16, 2020
Sudeep Sen is widely recognised as a major new generation voice in world literature and "one of the finest younger English-language poets in the international literary scene." His prize-winning books include Postmarked India, Distracted Geographies, Rain, Aria, The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry, and many others. He is the editorial director of aark arts and the editor of Atlas.
Sen is in conversation with fellow writer Kiran Bhat.
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Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," a new, unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.
Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.
Friday Oct 30, 2020
SKYLIT: Johnny Ray Huston & Bradford Nordeen, "BECAUSE HORROR"
Friday Oct 30, 2020
Friday Oct 30, 2020
For over a decade, Johnny Ray Huston was Arts and Entertainment Editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian. As a writer, artist and curator he has read or shown work at venues including SFMOMA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SF Camerawork, Artists’ Television Access and [2nd Floor Projects]. A book of stories, published by Straight to Hell, is due in 2021.
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Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," a new, unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.
Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.
Monday Oct 26, 2020
SKYLIT: Jennifer L. Knox, "CRUSHING IT" w/ Sarah Manguso
Monday Oct 26, 2020
Monday Oct 26, 2020
The poems in Jennifer L. Knox's darkly imaginative collection, Crushing It, unearth epiphanies in an unbounded landscape of forms, voices and subjects--from history to true crime to epidemiology--while exploring our tenuous connections and disconnections. From Merle Haggard lifting his head from a pile of cocaine to absurdist romps through an apocalypse where mushrooms learn to sing, this versatile collection is brimming with dark humor and bright surprise. Alongside Knox's distinctive surrealism, Crushing It also reveals autobiography in poems about love, family, and adult ADHD, and Knox's empathetic depictions of the ego's need to assert its precious, singular "I" suggest that a self distinct from the hive, the herd, the flock, is an illusion. With clear-eyed spirit, Crushing It swallows all the world, and then some.
Knox is in conversation with American writer and poet Sarah Manguso.
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Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," a new, unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.
Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.
Wednesday Oct 14, 2020
SKYLIT: Kazim Ali, "THE VOICE OF SHEILA CHANDRA" w/ Kiki Petrosino
Wednesday Oct 14, 2020
Wednesday Oct 14, 2020
Titled for the influential singer left almost voiceless by a terrible syndrome, The Voice of Sheila Chandra brings sweet melodies and rhythms as the voices blend and become multitudinous. There's an honoring of not only survival, but of persistence, as this part research-based, pensive collection contemplates what it takes to move forward when the unimaginable holds you back.
Author Kazim Ali is in conversation with fellow poet Kiki Petrosino.
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Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," a new, unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.
Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.
Saturday Sep 12, 2020
SKYLIT: Rory Waterman, "SWEET NOTHINGS" w/ Andre Naffis-Sahely
Saturday Sep 12, 2020
Saturday Sep 12, 2020
Rory Waterman's poems sometimes come in sequences; always they are in dialogue with one another, responding, echoing - within and between the book's two sections. At times, the leitmotifs are apparently personal, exploring divisions and painful losses. But we also encounter the largely invented academic Dr Bob Pintle, promoted at work since his cameo in Waterman's previous book, an anti-hero of the modern university system. In this book we also find the zero football score, the zero scores in life's more significant conflicts, and an obverse: the desire to settle at nothing, or for nothing less than what life might offer. Sweet Nothings is in fact a book of hopes and passions - quiet and lyrical at times, but also fiercely witty and bold.
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Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," a new, unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.
Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.
Friday Sep 04, 2020
SKYLIT: Dena Igusti, "CUT WOMAN" w/ Ray Jordan Achan
Friday Sep 04, 2020
Friday Sep 04, 2020
Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. Middle Eastern Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Women Studies. "One of the things I love most is when a poetry book forces me to slow down, to linger in every pause between breaths and reckon with the awareness that Reading is, itself, an act of consumption. CUT WOMAN does just this. From 'night // fall' to 'day // break, ' Dena Igusti's speaker forces readers to linger in the spaces both within and between words, bodies, and countries, even when those spaces do not yet exist: 'altar of my body did i give you // a forever // i could not promise? // ... // an altered kind of grief?' These poems slice, piece, project only to gut open. These poems remember despite Memory: 'i purposely forget // the prayer for when someone dies // inna-illahi-something // i always remember how to start // grieving // but // never when or how to let it out of my mouth.'
Igusti is in conversation with actor, director, writer, producer, and executive director of the Exiled Tongues Theater Company Ray Jordan Achan.
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Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," a new, unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.
Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.
Monday Aug 31, 2020
SKYLIT: Adam O. Davis, "INDEX OF HAUNTED HOUSES"
Monday Aug 31, 2020
Monday Aug 31, 2020
This is a book of ghost stories, and for the most part, ghosts are jealous monsters, intent upon our destruction. They never appear overtly here, yet we gradually become aware of the spirits in haunted houses in the way they tread over creaky floors, slam doors, and issue sudden gusts of wind. These poems are Koan-like—the fewer the words, the more charged they are. The engine driving the sense of haunting and loss is money, which Adam O. Davis describes as “federal bone” boiling around us. Bison in Nebraska are reduced to bones, “seven/standing men/tall” fodder for the fertilizer used by farmers in the 1800s. There is, too, an equality to the hauntings—every instance has its moment, and persists, despite being in the past, present, or future. Index of Haunted Houses is spooky and sad—a stunning debut, one that will surprise, convince, and most of all, delight.
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Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," a new, unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.
Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.
Wednesday Jul 29, 2020
SKYLIT: Ahrm Choi Wild & Muriel Leung
Wednesday Jul 29, 2020
Wednesday Jul 29, 2020
Join us for a conversation with poets Ahrm Choi Wild and Muriel Leung!
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Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," a new, unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.
Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.
Friday Jun 19, 2020
LIVE ON ZOOM: Charles Flowers, "THE IDEA OF HIM" w/ Blas Falconer
Friday Jun 19, 2020
Friday Jun 19, 2020
"Charles Flowers' long-awaited collection, The Idea of Him, evokes the implacable power of desire, from its earliest appearance in boyhood to the ache of adult experience. These wrenchingly honest, beautifully felt poems make clear nothing less than the soul hunger that lies deep in the body's dreams."—Joan Larkin
Flowers is in conversation with Blas Falconer, the author of Forgive the Body This Failure, The Foundling Wheel, A Question of Gravity and Light, and The Perfect Hour.
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Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," a new, unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.
Monday Jun 15, 2020
Tess Taylor, "RIFT ZONE" w/ Stephanie Danler
Monday Jun 15, 2020
Monday Jun 15, 2020
Tess Taylor’s previous book of poetry, Work & Days, was named one of the best books of poetry of 2016 by the New York Times. Now, with her extraordinary new collection, Rift Zone, Taylor presents her most powerful and timely work yet. Rift Zone shows a critically acclaimed poet—known to many as the on-air Poetry Reviewer for NPR’s “All Things Considered”—at work on a one-of-a-kind endeavor, mapping a California and a country at the brink. Addressing issues of gun violence, homelessness, and climate change, Taylor reveals the fault lines, literal and figurative, in her Northern California hometown and our country as a whole. At the same time, Rift Zone is a deeply intimate and tender book about parenting, specifically about becoming a parent in a fraught time.
Taylor is in conversation with novelist, memoirist, and screenwriter Stephanie Danler.
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Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," a new, unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.
Monday Jun 08, 2020
LIVE ON ZOOM: Tin House Poetry Night
Monday Jun 08, 2020
Monday Jun 08, 2020
Join us for the best reading in all of time and space, featuring the poets of Tin House: Jenny Zhang, Tommy Pico, Morgan Parker and Khadijah Queen!
Find their works on the Event Page, here.
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Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," a new, unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.
Wednesday Apr 01, 2020
Porsha Olayiwola, "I SHIMMER SOMETIMES, TOO"
Wednesday Apr 01, 2020
Wednesday Apr 01, 2020
Porsha Olayiwola is from the future! Black, poet, queer-dyke, hip-hop feminist, womanist: Porsha is a native of Chicago who now resides in Boston. Olayiwola is a writer, performer, educator and curator who uses afro-futurism and surrealism to examine historical and current issues in the Black, woman, and queer diasporas. She is an Individual World Poetry Slam Champion and the artistic director at MassLEAP, a literary youth organization. Olayiwola is an MFA Candidate at Emerson College and is the current poet laureate for the city of Boston.
Her debut poetry collection soars with the power and presence of live performance. These poems dip their hands deep into the fabric of black womanhood, pulling out all of its threads. This book establishes Porsha O firmly in the lineage of black queer poetics, pulling equally from Audre Lorde and Danez Smith. This is a book of gentle breaking and inventive reconstruction. This is a book of self-care, and community-care--the pursuit of building a world that will keep you alive.
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.