Events

 WORDS & PIZZA: Game Night at The Booksmith 7:00 - 9:00$10 (includes drinks!)  Our favorite local writers, journalists, friends, and you...duke it out over rounds of quick, challenging, crazy word games.   Our dynamic teams battle it out with their well-chosen guest team members joined by randomly chosen audience members, all emceed by Amy (Bookswap) Stephenson.   Audience and featured team members vie for points; correct (and sometimes wildly offbase) answers win the point; incorrect answers earn the laughs.   Good drinks, great pizza, book raffle, coupons, and hilarity for all who join the wordy merriment!     August 14 teams!   LEXICAL LEMURS: Pireeni Sundaralingam, Ken Grobe, and Peter Orner!  * Late news: alas, Peter Orner can't be with us this evening. His valiant sub will be Don Menn* TEAM C Elgy Gillespie, Faith Adiele, and Casey Childers!   Tickets must be purchased in advance, in the store or at Brown Paper Tickets online or 800-8368-3006. $10 tickets include drinks; great Club Deluxe pizza available for small additional charge during the games!   The original Obama, Faith Adiele is the author of Meeting Faith, a memoir about becoming Thailand’s first black Buddhist nun, which received the PEN Beyond Margins Award for Best Memoir; writer/narrator/subject of My Journey Home (PBS), a documentary film about growing up with a Nordic-American mother and then traveling to Nigeria as an adult to find her father and siblings; and editor of the international anthology, Coming of Age Around the World.  Named as one of Marie Claire magazine’s “5 Women to Learn From,” Adiele, who was educated at Harvard University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, has been featured on NPR; in a pilot for a new reality show; in a national television ad; on the Tavis Smiley show; and in “A Day in the Life of Faith Adiele” (a 2-page center spread in Pink Magazine). A contributor to O: The Oprah Magazine, Essence, and Transition, Adiele is Associate Professor at California College of the Arts and currently serves as the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Mills College in Oakland, where she is completing Twins, a memoir that will complete the story begun in the PBS film.  Casey A. Childers authored the novel Bear Season and a collection of soon-to-be-released short fiction called Beautiful Days are Wasted on Ugly People. He co-founded the Bay's premiere philanthropic competitive-reading series, WRITE CLUB San Francisco, and co-hosts the semi-weekly podcast of the same name. His work can be found on iTunes as well as live on the stage of The Make-Out Room on the third Tuesday of every month.   Elgy Gillespie is a teacher and writer and seasoned traveler living in San Francisco's Mission, with a dozen guidebooks and cookbooks under her belt, from You Say Potato’ to good food guides and books about her former habitats in Ireland and Latin America. She teaches immigrants to San Francisco in the Chinatown and Southeast campuses and reviews movies for CultureVulture.net.   Ken Grobe has tackled his writing career with the verve and focus of a moth ina lamp store. He has edited graphic novel adaptations based on classic worksfrom Ray Bradbury, Raymond Chandler, and Douglas Adams. As an author,he's published short stories and comic books. As a journalist, he's contributedto national publications and co-founded Want Magazine, an online publication dedicated to the art of User Experience design. He's also an award-winningadvertising writer and creates sketches and videos for SF comedy stalwarts Killing My Lobster. But he always has time for you. You know that. Don Menn  was editor-in-chief of Guitar Player magazine and Multimedia World; freelanced for Harper's, San Francisco Magazine, The San Jose Mercury News, The San Francisco Chronicle, etc.; wrote liner notes for Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa; edited more books than he bothered to count; and helped launch several periodicals (distributed in seventy countries) for which he won numerous publishing awards, His poetry and fiction has appeared in a variety of literary titles, and he oversees Xpress, one of the first, student-produced iPad magazines. He also teaches a dozen different courses in the journalism and creative-writing departments at San Francisco State. Peter Orner's stories have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, McSweeney's, Bomb, The Best American Short Stories, and The Pushcart Prize XXV. He has lived in Namibia and currently teaches writing at San Francisco State University. His books include Love and Shame and Love, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, Hope Deferred, and Underground America.   Pireeni Sundaralingam has held national fellowships both in cognitive science and in poetry. She is co-editor of Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry, winner of both the 2011 N. California Book Award and the PEN Oakland 2011 National Book Award. Her own poetry has been published in journals such as Ploughshares and The Progressive, and in a variety of anthologies. Sundaralingam has spoken on the intersections between poetry and the brain at MOMA (New York), the deYoung Fine Arts Museum, and the Exploratorium.