Anthony Swofford and Raj Patel at Writers With Drinks

San Francisco's longest-running spoken word variety show is back, with quite possibly our biggest lineup yet!

When: Saturday, June 9, 2012, 7:30 to 9:30 PM, doors open at 6:30 PM
Who: Anthony Swofford, Geeta Dayal, Vanessa Veselka, David Moles and Raj Patel!
Where: The Make Out Room, 3225 22nd. St., San Francisco
How much: $5 to $10 sliding scale, all proceeds benefit the CSC.

About the readers/performers:

Anthony Swofford's books include Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails: A Memoir, Exit A, and Jarhead. Swofford served in a U.S. Marine Corps Surveillance and Target Acquisition/Scout-Sniper platoon during the Gulf War. After the war, he was educated at American River College; the University of California, Davis; and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has taught at the University of Iowa and Lewis and Clark College. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times, Harper's, Men's Journal, The Iowa Review, and other publications. A Michener-Copernicus Fellowship recipient, he lives in New York.

Geeta Dayal is a staff writer at Wired.com, specializing in culture reporting. She's also the author of Another Green World, a recent book on Brian Eno. She is the recent recipient of a major grant from Creative Capital | The Andy Warhol Foundation in the Arts Writers Program. She has written over 150 articles and reviews for major publications, including Frieze, Bookforum, The Wire, The Village Voice, The New York Times, The International Herald-Tribune, Print, Wired, Rhizome, and many more. Her essays appear in several anthologies on music, including The New Grove Dictionary of Music (Oxford, 2011), Loops (Faber & Faber, 2009), The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson (Zer0, 2009), The Pitchfork 500 (Simon & Schuster, 2008) and Marooned (Da Capo, 2007). She has taught several courses as a lecturer in new media and journalism at the University of California – Berkeley, Fordham University, and the State University of New York.

Raj Patel's first book was Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, and his latest, The Value of Nothing, is a New York Times best-seller. He’s currently a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for African Studies, an Honorary Research Fellow at the School of Development Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and a fellow at The Institute for Food and Development Policy, also known as Food First. He is currently an IATP Food and Community Fellow. He has testified about the causes of the global food crisis to the US House Financial Services Committee and is an Advisor to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. In addition to numerous scholarly publications, he regularly writes for The Guardian, and has contributed to the LA Times, NYTimes.com, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Mail on Sunday, and The Observer.

Vanessa Veselka is the author of Zazen. She has been, at various times, a teenage runaway, a sex-worker, a union organizer, a student of paleontology, an expatriate, an independent record label owner, a train-hopper, a waitress, and a mother. Her work has appeared in Arthur, Bust, Bitch, Maximum Rock ’n’ Roll, and elsewhere.

David Moles was a finalist for the 2005 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. His novelette “Finisterra” won the 2008 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and was a finalist for the 2008 Hugo Award. His fiction and poetry have been published in Polyphony, Say…, Rabid Transit, Flytrap, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Asimov’s, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, as well as on Strange Horizons. He co-edited All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories with Jay Lake and the World Fantasy Award–nominated Twenty Epics with Susan Marie Groppi.


About Writers With Drinks:

Writers With Drinks won "Best Literary Night" from the SF Bay Guardian readers' poll six years in a row and was named "Best Literary Drinking" by the SF Weekly. And it was namechecked in Armistead Maupin's latest Tales of the City novel. The spoken word "variety show" mixes genres to raise money for local worthy causes. The award-winning show includes poetry, stand-up comedy, science fiction, fantasy, romance, mystery, literary fiction, erotica, memoir, zines and blogs in a freewheeling format.