Jane McGonigal at Writers With Drinks

Writers With Drinks is back after taking July off -- and we're hitting twice as hard to make up for the hiatus!

When: Saturday, August 11, 2012, 7:30 to 9:30 PM
Who: Jane McGonigal, Saqib Mausoof, Rachel Swirsky, Javier Zamora, and Simon Sheppard!
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:

Jane McGonigal, PhD is a world-renowned designer of alternate reality games. She is the New York Times bestselling author of Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (Penguin Press, 2011) — and currently serves as the Creative Director for Social Chocolate, where she is making games powered by the science of positive emotion and social connection.She is the Director of Games Research & Development at the Institute for the Future, a non-profit research group in Palo Alto, California. She is also the founder of Gameful, “a secret headquarters for worldchanging game developers.” She's ranked at #16 out of the top 20 most engaging TED talks, and frequently appears on lists of the top innovators to watch and top creative people in business.

Saqib Mausoof is a Pakistani-American filmmaker. His narrative, Kala Pul - The Black Bridge, a topical thriller shot on Super 16 in Karachi, was short listed at the Asian Festival of First Films and won Best Short at New Jersey Independent Cinefest. He is raising funds on Kickstarter to make a movie called In Search of Meluhha: The Story of Mohenjodaro.

Rachel Swirsky’s short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, PANK, the Konundrum Engine Literary Review, the New Haven Review, Weird Tales, Fantasy Magazine, and Subterranean Magazine, among others, and been collected in Year’s Best anthologies edited by Rich Horton, Jonathan Strahan, and the VanderMeers. She was the founding editor of Podcastle, an audio fantasy magazine. Her novella "The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window" won the 2010 Nebula Award, and was nominated for the Hugo and World Fantasy awards. Her novella "A Memory of Wind" was a finalist for the 2009 Nebula Awards ballot. Her novelette "Eros, Philia, Agape," was nominated for the Hugo, as well as the Theodore Sturgeon Award, the Locus Award, the storySouth Million Writers Award, and the Tiptree Award. And most recently, her novelette "Fields of Gold" has been nominated for the Hugo and Nebula awards.

Javier Zamora was born in La Herradura, La Paz, El Salvador. At the age of nine he immigrated to the Yunaited Estais. His chapbook, Nine Immigrant Years, is the winner of the 2011 Organic Weapon Arts Chapbook Contest. Zamora is a CantoMundo fellow and a Breadloaf work-study scholarship recipient. He has received scholarships from Frost Place, Napa Valley, Squaw Valley, and VONA. His poems appear or are forthcoming in DirtyLaundry, NewBorder, Phat’titude, The Homestead Review, The Poetry Show, Spillway Magazine, among other journals. He will attend NYU’s MFA program in Fall 2012.

Proclaimed “our erotica king” by San Francisco magazine, Simon Sheppard is the editor of Homosex: 60 Years of Gay Erotica, winner of the Lambda Literary Award, and the author of Hotter Than Hell and Other Stories, which won the Erotic Authors Association award. His other books include In Deep, Sex Parties 101, and Kinkorama: Dispatches From the Front Lines of Perversion. His work has also been published in over 300 anthologies, including five editions of The Best American Erotica and a record number of appearances in the Best Gay Erotica series.

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.