Writers With Drinks with Diane Cook, Pagan Kennedy & Charlie Jane Anders

This month at Writers With Drinks, former This American Life producer Diane Cook reads from Man V. Nature, and WWD host Charlie Jane Anders reads her own novel!

When: Feb. 13 from 7:30 PM to 9:30 PM, doors open 6:30 PM
Who: Diane Cook, Pagan Kennedy, Judy Budnitz, Meredith Maran, Tongo Eisen-Martin, and Charlie Jane Anders!
How much: $5 to $20, all proceeds benefit the CSC
Where: The Make Out Room, 3225 22nd. St., San Francisco, CA

About the readers/performers:

Judy Budnitz has written one novel, If I Told You Once, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. And two short story collections, Flying Leap and Nice Big American Baby.

Diane Cook is the author of the story collection Man V. Nature, and was formerly a producer for the radio show, This American Life. Man V. Nature was a finalist for the Believer Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, received Honorable Mention for the PEN/Hemingway award, and was recently longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. Her stories have appeared in Harper’s, Tin House, Granta, and elsewhere and anthologized in Best American Short Stories.

Meredith Maran is the editor of Why We Write About Ourselves: 20 Memoirists on Why They Expose Themselves (and Others) in the Name of Literature. She also edited Why We Write: 20 Acclaimed Authors on How and Why They Do What They Do. Her other books include A Theory of Small Earthquakes, My Lie: A Story of False Memory, 50 Ways to Support Gay and Lesbian Equality, Dirty, Enough About You, Class Dismissed and Notes From An Incomplete Revolution. She's a National Book Critics Circle and the MacDowell Fellows West, who writes features, essays, and book reviews for People, Salon, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Real Simple, Mother Jones, Good Housekeeping, and other publications.

Pagan Kennedy's new book is Inventology: How We Dream Up Things That Change The World. Her other books are The First Man-Made Man, Black Livingstone, Spinsters, The Exes, Confessions of a Memory Eater, 'Zine, Stripping and Other Stories, and The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories. She was the Innovation columnist for the New York Times Magazine. She has received a Smithsonian fellowship, a Massachusetts Book Prize honor in nonfiction, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship.

Tongo Eisen-Martin is the author of someone's dead already, a poetry collection. He has educated in detention centers from New York's Rikers Island to California's San Quentin State Prison. His work in Rikers Island was featured in the New York Times. He was also adjunct faculty at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University in New York. Subscribing to the Freirian model of education, he designed curricula for oppressed people's education projects from San Francisco to South Africa. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country.

Charlie Jane Anders has been organizing Writers With Drinks since 2001. She's the author of a new novel called All the Birds in the Sky. She's the editor of io9, a website about science fiction and futurism. Her stories have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Tor.com, Lightspeed, Tin House, ZYZZYVA, and several anthologies. Her novelette “Six Months, Three Days” won a Hugo award.


About Writers With Drinks:

Writers With Drinks has won numerous "Best ofs" from local newspapers, and has been mentioned in 7x7, Spin Magazine and one of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City novels. The spoken word "variety show" mixes genres to raise money for local 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.