Writers With Drinks featuring Devorah Major, Celeste Chan & Margaret Rhee!

October's Writers With Drinks has a theme of STRANGE ROMANCE. Featuring mind-opening speculative fiction, robot poetry, almost-human spoken word, and tons more!

When: Saturday, Oct. 21, 2017 from 7:30 PM to 9:30 PM, doors open 6:30 PM
Who: devorah major, Celeste Chan, Shawna Kenney, Christopher Brown, Thomas Centolella and Margaret Rhee!
How much: $5 to $20, all proceeds benefit the Center for Sex & Culture
Where: The Make Out Room, 3225 22nd. St., San Francisco, CA

About the readers/performers:

devorah major is the author of an upcoming science fiction novel called Ice Journeys. San Francisco’s third former Poet Laureate, major is a part-time senior adjunct professor at California College of the Arts, and poet-in-residence of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Her first novel, An Open Weave, was awarded the First Novelist Award by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Curbstone Press released her second novel (which includes poetry), Brown Glass Windows to critical acclaim. City Lights Publishing released another book of major’s poetry, where river meets ocean, and Creative Arts Books, Inc. released her third solo book of poetry, with more than tongue. She is the recipient of a 2002 California Arts Council Spoken Word Literary Arts Fellowship. For over twenty years she has been a part of Daughters of Yam (a poetry performance group with Opal Palmer Adisa) which has released one book, two chapbooks, one poetry and jazz cassette and one poetry and jazz CD. major's poems and short stories, and essays have been published in a number of anthologies including: So Long Been Dreaming: Post-Colonial Science Fiction, Mojo: Conjurer Tales, Drum Voices Review, So Much Thing to Say, Heartspeak, Saints of Hysteria, 100 Poets Against the War, So Luminous the Wildflowers, Rites of Passage, Black Silk, Bum Rush the Page: Def Poetry Jam, Girls Like Us, Father Songs, Streetlights: Urban Stories of the Black Experience, Thoughts to Savor, I Hear A Symphony, Poetry Like Bread, and many magazines and journals including ZYZZYVA, Callaloo, and River Styx. She has received Pushcart recognition for her short story/poem, "A Crowded Table". She has also written two “Start to Finish” history books for young people: Rosa Parks: Freedom Fighter and Frederick Douglas: A Hero for All Times (1999).

Celeste Chan is a Hedgebrook, Lambda, and VONA fellow, and recent Sister Spit alum. Her writing can be found in Ada, AWAY, Citron Review, cream city review’s genrequeer folio, Feminist Wire, Hyphen, Mixed Race/Queer and Feminist, and The Rumpus. She also has work in the anthologies Writing the Walls Down: A Convergence of LGBT Voices, and Glitter & Grit: Queer Performance from Heels on Wheels. She co-founded Queer Rebels, a queer and trans people of color arts project, and is a contributing editor for Foglifter, a new literary journal of queer form & content.

Shawna Kenney is the author of the award-winning memoir I Was a Teenage Dominatrix, editor of the anthology Book Lovers: Sexy Stories from Under the Covers, co-author of Imposters, and co-author of the new oral history Live at the Safari Club: A History of HarDCore Punk in the Nation’s Capital 1988-1998. Her nonfiction work has appeared in The New York Times, Playboy, Creative Nonfiction, Vice, The Rumpus, Bust, Narratively, Salon and more. Kenney’s personal essays appear in numerous anthologies and she has shared her words on college campuses and airwaves around the world.

Christopher Brown's first novel is Tropic of Kansas. He was nominated for a World Fantasy Award for the anthology Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic. His short fiction has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including MIT Technology Review’s Twelve Tomorrows, The Baffler, and Reckoning.

Thomas Centolella is the author of four books of poetry: Terra Firma (1990), Lights & Mysteries (1995), Views from along the Middle Way (2002), and Almost Human (2017). He has received the Lannan Literary Award, the American Book Award, the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, and was selected for publication in the National Poetry Series (selected by Denise Levertov). He is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University, and his work has appeared in many periodicals and anthologies and on Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac.

Margaret Rhee is a poet, artist, and scholar. She is the author of chapbooks Yellow (Tinfish Press, 2011) and Radio Heart; or, How Robots Fall Out of Love (Finishing Line Press, 2015), awarded a 2017 Elgin Award, second place by the Science Fiction Poetry Association. Her project The Kimchi Poetry Machine was selected for the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 3. Literary fellowships include Kundiman, Hedgebrook, and the Kathy Acker Fellowship. She received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in ethnic and new media studies. She is at work completing her monograph, How We Became Human: Race, Robots, and the Asian American Body. Currently, she is a Visiting Scholar at the NYU A/P/A Institute, and a Visiting Assistant Professor at SUNY Buffalo in the Department of Media Study.​

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.