Lone Glen

On Sunday, 14 March at 4 pm PST, the Lone Glen series will feature an afternoon of poetry and activism with Tongo Eisen-Martin, Sara Mumolo, and Jive Poetic. Join us on zoom, where Noah Sanders of The Racket series will DJ a few tunes to open and close the reading! This is the second Lone Glen of the season, and our 30th event of the last nine years. 
Lone Glen is a quarterly reading and performance series dedicated to fostering all writing and art genres within a spirit of collaborative, down-to-earth, and inclusive creative community.  

Launched in December 2011 in an apartment in the Mission District of San Francisco, Lone Glen was later an Oakland basement operation for several years before taking root at the Temescal Art Center in Oakland and The Bindery in San Francisco. Although on hiatus for nearly a year due to pandemic constraints, we are back on track to host several virtual events in 2011. 

About the writers:
Tongo Eisen-MartinOriginally from San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin is a poet, movement worker, and educator. 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. His book titled, “Someone’s Dead Already” was nominated for a California Book Award. His latest book “Heaven Is All Goodbyes” was published by the City Lights Pocket Poets series, was shortlisted for the Griffins Poetry Prize and won a California Book Award and an American Book Award. His forthcoming book “Blood On The Fog” is being released this fall in the City Lights Pocket Poets series. He is San Francisco’s eighth poet laureate.

Sara MumoloSara Mumolo is the author of Day Counter (Omnidawn, 2018) and Mortar (Omnidawn, 2013). She serves as the Associate Director for the MFA in Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s College of CA. Poems have appeared in Lana Turner, PEN Poetry Series, Pleiades, San Francisco Chronicle, The Millions, and Zyzzyva, among others. She has received residencies to Vermont Studio Center, Caldera Center for the Arts, and has served as a curatorial resident at Pro Arts Gallery in Oakland, CA. Mumolo is the recipient of a 2021 Poetry and the Senses Fellowship from UC Berkeley’s Arts Research Center.

Jive Poetic Jive Poetic is a writer, organizer, and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. In 2017, he was the first recipient of the John Morning Award for Art and Service. Jive is the founder of Insurgent Poets Society, Carnival Slam: Cultural Exchange, and the co-founder of the Brooklyn Poetry Slam. His work has been showcased on season four of TVONE’s Lexus Verses and Flow, PBS NewsHour, and BET. International recognition for his work has come from the British Arts Council; the Minister of Culture for Antigua and Barbuda; and US Embassies in Australia, Brazil, and Poland.

Lone Glen : Triple Launch 

On Sunday, 31st January at 4 pm PST, Lone Glen celebrates three wonderful writers and their new books. Join us on zoom for an hour of poetry and prose! Meredith Clark, Arisa White, and Maw Shein Win will read from their latest poetry and/or prose in a “round” style event, and Noah Sanders of The Racket series will DJ a few tunes. 

Join zoom here: Meeting ID: 916 3104 2978; Passcode: 573574

“To live freely, observantly as a politically astute, sensually perceptive Queer Black woman is to be risk taker, at risk, a perceived danger to others and even dangerous to/as oneself,” writes the poet Tracie Morris of Arisa White’s You’re The Most Beautiful Thing That Happened. White’s upcoming book, Who’s Your Daddy, is now available for preorder at Augury Books! Terrance Hayes confides that in this poetic memoir, “What she gives us are archives, allegories, and wholly new songs.”

Meredith Clark’s recently released Lyrebird (Platypus Press) is a fragmented documentation of “a miscarriage and the chronicle of the dissolution of a relationship—a moving discovery on how it is possible to approach a thing with tenderness and still watch it break.” Writer Jenny Boully describes how “LYREBIRD slowly circles its heartbreak through understatement, poetic revelation, imagistic accord. It . . . knows there is no way to write what cannot be undone.”

Maw Shein Win’s Storage Unit for the Spirit House“takes as its literal subject compartments, vessels, and spaces, such as storage units, vases, tombs, towers and hallways. The objects they house … represent moments of necessary stillness in a world where achieving stillness, or self-reflection, seems almost impossible” (Eve Wood, LA Review of Books). Amanda Moore describes “The poems [as] tight, condensed, and without digression . . . the result is transporting.”

Lone Glen is a quarterly reading and performance series dedicated to fostering all writing and art genres within a spirit of collaborative, down-to-earth, and inclusive creative community.  Launched in December 2011 in an apartment in the Mission District of San Francisco, Lone Glen was later an Oakland basement operation for several years before taking root at the Temescal Art Center in Oakland and The Bindery in San Francisco. Although on hiatus for nearly a year due to pandemic constraints, we are back on track to host several virtual events in 2011. 

About the writers

Meredith Clark is a poet and writer whose work has received Black Warrior Review’s nonfiction prize and the Sonora Review nonfiction prize. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Phoebe, Gigantic Sequins, Denver Quarterly, Berkeley Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a B.A. in creative writing from Oberlin College, and is the recipient of grants and residencies from Artist Trust, Art Farm Nebraska, Jack Straw, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her book, Lyrebird, is out now with Platypus Press.

Maw Shein Win is the first poet laureate of El Cerrito (2016 – 2018). Her full-length poetry collection is Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn, 2020), which is longlisted for the 2021 PEN America Open Book Award. She often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers and is a Spring 2021 ARC Poetry Fellow at UC Berkeley. mawsheinwin.com

Arisa White is a Cave Canem fellow and an assistant professor of creative writing at Colby College. She is the author of You’re the Most Beautiful Thing That Happenedand co-author of the middle-grade biography Biddy Mason Speaks Up. Forthcoming in March 2021 from Augury Books is her poetic memoir Who’s Your Daddy. Arisa serves on the board of directors for Foglifter and Nomadic Press. arisawhite.com

Please join us at 7 pm on Tuesday, February 25th for a night of poetry revelry at The Bindery in San Francisco. The Lone Glen series will celebrate the beginning of its ninth year with Apogee Press, featuring poets Elizabeth Robinson, Barbara Tomash, Laura Walker, and Edward Smallfield, who is also launching his latest book, to whom it may concern. Whereas Smallfield explores the “lyric meditation, [where] eros and erasure alternately fuse and efface until erasure becomes manifestation . . .”, Walker assures us that narrative is “a music to live by”, Tomash reminds us that “every word was once a poem”, and Robinson allows us to “revel in the slippery meanings of common words as they pour through the security perimeters.” We look forward to witnessing each of these poets pour through their works and invite you to share their words with us.

About the series:

Lone Glen, now in its ninth year, is a quarterly art-centric reading and performance series dedicated to creating a down-to-earth, inclusive space among writers and artists of all genres. Suggested donation for this reading is $5-$10 but no one will be turned away for lack of funds.

About the Venue:

The Bindery, an outcrop of The Booksmith, is a magical bookstore/event space with a beer, wine and cocktail bar, located at 1727 Haight Street. The Bindery is wheelchair accessible.

About the poets:

ELIZABETH ROBINSON is the author, most recently, of Rumor (Parlor Press/Free Verse Editions) and Blue Heron (Center for Literary Publishing).  Her nonfiction essays have appeared recently in Conjunctions and Scoundrel Time.  Robinson has received grants from the Fund for Poetry, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the Maison Dora Maar.  With Jennifer Phelps, she co-edited the critical anthology Quo Anima: innovation and spirituality in contemporary women’s poetry, published by University of Akron Press in 2019.

EDWARD SMALLFIELD is the author of to whom it may concern, equinox, The Pleasures of C, and americana. He is also the author of several collaborative projects, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (with Doug MacPherson), locate (with Miriam Pirone), and lirio and anonymous (both with Valerie Coulton). His poems have appeared in Barcelona INK, Denver Quarterly, e-poema.eu, Five Fingers Review, New American Writing, Páginas Rojas, Parthenon West Review, 26, and many other magazines and websites. He has participated in poetry conferences in Delphi, Paou, Paros, and Sofia, and lives in Barcelona with his wife, the poet Valerie Coulton.

BARBARA TOMASH is the author of four books of poetry: PRE- (Black Radish Books 2018), Arboreal (Apogee 2014), The Secret of White (Spuyten Duyvil 2009), and Flying in Water, winner of the 2005 Winnow First Poetry Award. An earlier version of PRE- was a finalist for the Colorado Prize and the Rescue Press Black Box Poetry Prize. Before her creative interests turned her toward writing she worked extensively as a multimedia artist. Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Web Conjunctions, New American Writing, Verse, VOLT, OmniVerse, and numerous other journals. She lives in Berkeley, California, and teaches in the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University.

LAURA WALKER is the author of story (Apogee Press, 2016), Follow–Haswed (Apogee Press, 2012), bird book (Shearsman Books, 2011), rimertown/ an atlas (UC Press, 2008), and swarm lure (Battery Press, 2004). She grew up in rural North Carolina and now lives in Berkeley, CA, where she teaches creative writing. More information is available at laura-walker.com.

We are beyond thrilled to celebrate eight years of Lone Glen with Bay Area writers and artists Celeste Chan, Miah Jeffra, Kevin Killian, D.A. Powell, and Monica Tiulescu. Join us at Temescal Art Center in Oakland on Saturday, January 26^that 8:15 pm. This anniversary edition of Lone Glen will include cake and wine, as well as a chance for you to meet some new friends. Lone Glen is a quarterly (and sometimes bi-quarterly) reading, art, and performance series dedicated to collaboration and community, often with a focus on the multi-genre experience, and always with a down-to-earth vibe at its heart. In 2011 we held our first reading in our home in the Mission district and have since hosted over fifty local creators, including poets, fiction and nonfiction writers, filmmakers, visual artists, and musicians.

We are a donation-based series. $5-15 suggested donations will be taken at the door, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds.

Temescal Art Center is equipped with wide ramps leading to the entrance, and handrails in the restroom. Find TAC at 511 48th St, Oakland.

Featured Writers and Artists:

Celeste Chan is an artist, writer, educator, and organizer, schooled by DIY and immigrant parents from Malaysia and the Bronx. A Hedgebrook, Lambda, and VONA fellow, she creates, collaborates, and educates to amplify marginalized stories. From 2008-2018, she co-directed Queer Rebels, a queer and trans people of color arts project, and toured films to festivals in Austin, New York, Montreal, Berlin, and beyond. Her writing can be found in several journals, including cream city review, Feminist Wire, Gertrude, Hyphen, and The Rumpus. Celeste is a contributing editor for Foglifter Journal, coordinates Writing Rainbow: QTPOC FREE School, and serves as a Teaching Artist for the Queer Ancestors Project.

Miah Jeffra is author of the essay collection The First Church of What’s Happening (Nomadic Press 2017) and The Fabulous Ekphrastic Fantastic! (forthcoming Sibling Rivalry Press 2019). Awards include the New Millennium Prize for fiction, the Sidney Lanier Fiction Prize, The Atticus Review Creative Nonfiction Prize, the Alice Judson Hayes Fellowship, a Lambda Literary Fellowship, and finalist for the Prairie Schooner Book Prize. Residencies include Ragdale and The Hub City Writers Project. Recent publications include The North American Review, Fourteen Hills Review, The Nervous Breakdown and Fifth Wednesday. Miah is founding editor of queer literary collaborative, Foglifter Press.

Kevin Killian is a poet, novelist, art writer and playwright who has published twenty books: three novels, five books of poetry, three of short stories, and some unclassifiable mistakes.  His newest books include Stage Fright: Plays from the San Francisco Poets Theater (Kenning Editions); Fascination: Memoirs, edited by Andrew Durbin (Semiotexte); and Les elements, poems translated into French by Vincent Broqua, Olivier Brossard and Abigail Lang (Joca Seria). With Dodie Bellamy, Killian edited Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977-1997 (Nightboat Books) and with Kelly Holt he is collecting and editing the letters of the poet Jack Spicer (1925-1965).  A 2012 novel inspired the recent visual exhibition “Kevin Killian: Spreadeagle”at the Chicago gallery Iceberg Projects, in November and December 2018.

D.A. Powell’s books include Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys, Chronic and Repast (all published by Graywolf Press). He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as awards from the Academy of American Arts & Letters, the Poetry Society of America, the National Book Critics Circle and the Commonwealth Club of California. He teaches at University of San Francisco.

Monica Tiulescu

(bio forthcoming)

Lone Glen is thrilled to host Paul Hoover, Joseph Lease, and Chloé Veylit at Temescal Art Center on Saturday November 3^rd at 8 pm. The Body Ghost, Lease’s recent book, “conjures up the body in pain, the body politic in collapse, and the tensile strength of the filaments that connect us.” Hoover writes, “We eat our words and swallow hard. / There’s nothing much to say./ The knot’s in its nest, breathing./ A hand thinks it’s a bird”, and Veylit writes, “I have never died on a bridge / but I have held my breath / when the lake shovels its eyes out / I slip into myself.” Revel with us as we witness these sinews that connect and diverge.

Lone Glen, soon entering its eighth year, is a donation-based reading and performance series dedicated to all genres and motivated by a love of community building. $10-15 suggested donation but no one will be turned away for lack of funds.

About the Readers:

Paul Hoover has published sixteen books of poetry including The Book of Unnamed Things, Desolation:  Souvenir, Sonnet 56, Edge and Fold, and Poems in Spanish.  With Maxine Chernoff, he edited and translated Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin and with Nguyen Do the anthology Black Dog, Black Night:  Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry.  His translation of María Baranda’s Yegua nocturna corriendo en un prado de luz absoluta was published by Shearsman earlier this year.  Editor of Postmodern American Poetry:  A Norton Anthology and the literary annual New American Writing, he teaches in the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University.

Joseph Lease’s critically acclaimed books of poetry include The Body Ghost (Coffee House Press, 2018), Testify (Coffee House Press, 2011), and Broken World (Coffee House Press, 2007). Lease’s poems “‘Broken World’ (For James Assatly)” and “Send My Roots Rain” were anthologized in Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology. Lease’s poem “‘Broken World’ (For James Assatly)” was anthologized in The Best American Poetry (Robert Creeley, Guest Editor). His poem “Free Again (Why don’t people)” was published in The New York Times. Lease has received The Academy of American Poets Prize and numerous grants and awards in poetry and poetics from Columbia University, Brown University, Harvard University, and California College of the Arts. He is a Professor of Writing and Literature at California College of the Arts and the Editor of 1111.

Chloé Veylit has been published in VOLT, Second Stutter, Eleven Eleven, Aspasiology, and The North American Review, among others. Additionally, her work was featured in the 2016 exhibit Correspondencía (Correspondence), curated by Marcela Pardo Ariza, Nick Johnson, and Ángel Rafael Válzquez-Concepción. Chloé lives in Oakland.

LONE GLEN PRESENTS: Seedstarters: An Evening of Readings and Propagations

8 August, 7:30 pm, The Bindery, San Francisco 

Lone Glen is thrilled to present Seedstarters: An Evening of Readings and Propagations, guest curated by poet Genine Lentine. Join us on Wednesday August 8th at 7:30 pm at The Binderyin San Franciscoto celebrate Bidisha Banerjee, Emilie Lygren, and Lauren Shufran, who will be reading new writing and works-in-progress. Five to ten dollar donations will be taken at the door, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds. The Bindery, an outcrop of The Booksmith, is a magical bookstore/event space with a beer, wine and cocktail bar, located at 1727 Haight Street.

LONE GLENis a quarterly writing, art, and performance series dedicated to collaboration and community, now in its seventh year. Usually based in Oakland, we are happy to return to our birthplace in San Francisco for this special event.

About these seedstarting writers and artists:

BIDISHA BANERJEEis a sustainability innovator, embodied leadership coach, and author of Superhuman River: A Biography of the Ganga. It’s a multi-strand narrative about following the river over eight years from source to sea in an attempt to reconcile science and spirituality–or, at least, spot the elusive Ganges river dolphin. It’s due out from Aleph Books in New Delhi in 2018. Many thanks to loved ones, the Middlebury Environmental Journalism Fellowship, Triple Canopy, Hedgebrook, the Mesa Refuge, the Yerba Buena Arts Center’s Future Soul Think Tank, and Yale’s Tropical Resources Institute for supporting this work. Make a journaling date with her on Instagram @bidishaban, Twitter @bidishabanerjee, and LinkedIn.

EMILIE LYGRENis an educator, curriculum designer, and poet who delights in shaping learning experiences that connect people to one another and their surroundings. She is the co-author of several pieces of curriculum and books, including The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling and the forthcoming Nature Journal Teacher’s Guide. Her poems have been published in journals such as Askew, The English Leadership Quarterly, and The New South. Her writing practice and daily interactions are rooted in attention and curiosity.

LAUREN SHUFRANis a poet and the Lead Writer for Zoho Academy. Prior to working in software, she received a PhD in early modern British literature from UC Santa Cruz. Her book Inter Arma won the Motherwell Prize from Fence Books and was published in 2013. Since then, she’s been working on a translation of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass—a project she began as a Lambda Literary Fellow. She’s also recently been musing on two of her favorite things on Instagram, @shakespeare_and_mindfulness.

About the curator:

GENINE LENTINEis the author of Poses: An Essay Drawn from the Model, and the chapbooks, Archaeopteryx; Found Dharma Talks, and Mr. Worthington’s Beautiful Experiments on Splashes.  She is co-author with Stanley Kunitz and photographer, Marnie Crawford Samuelson, of The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden. She teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she also tends a meadow. www.geninelentine.com

Join us for our first Lone Glen of the season at 8 pm on Saturday, April 7th to celebrate the magnetic poetry of Maxine Chernoff, Michael Tod Edgerton, and Heather June Gibbons. Of Camera, Chernoff’s recent release from Subito press, Camille T. Dungy writes, “[These poems] are precise in just the way art is precise. They frame the word as a camera’s lens might frame a portion of what the eye might apprehend, adding a finely wrought filter of human feeling to the arbitrary world.” We’re thrilled to witness that frame, and to listen to charismatic Heather June Gibbons read from her debut book of poems, and to welcome poet Michael Tod Edgerton to the Bay Area.

About the writers:

Maxine Chernoff is the author of six works of fiction and 16 collections of poetry, most recently Camera (Subito) and Here (Counterpath). Winner an NEA in poetry and the PEN Translation Prize, she was a recent Visiting Writer at the American Academy in Rome.

Michael Tod Edgerton is the author of Vitreous Hide (Lavender Ink 2013). His poems have appeared previously as the winner of the Boston Review and Five Fingers Review contests, and in Coconut, Denver Quarterly, Drunken Boat, EOAGH, New American Writing, New Orleans Review, Sonora Review, and Word For/Word, among other journals. Tod holds an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University and a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Georgia. He lives with his husband, Greg, in San Francisco. You can check out Tod’s ongoing participatory text and sound project at WhatMostVividly.com.

Heather June Gibbons is the author of Her Mouth as Souvenir, winner of the 2017 Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize and forthcoming from the University of Utah Press, and the chapbooks Sore Songs and Flyover. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she teaches creative writing at San Francisco State University and in the community.

About the series:
Lone Glen, now in its seventh year, is a quarterly art-centric reading and performance series dedicated to creating a down-to-earth, inclusive space among writers and artists of all genres. Suggested donation for this reading is $5-$10 but no one will be turned away for lack of funds. Learn more about Lone Glen and our history at https://loneglen.wordpress.com/

About the Venue:

Temescal Art Center can be accessed via a wide ramp and its bathroom is equipped with hand rails.