Lindy West reads at Writers With Drinks

Lindy West (Shrill) leads an all-star lineup of feminists, poets, visionaries, dystopian creators and comedians. This is going to be epic!

When: Saturday, May 13, 2017 from 7:30 PM to 9:30 PM, doors open 6:30 PM
Who: Lindy West, Julia Vinograd, Zahra Noorbaksh, George Higgins and Meg Elison
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:

Lindy West is a columnist at The Guardian, a contributor to This American Life, and a freelance writer whose work focuses on feminism, social justice, humor, and body image. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Cosmopolitan, GQ, Vulture, Jezebel, The Stranger, and others. She is the founder of I Believe You, It's Not Your Fault, an advice blog for teens, as well as the reproductive rights destigmatization campaign #ShoutYourAbortion. Her first book, a memoir called Shrill, is out now from Hachette Books.

Julia Vinograd is a Berkeley street poet and the unofficial Poet Laureate of Berkeley. She has published 50 books of poetry, and won the American Book Award of The Before Columbus Foundation. She has three poetry CD collections: Bubbles and Bones, Eye of the Hand, and The Book Of Jerusalem. She received a BA. from the University of California at Berkeley and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. She received the 2004 Poetry Lifetime Achievement Award from the City of Berkeley. She won a Pushcart Prize for her poem “The Young Men Who Died of AIDS”. She was one of the four editors of the anthology New American Underground Poetry Vol. 1: The Babarians of San Francisco— Poets from Hell.

Zahra Noorbakhsh is a Feminist Muslim, Iranian-American comedian and cohost of the award winning podcast, #GoodMuslimBadMuslim. The podcast was recently invited to record at the White House and featured in Oprah Magazine. Her one woman show, "All Atheists are Muslim: a romantic comedy" was dubbed a highlight of the Int'l New York City Fringe Theater Festival by The New Yorker. Noorbakhsh is a contributor to The New York Times Featured anthology, Love Inshallah: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women. As a comedian, she has performed with renowned comics, such as W. Kamau Bell, Hari Kondabolu, and Maz Jobrani. Last summer, she was invited to the Sundance Creative Change retreat to workshop her comedy special, "On Behalf of All Muslims," which will debut at the Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California, Oakland, where Noorbakhsh is an artist in residence. She is also a member of the San Francisco Writer's Grotto.

George Higgins has been a public defender in Oakland, California for the past 26 years. He received a J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School where he studied with Robert Hayden and an M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College where he was a Holden Fellow. His first published poem, a villanelle, was selected for Best American Poetry 2003 by Yusef Komunyakaa. Other poems have appeared in Fugue, Lungfull, Nimrod, Pleiades, and Salamander. George is presently a Cave Canem Fellow.

Meg Elison is a Bay Area author and essayist. Her debut novel The Book of the Unnamed Midwife won the 2014 Philip K. Dick Award and was listed as a Tiptree Committee Recommendation. Her second novel, The Book of Etta, will be published in spring 2017 by 47North. Her work has appeared in The Establishment, Liquid Imagination, Compelling Science Fiction, Everyday Feminism, and many other places online and in print. She writes like she's running out of time and lives in Oakland.

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.