Writers With Drinks: Juba Kalamka, Meredith May and Alexandra Marzano-Lesnevich!

September's Writers With Drinks is packed with murder and memoir, clockwork empires, hella queer poetry, beautiful wartime stories, and much more!

When: Saturday, Sept. 9, 2017 from 7:30 PM to 9:30 PM, doors open 6:30 PM
Who: Alexandra Marzano-Lesnevich, Juba Kalamka, Meredith May, Natasha Dennerstein and Daniel H. Wilson!
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:

Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich is the author of The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir, named an Indie Next Pick; one of the most anticipated books of 2017 by Buzzfeed, BookRiot, and the Huffington Post; a must-read for May by Goodreads, Audible.com, Entertainment Weekly, Real Simple and People; long-listed for the Gordon Burn Prize and a finalist for a New England Book Award; and one of the 10 best books of the year so far by Entertainment Weekly, Audible.com, and BookRiot. Marzano-Lesnevich is the recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, and Yaddo, and a Rona Jaffe Award.

Natasha Dennerstein is the author of two poetry collections, Triptych Caliform and Anatomize. Dennerstein has had poetry published in Fourth Floor, Landfall, Snorkel, JAAM, Takahe, Bloom, Transfer and Red Light Lit, Foglifter, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Sparkle+Blink. She's currently on the editorial team of Nomadic Press in Oakland.

Bisexual artist/activist Juba Kalamka is the author of a forthcoming poetry collection, Son of Byford, and also plans to release a new solo album, Jig School Confidential. He been recognized for his more recent work with queer POC performance troupes Sins Invalid and Mangos with Chili, as a member of “homohop” group Rainbow Flava, as co-founder/producer of Deep Dickollective (D/DC) and creator of the micro-label @Sugartruck Recordings. He has written and for Kitchen Sink, Anything That Moves and Carnal Nation, and served six years as a music columnist, book reviewer and feature writer for Colorlines Magazine. He received a 2005 Creating Change Conference award from the National LGBTQ Task Force for his activist work in queer music community. He was one of 30 activists selected to attend the White House Bisexual Community Briefing on Public Policy in September 2015.

Meredith May is an award-winning journalist and the author of I, Who Did Not Die, which tells the true story of a 13-year-old Iranian child soldier who secretly nursed an enemy fighter back to life during the brutal Iran-Iraq War. May teaches podcasting at Mills College in Oakland, and is a fifth-generation beekeeper. She spent 16 years as a feature writer at the San Francisco Chronicle. Her 2004 newspaper series about a war-wounded Iraqi boy won the PEN USA Literary Award for Journalism and the Pulitzer Prize for photography; and her 2006 sex trafficking investigation earned first place feature writing awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Associated Press, and was turned into a graphic novel by Stanford University. Her writing is included in the book, Best Newspaper Writing 2005, published by the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

Daniel H. Wilson's latest book is The Clockwork Dynasty. A Cherokee citizen, Wilson is the author of the New York Times bestselling Robopocalypse and its sequel Robogenesis, as well as seven other books, including How to Survive a Robot Uprising, A Boy and His Bot, and Amped. He earned a PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University, as well as Masters degrees in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics.



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.