Author: Evan Karp

Insularity might be the one thing San Francisco and writing communities generally have most in common. Once we belong, we have everything we need: a beautiful place with a rich culture, an audience to both support and inspire. But a shared insularity is just one of the things that might bring us together. Historian William Deverell and Read More

Four hundred authors walked into a bar, a police station, an art gallery, a Buddhist center, a cheese shop, a sex shop, a bowling alley. They joined thousands of other people – writers and drinkers, hipsters and hucksters – in the Mission District over a span of only three hours for Lit Crawl, the finale Read More

The Contemporary Jewish Museum’s hosting of “Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg” overlaps with City Lights’ celebration of its 60th year this week with the Allen Ginsberg Festival, which the CJM co-produced with City Lights and a host of other local organizations to, the museum says, “celebrate the life and legacy of Allen Ginsberg and Read More

When Daniel Alarcón toured the world for his first novel, the 2009 International Literature Award-winning “Lost City Radio,” he spoke with many people in rural South America and realized something interesting: When he asked people in the city where they were from, they often replied with the name of their parents’ town, even if they had never Read More

When Dave Eggers started McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern in 1998, he was only publishing work rejected by other magazines. The literary journal has grown into what Fast Company magazine last year rated the world’s seventh most innovative media company “for proving the value of print publishing.” “Empire” is a word commonly used to describe the publishing house due to its Read More

Raina León went to school “to diversify journalism, focusing on diverse issues and the arts,” she said recently by phone. But as an undergraduate at Penn State, she says, she experienced a series of frightening wake-up calls: among them, death threats against black leaders that included the shooting deaths of two black men and a 10-day Read More

Isolation is a major theme in Chang-rae Lee‘s first four novels, including “The Surrendered,” a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize. The theme recurs, but in an unusual manner, in his new novel, “On Such a Full Sea,” published this week. The book is set in a future dystopian version of America, in which a failed Read More

Jerome Rothenberg changed the course of poetics with the opening statement to his landmark “Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries From Africa, America, Asia, Europe & Oceania“: “Primitive means complex.” The 1968 anthology was the result of his search for a better understanding of poetry. “There was a sense I had that what we knew Read More

No one claims to have invented poetry. There is poetry in every people and in every language. Jazz, though, was made in America. “Jazz, it seems to me, is less about the soloist – however talented – than it is about the complex interweaving of various sounds and voices,” says poet Jack Foley by e-mail. Foley is Read More

Last year, Baruch Porras-Hernandez left his position as patron services manager of Magic Theater, where he worked for nine years, to focus on his own arts organizing. With a grant from Galería de la Raza, Porras-Hernandez has organized a three-evening festival honoring Latino writers, called Donde Esta Mi Gente? (or, Where Are My People?). “When I went to Read More