|
___________________
Thirty-Fifth
Annual
St.
Patrick's Day
Open
Reading
of
Irish Poetry and Prose
Monday,
March 17,
7pm
until it ends
Members of the public are invited
to read selections from James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Oscar Fingal O'Flaherty Wills
Wilde, Sean O'Casey, Edmund Burke et al. Messrs. Guinness and Harp will officiate the proceedings.
________________________
Lt.Commander
William H.
“Sweetwater” LaBarge,
USN (Ret.),
will read from and discuss his new
book
LIGHTNING
STRIKES TWICE
Saturday, March 29, 7PM
Lightning Strikes Twice is an action packed
political thriller that includes the Bushehr Nuclear Plant in Iran, the CIA, Navy SEALs, an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, the world’s
longest Sniper kill shot, an SSGN Nuclear Submarine, and the F-35C, the newest Stealth Fighter which has the most advanced
Integrated Sensor Fusing Technology and Multispectral Electro-Optical Targeting capability in the world.
Lt. Commander William H. “Sweetwater”
LaBarge is not only a real TopGun, his Naval Aviation Novels have made him a New York Times Best-Selling
author. LaBarge spent decades as a Navy Carrier Pilot & Special Operations Operative with the Special Operations
Group, an elite group of forces conducting high-priority, secret missions. He also served as technical advisor on the movie
sets of Top Gun, starring Tom Cruise, Firefox, starring Clint Eastwood, Final Countdown, and the
TV Series JAG.
_____________ John
M. Ridland
and Peter Czipott
will read
from their new book
The
Withering World
the first translations in English of the
poetry of
Sandor Marai
(1900-1989)
Saturday,April 5th, 7
P.M.
Sándor Márai is now remembered worldwide as the
acclaimed author of novels such as Embers,
Casanova in Bolzano, and The Rebels. However, it is as a poet and translator of
poetry that he first made his name in the literary world of his native Hungary,
producing a rich body of work in the genre.
Witnessing and responding to the turbulence of his time, he is now
considered one of his country’s most significant writers of the twentieth
century. Profoundly anti-fascist in the
years leading up to World War II, he was equally anti-communist in the years
following and found himself forced to choose exile for the last forty years of
his life. He spent his last decade in San
Diego, where the San Diego Central Library and Balboa
Park became his twin oases. The
Withering World, the first edition of Márai’s poems in the English language
– here presented in John M. Ridland’s and Peter V. Czipott’s translations –
offers a comprehensive selection spanning the author’s whole career and
exemplifying his mastery of what he considered to be the highest form of
literary – indeed, human – expression. John
M. Ridland is Professor
Emeritus of English and creative writing at UC Santa Barbara. A noted poet with numerous volumes of verse
to his credit. He also won the 2010 Bálint Balassi Memorial Sword Award for his
translation of Sándor Petöfi’s epic in folk style, John the Valiant. Peter
Czipott is a local
physicist and writer, having lived in San Diego
since 1971. He is an alumnus of UCSD
(BA, 1975; PhD, 1983) and a past member of the San Diego Symphony Board of
Directors (2007-2012). In 2010, he was a
recipient of the Bálint Balassi Memorial Medallion for services to Hungarian
culture.
___
Northern
California Poet
ROY MASH
reading from “Buyer’s Remorse”
and
San Diego Poet Laureate
STEVE KOWIT
reading from “The Dumbbell Nebula”
Saturday,
April 19th, 7 P.M.
Roy Mash
is a long time board member of the
Marin Poetry Center. In a previous life he held degrees in English, Philosophy,
and Computer Science. His poems have
appeared widely in journals such as Agni,
Atlanta Review, Barrow Street, Nimrod,
Passages North, Poetry East, Rhino,
and River Styx. Buyer’s Remorse is a
celebration of the small, the overlooked,
and the underrated. Doggedly anti-lofty, reveling in the This-Worldly,
the poems caper around the themes of the body, of mathematics and rationality,
adolescence and middle-age, love and fear and death. The tone ranges from the
irreverent to the wistful – the spritz of seltzer in the face of the Creature from the Black Lagoon to the
lover standing in one sock. Drawing on sources from The Three Stooges to
Archimedes, Lavoisier to Tweety Bird, Mash is a latter day Anti-Oracle, a nail
in the tire of post-modernity, an incorrigible wag who’s smuggled his pea
shooter into the Church of Poetry. Be ready to duck.
Steve Kowit
is the Poet Laureate of San Diego.
He studied poetry with Ned O’Gorman at Brooklyn College, Stanley Kunitz at the
92nd Street Y, and Robert Lowell at the New School for Social Research. Kowit
has taught at Southwestern College and San Diego State University for many
years. His books include Lurid Confessions;
Crossing Borders; The First Noble Truth; The Gods of Rapture; and In the Palm of Your Hand; and
he edited
the noted anthology The Maverick Poets.
___________ Washington, D.C.
poet
Jodie
Hollander
will read from her new collection
THE HUMANE SOCIETY
Saturday, April 26th, 7PM
Romantic, surreal and tender,
The
Humane Society paints a family portrait that is a mixture of memoir, ghost story
and artistic obsession, as well as being an elegy for an older, more mannered, world. Jodie Hollander
is originally from Wisconsin and now lives and works in Washington, DC. An alumna of Pomona
College, Boston University and Bath Spa University, her poetry has
appeared in a number of poetry magazines and journals both in the UK and America.
____________________ Author and USD Professor Halina Duraj will read from her new short story collection THE FAMILY CANNON Saturday, May 10,7PM
Halina Duraj brings to her readers an American family,
strikingly individual but recognizable to us all—as strange and familiar as home. An escalating neighborhood feud takes
an unanticipated turn. A college student visiting Poland learns about drinking, dancing, and some of the more perplexing mysteries
of adulthood. A mother opens up about her youth and courtship. A daughter tries to understand her own relationship within
the context of what she has been taught about marriage. These tender and generous linked stories illuminate the hidden corners
of our family lives and, in doing so, cast beautiful light on the shadows. “With quiet astonishment, Halina Duraj explores
the mysteries of love and madness, offering her readers the secret salvation of story. Between a father’s reinvention
of himself, a mother’s perplexing fidelity, and a woman's navigation of the complexities of betrayal, we discover the
exquisite pleasures of a world restored and redeemed through Duraj’s luminous gaze, the loving attention and tender
playfulness of an extravagantly passionate imagination.” —Melanie
Rae Thon, author of The Voice of the River and In This Light Halina Duraj’s stories have appeared in The Sun, The Harvard Review,
Fiction, Witness, and other journals. She has an MA in creative writing from the University of California, Davis, and
a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Utah. In 2012, she was a writer-in- residence at Hedgebrook,
a women’s writing retreat on Whidbey Island, WA. She teaches at the University of San Diego, where she also directs
the Lindsay J. Cropper Center for Creative Writing
Previous Events at D.G.Wills Books
Christopher Hitchens
Director Oliver Stone
Historian and Churchill biographer Sir Martin Gilbert
Francoise Gilot
Vogue magazine photo of Francoise Gilot
at the original store
Michael McClure
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman, Director of the Neurosciences
Institute, with U.C. Berkeley philosopher John Searle with Mrs. Searle
Nobel Laureate Manfred Eigen
Quincy Troupe
Iris Chang
Gerry Spence
Noted editor Robert Weil, editing a Patricia
Highsmith manuscript for W.W. Norton & Co.
|
