The Oakland Review of Books calendar of not just literary events
In the East Bay it’s wildflower season and bird-nesting season, and also weed-pulling season. If you want to get out into the beautiful East Bay hills and explore, the East Bay Regional Park District has tons of events every weekend to help you learn more about this remarkable place we live, and also volunteer opportunities so you can offer the ache of your back and your wrists to your neighbors, human and nonhuman, as a gift, comrade. That mustard won’t pull itself. (Also Monday there was a cool event at Clio’s that hopefully folks went to.) -MS
Wednesday, April 30
Lyrics & Dirges: A Monthly Poetry Series, 7 p.m. Pegasus Books (downtown Berkeley). No specific details revealed yet by the horse with wings who sells books! Show up and be surprised! [Pegasus]
Imaginary Crimes Tour: Stop Cop City, 7 p.m. Tamarack, Oakland. Get tied into the network of local movements resisting police power and join in the discussion on anti-repression and movement defense that’s growing out of the collective effort to stop Cop City in Atlanta. A panel of local people and groups who have been involved in anti-repression work will also gather. [Instagram]
Thursday, May 1
May Day. MAYDAY means EMERGENCY. In Martinez. In Berkeley and at Cal (the other Berkeley). In Oakland. Wherever you can put a shoulder to the wheel or gum up the works. Do not register, just show up.
Also, come to Lunch Poems: Megan Fernandes, 12:10 p.m. Morrison Reading Room (Doe Library, UC Berkeley), as a gesture of solidarity. Poems refuse to be useful, and so should you. Meg rocks. She’s fun and funny and writes with her heart on her sleeve and the page, and her exploded sonnets are gorgeously exploratory. We drank wine and threw dinner parties and talked about Irish poetry and difficult men in our 20s, and she’s always been much cooler than me and I love her for it. [Berkeley]
The Radical Mind: The Origins of Right-Wing Catholic and Protestant Coalition Building. 4 p.m. , 2111 Bancroft Way #104, UC Berkeley. The origins of the culture wars, or how the right captured Catholics, braided them together with Evangelicals, and launched the radically reactionary social fever dream we’re all mired in now. [Berkeley]
Bay Area TroubleMakers School Fundraiser, 8 p.m. Tamarack, Oakland. Dance party to raise funds for a labor organizers educational event in June. Wear union swag, win prizes! [Tamarack]
Friday May 2
Sinner's Black Blues, 3:30 p.m.–6 p.m. McCone Hall, UC Berkeley. Locals Ericka Hart and Ebony Donnley—hosts of Hoodrat to Headwrap: A Decolonized Podcast—explore Black music as a sonic and spatial archive of memory, resistance, and cultural production. Eb, a Black cultural preservationist, will explore how Black musical traditions engage Oakland’s urban and sonic landscapes, examining how sound both reflects and shapes gentrification, displacement, and identity. Ericka will examine how gender, sexuality, and musical expression intersect in Black music, drawing on cultural works like the film Sinners. This event launches The Sound Space, a new working group exploring how sonic practices both shape and are shaped by space. Stay for BBQ, drinks and dancing! [Eventbrite]
Meet the Author: Dr. Edda Fields-Black, 3 p.m. The African American Museum and Library at Oakland. Noted historian Dr. Fields-Black visits Oakland to talk about her research into Harriet Tubman’s service to the Union Army as spymaster and liberator, and her resulting history book Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War. Histories like this light the way to a future that’s truly free – which is of course why the surging tide of federal fascism is trying to keep these stories out of our schools and colleges. [African American Museum and Library at Oakland]
Tamarack’s Friday poetry series, 6:30 p.m. Tamarack, Oakland. Rosie Stockton, Noah Ross, and Zoë Hitzig this week. Show up so the curators can keep doing this! Hitzig is both a poet and works at OpenAI, so bring questions on both. [Tamarack]
Stories from 50 Years of Naturalist Program at Lake Merritt, 7 p.m. Naturalist Jim Covel will share stories and photos of 50 years of Naturalist Program at the first Wildlife Refuge in the USA: Lake Merritt. Presented by The Friends of the Rotary Nature Center at Lake Merritt. (Pssst – To learn more, Birds of Lake Merritt by Alex Harris has an introduction that gives a solid overview of the environmental history of the lake and the role of the Naturalist Program in tying Oakland’s community and wildlife refuge together.) [Online]
Bonus West Bay event: First Friday in North Beach -- Under-the-radar poetry in the alley, 5 p.m. Vesuvio, Kerouac Alley. I'll be with a few people outside Vesuvio in Kerouac Alley to share some new poems and poetic genre-undefined objects very casually around a table over beer. I have been moved recently by these two poems, “Staying” by Lena Moses-Schmitt and “King City Metro” by Geffrey Davis, and offer them as inspiration if you like a prompt. Sharing Joshua Clover’s poems is also on my mind. [Last sunshine]
Bonus West Bay Event, part deux. Ashley D. Escobar reading with Derrick Brown & Meredith Adelaide, 6 p.m. Golden Sardine on Columbus. West Bay poet Escobar, temporarily embarrassed by a move to NYC, boomerangs back to the city to celebrate her new book of poems. Brown runs Write Bloody Press in LA, which has been publishing the best poets emerging from slam and spoken word traditions for a long time. [Instagram]
Saturday, May 3
Co-Creating A Thriving Future for the Bay Area: An Unconference, 9 a.m. - 5:30 p.m. Laney College, Oakland. Join in the collective reimagining of our future here in the East Bay that celebrates our connection to each other and place, and refuses to be limited by the very boring status quo. Bioregionalism, it’s back and better than ever! [Laney]
Tackling Jon Fosse's Septology Series Together, 10 a.m. Bathers Library, Oakland. Go talk about this very very long sentence with other people. Grab an oar, row that ship together. Led by Joanne Furio. [Bathers Library]
Geology Walk and Talk with Deep Oakland author Andrew Alden, 2 p.m. Scout Road & Mountain Blvd, Oakland. Talk chert, faults, and deep time with Oakland’s local geology expert and Heyday author. Check out his newsletter for more walks in different neighborhoods on different dates as well. [Boom Calendar]
Tend : Share : Grow, 6 p.m. Junior Center, The Lake. A collective dialog between Oakland artists featured in the gorgeous Sprout & Bloom group exhibition by local artists Lana Williams, Sigrid Hubbell, and Alex Arzt. Join in to talk about seeds, gardening, and care as art practice and daily life. Hot tip: there’s a room for kids to play in while adults think and talk together. I deeply love that the Junior Center is deliberately creating an intergenerational space for art, science, craft, and community with this show and the events related to it. Plus the art is really good. [Junior center]
Kate Folk: Sky Daddy in conversation at Womb House Books, 7 p.m. Womb House, Temescal Alley. West Bay fiction writer Folk will be in conversation with Womb House owner (and critic and writer) Jessica Ferri. Ferri gives good questions, and Folk’s book of short stories was so well-loved it has everyone as excited to read her debut as a novelist as the protag is amorously excited about plane crashes. [Womb House]
West Bay bonus event: Bi-Annual Trinity Alley $5 Book Fair & Poetry Reading, 10 a.m. (reading at 1 p.m.) 34 Trinity Arts & News. Not only can you redistribute literary excellence from their shelves to yours, but Wendy Trevino, Juliana Spahr, and Finn Finnerman will be reading at 1 p.m., redistributing poems from their brains to yours. [Instagram]
West Bay bonus event, the second: Aspen Mays in discussion with Shana Lopes about Mays's book Ten Gallon Sunflower, 6:30 p.m. Et al. Books, the Mission. Artists on art books. What is a book, and when is it a work of art as an object, when is it the representation of art, and what is an art object anyway? [Et al.]
Sun, May 4
The University: What Was, Is, and Can it Be Good For, 10 a.m, Bathers Library, Oakland. Reading group led by Stephanie Reist, currently a lecturer at Stanford [insert joke at the expense of the Peninsula, and to Oakland’s credit]. [Bathers Library]
The First Jewish Arts & Bookfest, 11 a.m.—4 p.m. Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, Berkeley. All day celebration of Jewish writers, arts, and culture. Notable features: Helene Wecker (The Golem and the Jinni, which lived up to its gorgeous cover) on an author panel; zine and comics workshops; discussion around what it means to be a “People of the Book.” [Berkeley]
Movie Night Fundraiser at Moments Co-op, featuring Leila and the Wolves, 4 p.m. Moments Cooperative & Community Space (410 13th St., Oakland). Nostalgic for Nothing Cinema presents a film by Heiny Srour from 1984 centering Palestinian and Lebanese women. She braids together reenactment, archival footage, mythology, and song to fashion a striking corrective to the “official”—i.e. patriarchal—history of anticolonial unrest. [Eventbrite]
Tackling the Everyday: Race and Nation in Big-Time College Football, 6 p.m. Clio’s, Oakland. Dr. Tracie Canada discusses her new book Tackling the Everyday with Naledi Yaziyo, an ethnography of Black college football players and their relationship with the institutions that extract millions of dollars of value from the traumatic brain injuries that these young men get on their way to an education. Also, the Black brotherhood and motherhood that help the student athletes survive. [Clio's]
(Tell us what we missed! Or what you did today. Or anything else. orb@oaklandreviewofbooks.org)