City Lights: An Evening with the Life of A Bookstore

Name: City Lights: An Evening with the Life of A Bookstore
Start: 2026-02-08T17:00:00-07:00
Location: 18 N. San Francisco St., Flagstaff, AZ, United States, Arizona 86001

Schedule

Sun, 08 Feb, 2026 at 05:00 pm

UTC-07:00

Location

18 N. San Francisco St., Flagstaff, AZ, United States, Arizona 86001 | Flagstaff, AZ

Join us for an evening with local author, Gioia Woods celebrating her latest book, City Lights: Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Biography of a Bookstore. The event will begin at 5:00 PM with a reading, followed by a Q&A and book signing. This is a free event.
About The Book: On a San Francisco street corner in 1953, aspiring painter and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti shook hands with sociology instructor and magazine editor Peter Martin. Their handshake sealed Ferlinghetti's five-hundred-dollar investment in a small retail space above a North Beach flower shop that would become City Lights Bookstore and Press. Since the mid-twentieth century, the bookstore and its press have continued to shape the way literature is produced and consumed. As the first-ever all-paperback bookstore in the nation, sponsor of the Beat Movement and the San Francisco Renaissance, home of the Pocket Poets series, torchbearer for free speech movements, and promoter of global comparative literature and human rights, City Lights has continuously been at the avant-garde of literary experimentation and cultural revolution.
City Lights: Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Biography of a Bookstore is the seminal story of the bookstore, its press, and the inimitable Ferlinghetti.
About The Author: Gioia Woods is professor of humanities and chair of the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies at Northern Arizona University. She is the author of the Western Writers Series monograph Gary Paul Nabhan, coeditor of Western Subjects: Autobiographical Writing in the North American West, and editor of Left in the West: Literature, Culture, and Progressive Politics in the American West.