LONE GLEN Launch: CLOUD OF WITNESSES
Schedule
Sat Sep 14 2024 at 06:00 pm
UTC-07:00Location
1409 Derby St, Berkeley, CA 94702-2310, United States | Berkeley, CA
Join us at summer’s end for a Lone Glen garden book launch: Saturday, September 14th at 6 pm! With featured writers Norma Cole and Juba Kalamka, we’re so excited to celebrate Cloud of Witnesses: Essays, Poems, Collages, a new collection from writer and visual artist, Linda Norton. According to Alice Lyons, “Linda Norton's pandemic response to the ‘death’ of her life in public was to re-read books as a kind of replacement for lost community. Cloud of Witnesses is a one-woman, New-Deal-WPA poetry intervention, privately funded by the writer's voracious reading, care, rage, and love.” We can’t wait to behold these three very different and very captivating writers share community space as we collectively welcome Cloud of Witnesses. There will be talk and books. There will be wine and wildflowers. ABOUT THE WRITERS
NORMA COLE is a poet, visual artist and translator. Books of poetry include FATE NEWS (Omnidawn) and Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems 1988-2008 (City Lights). A book of drawings called DRAWINGS came out from Further Other Book Works. A new book of poetry, ALIBI LULLABY, will appear from Omnidawn in 2025.
JUBA KALAMKA (he/him) is most recognized for his work with performance troupes Sins Invalid and Mangos With Chili and as co-founder and producer of the queer hip hop group Deep Dickollective (D/DC). His writing appears in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Anthology of Rap (Yale University Press, 2010), Queer and Trans Artists of Color: The Stories of Some of Our Lives (2014), Recognize: The Voices of Bisexual Men (Bisexual Resource Center, 2015), and Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Workers’ Poetry (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2019). In 2017 he joined experimental music rhythm section The Living Earth Show in rap-rock/nü metal collaborative COMMANDO, whose first full-length album was released on the K*ll Rock Stars label in 2022. His first poetry collection, Son of Byford was released by Nomadic Press in 2022 and became available through Black Lawrence Press in 2024. He is featured in the oral history archive _I See My Light Shining_through the Baldwin-Emerson Elders Project at Columbia University. He has been a HIV services worker and community health educator in the SF Bay Area and beyond since 1999 and served on the San Francisco HIV Community Planning Council since 2019. Juba earned a BA in Art, Secondary Education from Chicago State University in 1993 and an MFA in Poetics (minor in Queer and Activist Performance) from The New College of California in 2006.
LINDA NORTON is a the author of The Public Gardens: Poems and History (introduction by Fanny Howe), a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Wite Out: Love and Work, which John Keene and Eileen Myles call a “masterpiece” and Norman Fischer calls “a gorgeous, courageous book,” and Cloud of Witnesses: Essays, Poems, Collages. She was the 2023 recipient of a $5000 non-fiction award from the San Francisco Foundation for an excerpt from Something Close: A Transatlantic Genealogy of Love, Shame, and Defiance, a memoir and cultural history she hopes to publish in 2025, the hundred-year anniversary of her grandmother's emigration from Ireland to Boston. Linda's collages have appeared on books by Claudia Rankine, Julie Carr, Maureen Owen and others, and on the covers of her own books, too.
LOCATION
The back garden at 1409 Derby Street, Berkeley: find the open fence door on the right side of the house (please don’t use the front door). PLEASE BRING A FRIEND, and maybe a blanket or chair! Lone Glen will provide a nonalcoholic array of drinks, and also, plenty of wine. $10-15 suggested donation, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds. ADA accessible to the yard; there is no ADA accessible restroom.
LONE GLEN is a quarterly reading and performance series dedicated to cultivating a down-to-earth, inclusive creative community among makers of all forms. In December 2021, Lone Glen celebrated its decade birthday. Lone Glen has lived at various venues in Oakland and San Francisco, and now hosts live, in-person events at Medicine for Nightmares or in their South Berkeley backyard.
