Berkson & Opstedal Reading in S.F., Aug. 26

Book Party & Reading at Books & Bookshelves
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
7:30 pm

Bill Berkson
Goods and Services
Kevin Opstedal
Santa Cruz
[both from Blue Press, 2008]

Books and Bookshelves is located in the Castro at 99 Sanchez Street.

BILL BERKSON was born in New York in 1939.   A poet, critic, teacher, and sometime curator, he moved to Northern California in 1970 and during the next decade edited a series of little magazines and books under the Big Sky imprint.   From 1984 to 2008 he was a professor of Liberal Arts at the San Francisco Art Institute.   He is a corresponding editor for Art in America and has contributed reviews and essays to such other journals as Aperture, Artforum, Works on Paper and Modern Painters.   His recent books of poetry include Gloria (in a deluxe limited edition with etchings by Alex Katz), Our Friends Will Pass Among You Silently, and Goods and Services.   Other books include a collection of his criticism, The Sweet Singer of Modernism & Other Art Writings: 1985-2003; Sudden Address: Selected lectures 1981-2006; an epistolary collaboration with Bernadette Mayer entitled What's Your Idea of a Good Time?: Interviews & Letters 1977-1985.   His Portrait and Dream: New & Selected Poems will appear form Coffee House Press in 2009.   Berkson was the 2006 Distinguished Mellon Fellow at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.   He now lives in New York and San Francisco.

KEVIN OPSTEDAL is a poet as well as the editor/publisher of Blue Press Books, a venture started 10 years ago with Colorado poet Michael Price.   Blue Press has published 15 magazines and 52 books to date, with more on the way.   Opstedal himself has written 24 books of poetry, the most recent being User's Manual to the Pacific Coast Highway (Seven Fingers Press, Boulder, 2007) and Santa Cruz (Blue Press, 2008).   A slim volume of selected poems, Rare Surf, Vol. 2: New & Used Poems, was published by Smog Eyes Press, Playa del Rey, in 2006.   His poems, essays and book reviews have appeared in numerous little magazines and periodicals over the years, as well as on the web.   In addition he has edited the as yet unpublished Dear Oxygen, Selected Poems of Lewis MacAdams, and his recently completed literary history of the Bolinas poets has been published online.   Born and raised in Venice Beach, California, Opstedal currently resides in Santa Cruz.

FREE, but
Please B.Y.O.B.