Thursday, March 27, 2008
Monday, March 24, 2008
yay!
if you weren't there, too bad for you. definitely come on over for our April 26th reading with RAE ARMANTROUT, CS GISCOMBE, & ALLI WARREN!
hello, with a fantastic line up like that, how could you miss it???
Monday, February 25, 2008
Artifact : 3 . 22. 08 : Buuck : Perez : Scalapino
Artifact presents
David BUUCK
Craig Santos PEREZ
Leslie SCALAPINO
Saturday, March 22, 2008
PLEASE NOTE OUR EARLIER START TIME:
6PM Doors, 6:30 Readings begin
$5 donation at the door (no one turned away for lack of funds)
ALSO NOTE OUR NEW LOCATION!
Oakland Art Gallery
Frank Ogawa Plaza
199 Kahn's Alley
Directions may be found here.
Parking is free!!! & available at the following locations:- Dalziel Building (250 Frank H. Ogawa Plaza) Parking Garage (entrance on 16th Street at Clay Street)
- Clay Street Garage (entrance on Clay Street between 14th and 15th Streets, behind City Hall)
- City Center Garage (entrance on 11th Street between Clay Street and Broadway; also entrance on 14th Street)
BIOS
David Buuck is a Contributing Editor at Artweek, and a founding editor of Tripwire. His ongoing project BARGE, the Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics, will be organizing (de)tours this summer as part of the
Craig Santos Perez, a native Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guam, has lived in
3/6 : Small Press Month Marathon & New Lit Generation reading

Small Press Month Marathon & New Lit Generation reading
Thursday, March 6th 2008, 830pm
City Lights Book Store
261 Columbus Avenue at Broadway (North Beach)
San Francisco, Ca 94133
415-362-8193
spdbooks.org
MySpace.com/SPDbooks
Poetry Trading Post Trade a poem or story for a free book!
Manic D Press
Justin Chin, San Francisco, Gutted
Jon Longhi , San Francisco, The Rise and Fall of Third Leg
Alvin Orloff , San Francisco, Gutter Boys
Thea Hillman, San Francisco, forthcoming creative non-fiction collection, Intersex: For Lack of a Better Word
Jennifer Joseph, San Francisco, Editor and Publisher of Manic D Press
Sixteen Rivers Press
Jerry Fleming, Lagunitas, Swimmer Climbing Onto Shore
Margaret Kaufman, Kentfield, Snake At The Wrist
Jackie Kudler, Sausalito, Sacred Precinct
Nina Lindsay, Oakland, Today's Special Dish
Carolyn Miller, San Francisco, After Cocteau
Heyday Books
William E. Justice, Albany, Essential Saroyan
Nesta Rovian, Albany, Tree Barking: A Memoir
Stan Yogi, San Francisco, Highway 99: A Literary Journey through California's Great Valley
Lucille Day, Oakland, Chain Letter, a children's book, illustrated by Doug Dworkin
nocturnes (re)view of the literary arts
Latasha N. Nevada Diggs, San Francisco, Ichi-Ban and Ni-Ban and Manuel is destroying my bathroom
Aja Couchois Duncan, Commingled : Sight, San Francisco
Jacob I. Evans, San Francisco
Douglas "D. Scot" Miller, San Francisco
giovanni singleton, San Francisco, Editor of Publisher / nocturnes (re)view of the literary arts
O Books
Laura Moriarty, Albany, The Case
Bob Grenier, Bolinas, Phantom Anthems
Norman Fischer, Muir Beach, Precisely the Point Being Made
Leslie Scalapino, Oakland, Editor and Publisher of O Books
David Brazil, Oakland, Moe's Books
WritersCorps
Milta Ortiz, Oakland, Scatter My Red Underwear (theater piece)
Myron Michael Hardy, Oakland, www.rondeaurecords.com.
Antoinette Osborne, Notre Dame de Namur University
Robin Black
Annie Yu, City College
Indiana Pehlivanova, School of the Arts
Thanks to the Walter & Elise Haas Fund, The Marin Community Foundation, The San Francisco Foundation and the Friends of SPD!
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Artifact Reading Series Announces a New Partnership With the Oakland Art Gallery
Artifact: a reading series of innovative writing, is pleased to announce that it will soon return from its hiatus in a new location at the Oakland Art Gallery. Centrally located in the hustle and bustle of downtown Oakland's Frank H. Ogawa Plaza, the Oakland Art Gallery provides a vital site for national and regional envelope-pushing visual artists to display work ranging from painting and sculpture to video and new media. The writers Artifact has hosted--who range from post-Language writers like Juliana Spahr and Lisa Robertson to New Narrative writers like Robert Gluck and Dodie Bellamy--are certainly no strangers to unknown aesthetic territory, and this shared aesthetic, as well as the beauty of the space itself, makes the Oakland Art Gallery an ideal venue for hosting Artifact's textual experiments. This partnership will have its official kick off on March 22nd, 2008, with a reading by David Buuck, Craig Perez, and Leslie Scalapino.
Artifact began in San Francisco's Mission District on November 20, 2004, in the living room of longtime friends and writers Melissa Benham and Chana Morgenstern. Recognizing a need for a new experimental poetry and prose venue, they began the Artifact Reading Series, which quickly became a vital social and artistic gathering spot for many Bay Area writers. Since then, the reading series has garnered praise in a number of newspaper and magazine articles. Venus Zine called it a "place for renegade literature," and Michelle Tea, writing in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, wrote that the series hearkens back to the "cozy salons of yore." Artifact maintains a partnership with Hooke Press (www.hookepress.com), which publishes chapbooks of "poetry, criticism, theory, writing, and ephemera" by past Artifact readers and other innovative writers, as well as Digital Artifact (www.digitalartifactmagazine.com), an online journal interrogating narrative in contemporary culture through fiction, criticism, experimental prose, and web-based audio-visual work.
Artifact is a Member of the Intersection Incubator, a program of Intersection for the Arts (www.theintersection.org) providing fiscal sponsorship, incubation and consulting services to artists.
Monday, January 28, 2008
SPD: Live at the AWP
http://awplive.blogspot.com/
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Call for Submissions : Digital Artifact Magazine
DIGITAL ARTIFACT MAGAZINE
ISSUE 2: TRANSNATIONALISM
**Call for submissions**
Deadline: May 15, 2008
Digital Artifact Magazine interrogates narrative in contemporary culture through fiction, criticism, experimental prose, and web-based audio-visual work. We're specifically interested in the impact of digital culture and globalization on contemporary narrative(s). How do these phenomena create new forms of story, text, language, and literature? What kinds of narratives have emerged from specific elements such as web sites, chatrooms, video games, Myspace, internet porn, digital photography, web cams, blogs, internet media and cell phones, as well as broad trends such as the breakdown of national boundaries, the increased speed of communication, and the globalization of culture, capitalism, and war?
The second issue of Digital Artifact will examine the idea of transnationalism. What is the transnational space in literature and art? How do we describe the textual and digital interactions between countries, classes, cultures, languages, and identities? How do we write/track border crossings, migrations, translations, trans-cultural identities and conversations? In particular, we are interested in narratives that cross boundaries between the countries of the so-called first, second, and third worlds, narratives of migration, war, global society, cosmopolitanism and refugee culture. What does nationalism mean in our time? What is your (trans)nationality? We invite creative responses that explore these question through fiction, criticism, experimental prose, or web-based audio-visual work. Our aesthetic tendencies are always on display at digitalartifactmagazine.com.
Submission Guidelines
We accept e-mail submissions only. Send submissions to digitalartifact@gmail.com. In the subject heading, include your last name and the word “submission.” Do not send previously published work, and let us know if the work gets accepted elsewhere. One submission per person, please. Include a brief (50-100 word) bio with your work. We will read and respond to submissions between May 15 and July 15. We regret that we cannot provide payment for accepted content at this time.
**We accept text pieces up to 2,000 words in length. Please paste your work as plain text directly into the e-mail. You may also send a text document as an attachment in addition to pasting the content, if formatting is important to the piece.
**For images, we accept visual files in pdf, jpeg, and gif format. Please send low-res (72 dpi) versions for submission review.
**For sound, send mp3 files, zipped if possible, at a length of 5 minutes or less.
**For video footage, email QuickTime files, compressed for web, again in the vicinity of 5 minutes or less. Links to videos posted online also work. If we have difficulty looking at your video due to compatibility issues, we will email you with information about uploading your submission to the Digital Artifact YouTube account.
digitalartifactmagazine.com
digitalartifactmagazine.blogspot.com
digitalartifact@gmail.com
Digital Artifact Magazine reading at ATA : 2.22.08

Reading for Digital Artifact Magazine
Friday, February 22, 2008. 8 PM. $6
Artists' Television Access,
(415) 824-3890, ata@atasite.org
Wheelchair accessible
Digital Artifact Magazine is a new, web-based journal that explores digital and global culture using hybrid aesthetic tactics. Join us for a reading and screening by contributors from Issue 1 (Summer 2007), as we solicit submissions for Issue 2.
digitalartifactmagazine.com
digitalartifactmagazine.blogspot.com
digitalartifactmagazine@gmail.com
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
we're getting the band back together!
Thanks to Kaya Oakes recommendation (yay Kaya), I've just met with the wonderful peeps over at OAKLAND ART GALLERY & they are very excited to have us. It's a great space in downtown Oakland's Frank Ogawa Plaza (near 12th St. BART & Van Cleef's!). They've currently got a lovely show of painters Mike Henderson & Amy Kaufman. Go see.
We are terribly thrilled to be starting up the series again. It's been lonely without you.
More news to come as it unfolds...
Monday, January 14, 2008
Martian Poetics Class with Laura Moriarty & Brent Cunningham

MARTIAN POETICS: A CLASS
Led By
Laura Moriarty (Author of Ultravioleta & 13 other books)
&
Brent Cunningham (Author of Bird & Forest)
TEN (10) CLASSES for $200
Meets Every Wednesday from 6:30pm-9pm
starting March 5th, 2008 ***Note date change***
Class meets at Small Press Distribution in Berkeley
1341 Seventh Street
CLASS DESCRIPTION: It's easy to forget how strange poetry is. Whether it's messages from martians, value for the ecstatic (from greek ekstasis, "to be or stand outside oneself"), or frankensteinian borrowings from areas generally believed to be "other" to poetry (science, philosophy, history, logic), we believe this shifty something else to be at the heart of why poetry interests us in the first place. We will look at some of the ways communities of poets have and might cultivate this something else rather than try to dispel or contain it. We will talk about the ways it shows up in scenes, aesthetic principles, and most often specific poems. We will take dispassionate looks at ekstasis, and ecstatic looks at dispassion. We will often write during class. There will be no workshopping, but for interested students there will be opportunities for one-on-one meetings outside of class at (cheap) hourly rates. There will be opportunities to browse the thousands of small press titles at SPD. And there will be a 30% discount for students! Throughout, we will all try to interrupt our own habits and patterns of thought to invite the different, other, and strange into the room.
LAURA MORIARTY'S A Semblance: Selected & New Poetry 1975-2007 is just out from Omnidawn Publishing. Other recent books are Ultravioleta, a novel, from Atelos and Self-Destruction, a book of poetry, from Post-Apollo Press. She has taught at Mills College and Naropa University among other places & is currently Deputy Director of Small Press Distribution. She received a Poetry Center Book Award in 1984 for Persia. She has also been awarded a Gerbode Foundation grant, a residency at the Foundation Royaumont in France, a New Langton Arts Award in Literature and a grant from the Fund for Poetry.
BRENT CUNNINGHAM is a writer, publisher and visual artist currently living in Oakland with his fiancee and new daughter. His first book of poetry, Bird & Forest, was published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2005. After receiving his MA in English from SUNY Buffalo in 1998, he began working for Small Press Distribution (SPD) in Berkeley, the nation's only not-for-profit distributor of literary books. He currently holds the position of Operations director. A board member of Small Press Traffic since 2001, he was a founding curator of SPT's "Poets Theater Jamboree," an annual ritual of amateur experimental theater. In 2005 he and Neil Alger founded Hooke Press, a chapbook press dedicated to publishing short runs of poetry, criticism, theory, writing and ephemera. Hooke has published four titles so far, with two more on the way.