The Fabulist Magazine is thrilled to return to Lit Crawl this Saturday, October 22, from 6:30-7:30pm, at Adobe Books, 3130-24th Street, in San Francisco.
Our latest knockout lineup of Bay Area literary heavies includes Hugh Behm-Steinberg, Heather Bourbeau, Chris Carlsson, Ruth Crossman, Laird Harrison, Claire Light, and Antonio Roman Alcalá.
You can RSVP via the event’s Facebook and Lit Crawl pages — or just show up at the door. Our Lit Crawl readings always bring a full house, and we will be starting at 6:30pm sharp, so get there a little early to secure a good seat.
Be prepared for an evening of spoken-word science fiction, fantasy, “cli fi,” solarpunk, magic realism and nonfiction to explore anti-dystopianism and utopian hopes, dreams and possibilities during these dire and strange times for human society.
READER BIOS
Hugh Behm-Steinberg’s prose can most recently be found in Tiny Molecules, X-Ray, Lost Balloon, Interstellar Literary Review, Bending Genres and The Fantastic Other. His short story “Taylor Swift” won the 2015 Barthelme Prize from Gulf Coast, and his story “Goodwill” was picked as one of the Wigleaf Top Fifty Very Short Fictions of 2018. A collection of prose poems and microfiction, Animal Children, was published by Nomadic Press in 2020. He teaches writing and literature at California College of the Arts.
Heather Bourbeau’s work has appeared in 100 Word Story, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Kenyon Review, Meridian, The Stockholm Review of Literature, and SWWIM. She has worked with various UN agencies, including the UN peacekeeping mission in Liberia and UNICEF Somalia. Her collection Monarch, a poetic memoir of overlooked histories from the American West she was raised in, comes out in Spring 2023 (Cornerstone Press). Her collaboration with the poet Anne Casey, Somedays the Bird, is forthcoming from Beltway Editions.
Chris Carlsson, co-director of the “history from below” project Shaping San Francisco and its incomparable archive FoundSF.org, is a writer, publisher, editor, photographer, public speaker, and occasional professor. He was one of the founders in 1981 of the infamous underground San Francisco magazine Processed World. In 1992 Carlsson co-founded Critical Mass in San Francisco, which both led to a local bicycling boom and helped to incubate transformative urban movements in hundreds of cities, large and small, worldwide. Carlsson has written three books: Hidden San Francisco: A Guide to Lost Landscapes, Unsung Heroes, and Radical Histories (Pluto Press: 2020); his 2004 novel set in a future “post-economic” San Francisco, After the Deluge (Full Enjoyment Books); and his groundbreaking look at class and work in Nowtopia (AK Press: 2008) which uniquely examined how hard and pleasantly we work when we’re not at our official jobs. He has also edited six books. He has given hundreds of public presentations, and has appeared dozens of times in radio, television and on the internet. His current Fabulist contribution is a review of Verso’s new book Half Earth Socialism.
Ruth Crossman is a Pushcart-nominated writer whose work has appeared in publications including Litro, Flash Fiction, Brokeass Stuart, and Maximum Rock n Roll. Her auto-fiction collection All the Wrong Places was published by Naked Bulb Press in 2022. Her wicked and tragic tale for The Fabulist, “The Shoes,” updates Cinderella from the perspective of one of the sisters, who sublimates body shaming and undergoes self-mutilation in order to try and fit the lost glass slipper.
Genre-nonconforming writer Laird Harrison keeps finding new ways to put words together. He has published essays in Salon and The Nation, poetry in Catamaran and Chinquapin, short fiction in The Fabulist, and journalism in Time and Reuters. WUNC and KQED have broadcast his radio scripts. In 2012, Verdant Books published his novel Fallen Lake, the story of two couples who fall in love with each other. His novel in progress compares alternative realities in fiction to alternative universes in physics. His contribution to The Fabulist, “Abbreviation,” is a quietly devastating sort of ghost story for the AI era.
Claire Light is a Bay Area writer, cultural worker, and activist. She has worked since 1997 in nonprofit administration, particularly in arts and social justice, and was a cofounder of Hyphen magazine. Her activism has turned most recently to disability justice, and she is co-founder of the Disability Justice League-Bay Area. You can read her fiction in McSweeney’s, Hyphen, and The Encyclopedia Project, among others. A short collection of her stories, Slightly Behind and To the Left, was published by Aqueduct Press in 2009. Her fantasy novel Monkey Around, written under the pen name Jadie Jang, will be published by Solaris in 2021.
Antonio Roman-Alcalá is an educator, researcher, writer, and organizer based in Berkeley, California who has worked for just and sustainable food systems for the past 18 years. Antonio co-founded San Francisco’s Alemany Farm, the San Francisco Urban Agriculture Alliance, and the California Food Policy Council. His 2010 documentary film, In Search of Good Food, can be viewed free online. He holds advanced degrees from UC Berkeley and the International Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, and has published everything from peer-reviewed and popular articles, to comic books and homemade fanzines. Antonio is a musician who has recorded dozens of albums, and a father who loves bike rides and rock climbing with the kiddo. He currently organizes food scholars through the international Agroecology Research-Action Collective (ARC), consults with the Urban Permaculture Institute (UPI), and is an advisor to various initiatives working towards land access for young farmers, agroecological science, and community-based research.
