Babylon Salon

presents a special performance

Saturday, March 18, 2023

in The Sycamore's outdoor patio

2140 Mission St, San Francisco [16th St BART]

Come for drinks at 5 // Show starts at 5.30pm

featuring

Julia Scheeres

(Listen, World!; A Thousand Lives; Jesus Land)

Listen, World!: “A tremendous read." — Susan Orlean

A Thousand Lives: “Riveting...You will not be able to look away. " --The San Francisco Chronicle

Julia Scheeres is the New York Times-bestselling author of Jesus Land, a memoir; A Thousand Lives, an award-winning history of the Jonestown tragedy and Listen, World!, a biography of Hearst columnist Elsie Robinson. Scheeres’s essays and features have appeared in The New York Times magazine, Elle, Marie Claire, Pacific Standard, The Guardian and many other outlets. She teaches creative nonfiction through Stanford’s extension program and works with private clients.

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Louise Nayer

(Narrow Escapes; Burned: a Memoir)

“Narrow Escapes is a riveting, beautifully told story of Nayer's journey across continents, but also through layers of grief from a childhood trauma, as she learns to find her way home. I will not forget this book.” – Katherine Seligman, Pen/Bellwether Prize winner

Louise Nayer has written six books, two poetry books, Keeping Watch and The Houses Are Covered in Sound, and co-authored How to Bury a Goldfish about rituals for everyday life. Burned: A Memoir was an Oprah Great Read and won the Wisconsin Library Association Award. She is also the author of Poised for Retirement: Moving from Anxiety to Zen. Louise is a member of the Writer’s Grotto, a long-time educator, retired City College of San Francisco professor and now teaches through OLLI UC Berkeley and at The Writer’s Grotto. She has done numerous radio spots, including on NPR.

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Heather Bourbeau

(Monarch)

"There are many histories of the western United States and they are not all created equal. In Monarch, poet Heather Bourbeau gives a master class in what the poet's eye can make of some of these histories. Make no mistake, this is not history as a dry and emotionless drumroll, Monarch is heat lightning: 'How do you bury bodies gathered in pieces by search parties with gunnysacks?' This collection reveals, unfolds, different stories each time you read it. You should read it." — Kim Shuck, Seventh Poet Laureate of San Francisco Emerita

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 is the winner of La Piccioletta Barca’s inaugural competition and the Chapman Magazine Flash Fiction winner, and has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her journalism has appeared in The Economist, The Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy. She was a contributing writer to Not On Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond with Don Cheadle and John Prendergast. She has worked with various UN agencies, including the UN peacekeeping mission in Liberia and UNICEF Somalia. Her collection Some Days The Bird is a poetry conversation with the Irish-Australian poet Anne Casey (Beltway Editions, 2022). Her latest collection Monarch is a poetic memoir of overlooked histories from the US West she was raised in (Cornerstone Press, 2023).

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Sarah Heady

(Comfort; Corduroy Road; Niagara Transnational)

"What shapes of wildness and fecundity does a woman cultivate in the plot of world available to her? What home does she un/ravel for herself in the overlooked places of the house? In Comfort, Sarah Heady dares to uncover a poetics of domesticity that is vibrant with sensuality, texture, and mystery—where the mundane life of details becomes a world pulsing with pleasures, dangers, and questions of embodiment and the deep interior." — Jennifer S. Cheng

Sarah Heady is a poet and essayist interested in place, history, and the built environment. She is the author of Comfort (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022), Corduroy Road (dancing girl, 2021), and Niagara Transnational (Fourteen Hills, 2013). She is also the librettist of Halcyon, a documentary opera about the death and life of a women’s college. Sarah is the recipient of residencies from the Corporation of Yaddo, In Cahoots, Bethany Arts Community, and Art Farm. Raised in New York’s Hudson Valley, she lives in San Francisco, where she co-edits Drop Leaf Press, a small women-run poetry collective. More at sarahheady.com

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Faith Merino

(Cormorant Lake)

''Cormorant Lake has been called fantastical. But to me it reads as very real. It tells a story of generations of women who live without men. Parenting, husbanding, repairing their homes, caring for the sick and weak. Desiring. Women who haunt each other for what they've done and failed to do. Women who hurt their mothers, their children, their own minds and bodies, their friends. Women who try to hold their societies together by themselves. This darkly compelling debut mirrors a woman's nightmares, and equally, her realities.'' — Katherine Forbes Riley

Faith Merino is the author of the novel Cormorant Lake, which was longlisted for The Center For Fiction's 2021 First Novel Award. She holds an MFA from UC Davis and her short stories have appeared in The Indiana Review, Harpur Palate, The Carolina Quarterly, and more, in addition to inclusion among The Best American Short Stories distinguished stories. A 2022-2024 Stanford Stegner Fellow, she is currently at work on a second novel as well as a short story collection.

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in partnership with our friends

The Booksmith

in their new location at 1727 Haight Street, San Francisco

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Free Admission!