Babylon Salon
presents a special performance
Saturday, June 13, 2026
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
Portia Elan
[Homebound]
"Homebound is a joy—at once a gripping mystery that confidently spans centuries, and a hauntingly beautiful exploration of what makes us human. Inventive and gritty, powerful and clear-eyed, it kept me up all night!” —Madeline Miller, author of Circe and The Song of Achilles
“A novel to get lost in, Homebound is deeply felt, deftly crafted and beautifully written. A story of friendship and family, of hope and invention and love. An inspiring debut.” — Charles Yu, National Book Award Winning author of Interior Chinatown
Portia Elan studied history at Stanford University and earned an MFA from the University of Victoria before returning to California, where she has worked as a waitress, bookseller, teacher, and public librarian. She is a former Lambda Literary Fellow and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her wife and an abundance of cats. Homebound is her debut novel.
—
Heidi Kasa
[Beginners; The Bullet Takes Forever]
"[The Bullet Takes Forever] showcases the depth of the author’s commitment to a clearer and more human future where love can emerge as our salvation value. One of the most stunning and effective works of art in any medium I’ve experienced that speaks to a social crisis." —Jeffrey Bryant, author of The Catacombs of Vanished Lovers
Heidi Kasa is the author of the poetry collection The Bullet Takes Forever, the flash fiction collection The Beginners, winner of the 2023 Digging Press Chapbook Contest, and Split. Her work is in Barrelhouse, The Brooklyn Rail, The Pinch Journal, and elsewhere. Find her at www.heidikasa.com.
—
Samantha Kimmey
[ The Extremities!]
“The Extremities! is a peculiar and perfect novel. Eerie, maddening, and sometimes even funny, Kimmey’s novel is art for the fearful present, humming a note of dread that feels both hauntingly familiar and completely new.”—Lydia Kiesling, author, Mobility
Samantha Kimmey is the manager at Point Reyes Books, and was formerly the managing editor of the Point Reyes Light. Her short fiction has been published in the Southwest Review, the Indiana Review and elsewhere. She hopes one day to have more information to share in these literary bios. The Extremities! is her first novel.
—
Bernardo Wade
[The House on Asbury Street]
“One of the pleasures of Wade’s poems is that they shirk neither humor nor swagger nor play nor a little not-quite-subtle shit talk. These poems, even when they’re hurting, enjoy themselves. They flash a smile at you time to time. They’re stylish. They’re interested in the tilt of their cap, the cuff of their jeans; not only what the words mean, but how they lean, how they sound. They want to be pretty on their way to being beautiful. On their way to being true.” —Ross Gay, author of The Book of Delights
Bernardo Wade serves as assistant editor and poetry editor for Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora. He is a Wallace Stegner fellow and has published his poems in The Nation, The Sewanee Review, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. He is infatuated with Ed Roberson’s question, “Can you O.D. on life?”
novel.
—
Jesus Francisco Sierra
[At Times of Loss and Other Cuban Stories]
Jesus Francisco Sierra is a Cuban writer who grew up in San Francisco’s Mission District. His
work has appeared in Zyzzyva, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Common, Alta, and The
Caribbean Writer among others. His short story collection “At Times of Loss and Other Cuban
Stories” was a finalist for the 2023 Leapfrog Global Fiction Prize and also in the Eastover Press
2025 Debut Collection contest. He is the recipient of the 2025 San Francisco Literary
Foundation’s award for Fiction. He is currently at work on his first novel.
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