Friday, June 5 @ 7:30 p.m., featuring Shane Book and John Shoptaw with a special performance by Cloud Building

Please join us on Friday, June 5 for a reading featuring 

Shane Book and John Shoptaw

plus a special performance by Cloud Building!

Admission is FREE.

Beverages and snacks will be served.

This is our last reading of the '14-'15 season and we're going out with a bang! 

We'll kick off our '15-'16 season in September.

Studio One Art Center | 365 45th Street | Oakland, CA 94609

Here's a map.

Shane Book’s first poetry collection, Ceiling of Sticks, was published in 2010 by the University of Nebraska Press, and won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award and was a Poetry Society of America “New Poet” Selection. Excerpts from Ceiling of Sticks received The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize and a National Magazine Award. His second collection, Congotronic, is a 2014 Kuhl House Poets Series Selection, published in the U.S. by the University of Iowa Press and in Canada by House of Anansi Press. Excerpts from Congotronic were selected for inclusion in The Best American Experimental Writing. Congotronic was recently named to the shortlist for the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize. He is also a filmmaker whose work has been awarded numerous jury prizes and screenwriting awards at film festivals around the world and has played on television on three continents. Book’s other honors include a New York Times Fellowship, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and fellowships to the Telluride Film Festival and the Flaherty Film Seminar. He was educated at the University of Western Ontario; the University of Victoria; New York University; Temple University; the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow.

John Shoptaw was raised in the drained Mississippi River floodplain of the Missouri Bootheel, where he was baptized in a drainage ditch, picked cotton, and worked in a lumber mill.  He is the author of a book of poems, Times Beach (University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), winner of the 2015 Notre Dame Book Prize, poems from which appeared in The New Yorker, Common Knowledge, A Smartish Pace, and elsewhere.  He has also published a critical study, On the outside looking out: John Ashbery’s Poetry (Harvard University Press, 1995); and a libretto on Lincoln’s assassination for an opera by Eric Sawyer, Our American Cousin (BMOP Sound). He teaches poetry in the English Department of the University of California at Berkeley.

Cloud Building features Sheila Bosco, Brian Lucas, and Mark Pino twiddling secret knobs, collaging audio from alien sources, and abyss-foraging for hologrammatic atmospherics. They are based in the East Bay and are also members of groups Cloud Shepherd, Dire Wolves, Thomas Carnacki, and Infinite Plastic Internal.