Saturday Night Special
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Event Description
Saturday Night Special is an open mic literary reading series held at Nick’s Lounge in Berkeley on the last Saturday of every month. SNS has an optional monthly theme, a huge following and a reputation for being diverse, loud, gritty, sexy, inclusive, and loaded with local talent.
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Curator: Hollie Hardy
HOLLIE HARDY is the author of How to Take a Bullet, And Other Survival Poems (Punk Hostage Press, 2014). She teaches writing classes at Berkeley City College and San Francisco State University. An active participant in the local Bay Area literary scene, Hardy co-hosts the popular monthly reading series, Saturday Night Special, An East Bay Open Mic. She is a founder and core producer of the Beast Crawl Literary Festival in Oakland, and curator of Litquake's Flight of Poets. She lives in Oakland, California. Her website is www.holliehardy.com
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Event Readers
Peter Bullen
Peter (Thomas) Bullen, a Berkeley hairdresser started writing at 49, so will never be in the New Yorker's 30 under 30 collection. His resulting grief was somewhat mitigated by being named a Quiet Lightning Neighborhood Hero in 2014. However the weeping and sleepless nights have resumed, and it's not a pretty picture. His work has appeared in Sparkle and Blink, Blotterature, Weave, and Eleven Eleven. His fiction excerpts, stray thoughts, and wishes can be found at WETRIEDOURBEST.WORDPRESS.COM
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Maisha Z. Johnson
Maisha Z. Johnson is an Oakland-based writer and activist of Trinidadian descent. She writes poetry, fiction, and essays, and works at the intersections of the arts, healing, and social change. Maisha has an MFA in Poetry from Pacific University and she is the author of No Parachutes to Carry Me Home (Punk Hostage Press 2015), Through Your Own Words: 51 Writing Prompts for Healing and Self-Care(Inkblot Arts 2014), and three poetry chapbooks. Her work has been published in numerous journals and nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize, and she writes for online publications including Black Girl Dangerous and Everyday Feminism. Visit her at www.inkblotarts.org.
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JR Schenheit
JR Schenheit is a Minnesotan poet and novelist, like Garrison Keller but Jason swears sometimes. He's the proprietor of the Gorilla Press. Check out that .com because there are loads of free journals, short films, and podcasts, and it's not built by one of those tech bastards.
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Chad Sweeney
Chad Sweeney is the author of five books of poetry, including White Martini of the Apocalypse (Marick Press, 2015); Parable of Hide and Seek (Alice James Books), and Wolf’sMilk: Lost Notebooks of Juan Sweeney (Forklift) and two books of translation from Persian/Farsi and Spanish. His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, New American Writing, and elsewhere. He earned an MFA from SF State, taught in WritersCorps for several years in San Francisco and now teaches in the MFA program at CSU San Bernardino where he edits Ghost Town at www.ghosttownlitmag.com.
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William Taylor Jr.
William Taylor Jr. lives and writes in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco. His work has been published widely in journals across the globe, including The New York Quarterly, The Chiron Review, and Poesy.An Age of Monsters, his first book of fiction, was published by Epic Rites Press in 2011. The Blood of a Tourist (Sunnyoutside, 2014) is his latest collection of poetry. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee and was a recipient of the 2013 Acker Award.
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Sarah Wisby
Sarah Wisby is the author of the heart's progress (plain wrap press) and Viva Loss (small desk press.) She writes fiction, poetry, memoir, and essays, preferring to deepen and subvert genre by way of hybrid forms. She was awarded a residency at Headlands Center for the Arts in 2014, and received a San Francisco Arts Commission grant in 2011. Recent work can be found online in the Portable Boog and NAP, as well as on a plaque at the Maritime Museum, next to artifacts from a Russian coal ship abandoned in San Francisco during the gold rush. She is all over YouTube.
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