 Hello, beautiful people. All right, so nice to see all of you here today. Welcome to the 42nd Annual Northern California Book Awards. Give it up. So housekeeping, bathrooms are outside this door to your right behind the stairs. There's a guest keeper who will help you if you need help, guide you if you need guidance. There will be a gathering and book sale after this event, promptly after this event in the Coret Lobby and our Latinx community rooms. So please exit the auditorium right away after this ceremony. Please, that we will be very grateful of that. And don't miss the Mission Graphica exhibit in the Jewett Gallery, which is also in the same area. No food or drinks in the gallery or in this auditorium. All right. Our library would like to acknowledge that we occupy the unceded and ancestral homeland of the Ramitrushaloni people, who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. And as uninvited guests, we want to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ramitrush community. With that, I suggest you check out Segorte Land Trust. It's all women-led, indigenous-led, urban land trust out of Oakland. And they just successfully got 47 acres of land back from the city of Oakland. So that's very amazing. Also, we are going to be hosting, we are for the second year in a row, we'll be host to the American Indian Film Fest, running November 4th through the 8th, which is really great because it opens up those films to be free to the whole community. So please check back on that. We have a lot of stuff happening at the library. You can check that back table. That newspaper is the best thing to look at. But as you can see, we've got a lot of things happening. I hope you will show up for them. Come out. We are back in gear. And just again, thank you all for coming out and being here. Right now, I'd like to introduce Joyce Jenkins, a Northern California book reviewer, and editor and director of Poetry Flash. Give it up. Hi, everybody. So great to see you. OK, here we go. We're going to jump right in into the deep water. And thank you, Anissa. As Anissa said, I'm the chair of Northern California Book Reviewers, a volunteer association of reviewers, review editors, and others who write about books. This ceremony celebrates books published in 2022 by Northern California authors and California translators. These awards are presented by Poetry Flash with the world-class San Francisco Public Library and community partners, Mechanics Institute Library, and Women's National Book Association, San Francisco chapter. They're great. Each year, we come together over books. We read and discuss and fret over them, carrying them around in banker boxes. It's ridiculous. Seeking the best from hundreds of titles, finding in these books what we need to guide us through our cultural, political, and personal sea changes. Today, we gratefully celebrate all of these exceptional authors who help us through. Every single nominated book is our strong, strong recommendation to you. The Northern California Book Awards celebrate diversity. We believe we are stronger and better when we are learning together. If you are a book reviewer and would like to join us, contact me and be persistent. Let's draw a bigger circle together. The Northern California Book Reviewers who selected these books are listed with gratitude at the back of your program. The comments you hear today were all written by NCVR committee members. And will be posted on the NCBA page at poetryflash.org. And just think of it this way. We're making a quilt, a quilt of spirit and words for you. That's what we're doing here today. So the Booksmith, they have done their best to order all the books for us and make sure that the books are here. They tried. They're here. Be generous. Please be generous and pick one up. Support independent booksellers. And as Anissa said, a reception will follow in the Latino, Hispanic meeting rooms across the lobby. The children's literature, younger readers' nominees are a blaze with color, a story of painter, Alma Thomas, Jean Walker Harvey, illustrated by Love Is Wise. This book takes young readers on a vibrant and colorful journey through the life and art of an influential African-American artist. Alma Thomas is a young girl with a burning passion for color. It wasn't until her 70s that she focused on her own art. She painted in a new style, inspired by vibrant colors and abstract shapes and nature. The world noticed, and she became the first African-American woman to have a solo exhibition at Whitney Museum of American Art. 18 Vats of Water, Jinli Zhang, illustrated by Nadia Xie. Set in ancient China, this is the story of Xian, a young boy who dreams of becoming a master calligrapher, like his father. Xie embarks on a journey to learn calligraphy, discovering that it involves both writing and painting, but most importantly, patience. Father introduces his son to his method, washing ink brushes in vats of water. Each vat takes up to a year to turn black with ink. Once 18 vats of water have turned black, learning is complete. Listen to the language of the trees, a story of how forests communicate underground. Tara Kelly, pictures by Marie Hermanson. Set deep in a great forest, we follow the life of a young seedling that sprouts at the base of a giant old tree and struggles to grow up and into the sunlight. The giant tree acts as a mother, sending the little seedling food and water. Wrapped in this great nurturing net, the little seedling grows as it listens to the language of the trees. Beautifully illustrated, scientifically accurate, this book offers children a vision of a secure world. The Younger Readers Award goes to a Blaze with Color, a story of painter Alma Thomas, Gene Walker Harvey. Thank you so much. I'm really honored. And congratulations to all the nominees here. It's so thrilling to be in a room of book people and reviewers really appreciate it. So I've been a docent at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for 20 years. And I give school tours. And I saw Alma Thomas' painting. And I thought, I have got to do a book about her. So she lived in Georgia at a time when she couldn't attend the schools or go to the library or go to museums. So I end the book with the culminating event of the Obamas choosing her artwork to be in the White House Historical Permanent Collection, first one of an African-American woman. So really thrilling. And last week, I did an author visit and read this book. And it happened to be the 133rd birthday of Alma Thomas. And after I read it, a boy said, wow. Wow, she lived a really, really, really long time ago. And I said, yeah, she did. And he said, but you know, with the words and the pictures, I felt like I was there with her. And I can feel that it made a difference to me. And of course, that warmed my heart because that's why we write books. And for that connection, I have to thank the amazing illustrator, Love Is Wise. So stunning, stunning illustrations. And I just want to read a little bit from the very beginning that shows Alma Thomas' love of color and nature, which greatly influenced her paintings and her view of life. And it starts with a quote by Alma Thomas. Through color, I have sought to concentrate on beauty and happiness rather than on man's inhumanity to man. Alma always felt her best when she was outside soaking up the sparkling colors of nature. In the garden at her house on a hill, she skipped around circles of flowers, pastel purple violets, and crimson roses crowned by bright green banana leaves. She fell back on the grass beneath poplar trees and gazed at quivering yellow leaves that whistled in the wind. Alma waited in the blue hues of a brook and basked in the warm glow of sunsets. And now I get to bask in this ward. Thank you very much. Too many messages coming in all at once. And your certificate. You're going to want this. It's beautiful. So you're up to go. Undercover Latina for the nominees in middle grade. The nominees in middle grade are Undercover Latina, Aya De Leon, an international organization that protects people of color, if only. But 14-year-old Andrea Hernandez-Baldiquin actually does work for one. Aya De Leon populates her book with witty, intelligent characters and gets profound points across without patronizing young readers. Her plot line maintains a beautiful equilibrium of romance, espionage, and familial relationships without losing its level of intelligence, sense of purpose, or abundance of heart. Wave, Diana Farid, illustrated by Chris Gotto. 13-year-old Ava loves to surf with her buddy Phoenix and reads roomy poems to settle her mild OCD. She sings and uses music to process her feelings. Ava's parents are divorced. Her dad lives in Paris. Her Iranian-born mom is a doctor. Set in 1980s Southern California, this coming-of-age story about a Persian girl is written in free verse. Lyricism and natural aquatic rhythms convey her sense of loss with honesty and compassion. Seen and unseen, what Dorothea Lange, Toh-Yo Maetake, and Ansel Adams' photographs reveal about the Japanese-American incarceration, Elizabeth Partridge, illustrated by Lauren Tamaki. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed executive order 9066, it forcibly relocated all Japanese immigrants in their descendants. Many were American citizens into concentration camps. The harsh conditions were depicted in images shot by three very different photographers, Dorothea Lange, Toh-Yo Maetake, and Ansel Adams. Their biographies, together with the body of this gorgeous book, depict the rampant prejudice and racial nationalism suffered by Japanese-Americans. The award for middle grade goes to Undercover Latina, Aya De Leon. Now, Aya De Leon is in LA at the Libros Festival right this minute, and that was long planned. And her friend Patty Mandara is here to accept for her. And thank you so much. Wow, what an honor. And I'm very honored to be here as an undercover Latina myself. I used to call myself a stealth Latina, and I have to call myself an undercover Latina. I have Aya's speech to share with all of you. I'm really nervous. Thank you so much for this incredible honor. Growing up in the Bay Area in the 70s and 80s, my mother and I were often undercover Latinas. She looked white, and I am obviously black. My mother always told me that the worst thing about being mistaken for white was hearing the racist things white people sometimes said when they thought there were no people of color in the room. Part of being an author, and particularly a social justice author, is figuring out how to tell stories that turn some of our challenges into advantages, which is why I love spy fiction. For women of color, being invisible, underestimated, taken for granted and expected to serve, others is a great advantage when it comes to espionage. It was a joy to imagine this mother-daughter pair and their team taken on white supremacy. But above all, the book is an invitation to everyone who has ever been put in a position where we're supposed to identify and align with oppression to make the decision to use our privilege for justice. These days, I have taken to writing about organizing around the climate crisis. Because as my folks in the boomer for Black Lives explain, climate justice is racial justice. I even hope to become a publisher of climate justice fiction, and to that end, I founded Fighting Chance Books. This afternoon, I offered deep gratitude to all the folks at Northern California Book Awards for their many decades of supporting and recognizing authors from our region. I'm so grateful for all the ways that Northern California has nurtured me as an author and change maker in my community. Thank you. And thank you for allowing me to read Aya's speech. Thank you so much. Thank you, Patty. OK, young adult. The young adult nominees are. And wow, what a rich field this was. I read all these books, oh my god. No stopping us now, Lucy Jane Bledsoe. 17-year-old Louisa is dissatisfied with playing basketball in the city rec league. But her high school still refuses to fund an all-girls team, even though it's 1974, and a law that prohibits discrimination based on sex had passed two years before. Based on the author's true story and set during a tumultuous period of transition for women's rights, this is a compelling exploration of gender equality and the power of activism. Self-made boys, Anna Marie Macklemore. New York City, 1922. The Jazz Age. Prohibition and bathtub gin. Nicholas, a 17-year-old transgender boy from Wisconsin, arrives in the Big Apple intent on establishing himself without succumbing to urban corruption. This reimagining of the Great Gatsby pulls F. Scott Fitzgerald's subtext to the surface, intensifying relationship dynamics and plot lines. Diverse trans, Latinx, and queer characters are woven into the story, creating a brand new version. Maddie and the Machine, Lynn Ng Creson. Maddie has the uncanny ability to fix anything mechanical and is tall for a girl of 15. But she lives in 1868 New England and is employed by Columbia Papers' all-female bag division. These are not necessarily good things. This is a fictionalized yet historically accurate account of Margaret E. Knight's fight for recognition as a 19th century female inventor who would be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2006. Her resourcefulness, sense of purpose, and determination make this empowering feminist commentary. All my rage, sabah tahir. The American dream can have its drawbacks, and so it does for Mizba and Sofik, who moved from Lahore, Pakistan after their arranged marriage and settled in the Mojave Desert Town of Juniper, California, where they run the clouds rest in Motel. Their sons, Salah Houdin and Noor, a close family friend, are connected by history in the challenges of growing up as outcasts in a place where Islamophobia is rampant. The Young Adult Award goes to All My Rage, sabah tahir. Sabah was not able to join us today, but sent this acceptance. Thank you so much for this award, which is all the more meaningful for who's presenting it, the unique, loving, and wonderful book community in Northern California, who made me feel at home while I was writing All My Rage. I moved to Northern California as an unpublished writer in 2012. I was in Union Square San Francisco the first time I submitted my book to an agent for representation many, many years ago. I worked out the details of my first publishing deal while I was in my office, also known as my car, in Mountain View. I spent years writing All My Rage in coffee shops, houses, and offices up and down the peninsula. My deepest thanks to every local bookseller, author, librarian, educator, reviewer, and friend who told me that I could do this, who believed in me and at All My Rage, and who has shared my work with others. Your support is a gift I never take for granted. Next, the NCBR Groundbreaker Award. This is for Real Pioneering Spirit. Goes to Litquake, San Francisco's literary festival. Litquake has become a cornerstone of our cultural life. Presenting readings and events at hundreds of Bay Area venues, almost all of us, myself included, have been part of it, one way or another, time and time again. Truly a groundbreaker, Litquake, founded in 1999 by Jane Ganal and Jack Bowe, has, at last count, hosted 10,500 authors for 275,000 attendees and distributed 12,000 free books to San Francisco school children. In its lively celebration of San Francisco's contemporary literary scene, Litquake seeks to foster an interest in literature, perpetuate literary community, and provide a forum for Bay Area writing. Accepting the award is Nora Peel, the new executive director of Litquake. Nora? Nora? I just got reading glasses, so about that age. Any thanks to the Northern California Book Reviewers, Poetry Flash, and San Francisco Public Library for hosting this ceremony, and to the NCBR for presenting Litquake with this award and for inviting me here to accept it. I've got to admit, I feel like a bit of an interloper being the one to accept the award on behalf of Litquake. After all, I've only been with the organization since July, and I've spent most of the time since then deep in preparations for our upcoming festival. The most revolutionary thing I've done for the organization has been to adopt new accounting software. Hardly the kind of thing groundbreaking awards are based on. That title, of course, should go to Litquake founders Jack Bullware and Jane Ganahl, as well as the cast of thousands we credit on our website. They're the ones who've built Litquake into what it is today, largely by possessing the genius and wisdom to recognize San Francisco's best and brightest writers and literary organizations and giving them the space to shine. Our board will be fetting Jane and Jack at a retirement party this evening, however, so I'm happy to stand here to accept the award and give them time to rest up for that shindig. But this does give me a brief, I promise, opportunity to share a little bit about myself and what I see as Litquake's role right now. I'm not an author or a poet or a journalist, although I do write countless emails and quite a lot of book reviews and the occasional three-minute acceptance speech. I view myself as a reader, first and foremost, and that's the lens through which I approach my work. Like most of you, I'm alarmed at the growing trend of keeping books away from readers who are hungry for them. And that's why I see the work that we do at Litquake and that you all do as book critics as essential right now. Books and their authors shouldn't be silenced or stifled or hidden away from public view. Instead, their work should be read and heard and discussed in conversations that can be challenging and provocative but still civil and productive. That's the kind of space Litquake strives to create. When I talk with other book festival directors in places like Arizona and Texas about the challenges they face, I'm continually reminded that a festival like Litquake might not be possible everywhere in the country right now, but that doesn't mean that any of us should be complacent, which is why it's more important than ever to give writers opportunities to connect with readers and for us to champion the work of authors like those being recognized today. I'm so honored to continue the groundbreaking work begun by Litquake's founders, and I hope you'll join me for this year's festival kicking off in less than a week and appropriately enough this same space. Thank you. OK, next. The NCBR Recognition Award. Now, there's going to be a little change in your program. Not, yeah, a little change in your program. So the NCBR Recognition Award for an extraordinary book or project outside of our categories goes to Illustrated Black History, Honoring the Iconic and the Unseen, George McCallman, winner of the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work debut author. George McCallman's Illustrated Black History is more than a book about 145 famous and little-known black pioneers from James Baldwin to Colin Kaepernick to Aretha Franklin to Guyan Stuart Bluford astronaut. This bold work is a cultural artifact. In addition to the original portraits and short essays celebrating black Americans and their achievements, the book is framed by five powerful essays by award-winning contributors on their personal explorations of black history. This and Illustrated Black History was created from a completely black perspective with McCallman himself as the writer, artist, and designer alongside an all-black team. So we'd really love to honor this book. George, are you here? George McCallman? There he is. It's a gorgeous book. Hello, everyone. I did not write a speech because I'm just used to talking about this project from my experience. So this book did not exist before I made it. This is the thing I say to any and everyone who asks me what the experience of making this is very, very special. I was going to talk about the process of making it, but I'm actually going to talk about a very emotional aspect of it, and I'm fine crying in front of you if that's what it comes to. Thank you. So as was just revealed, I am the co-writer, artist, and designer of this book. That's a pretty irregular thing. The book was published by Harper Collins, and it took me six years of working on it before I spoke to the head of Harper Collins. And I said, has anyone else in your history done all of that in one book? And she said, no, you're the first. And I have an unfair advantage in that I come from the publishing industry. I started out as a magazine art director. I have been designing things for almost 30 years. And as much as I know the engineering and mechanics of publishing, like breathing and brushing my teeth, this experience of making this book took me back down to the basics of being a student of my craft. And I had just kind of come out as an artist a couple of years before I made this book. And so it had been a lot of pent-up purpose and intention and energy. My mother was involved in this process in a very particular way. My mother passed away from terminal cancer two and a half years ago as I was finishing this book and played a very seminal role. I moved to Florida to take to be one of her caregivers for the last four months of her life while working simultaneously seven days a week on this book. And so the twin poles of watching my mother die and being with her as she died while giving birth to this book is an experience, the twin poles of that experience. I will never forget. And so one of the last acts of working on the manuscript, working with my co-writer, April Reynolds, who is quite brilliant, was waking up every morning and figuring out the book was originally written in the third person. And April was the one who suggested that I write it in the first. And I felt that that was way too personal, that black history as an experience is still something that Americans typically are uncertain about. It is a concept that has been segregated and has formed its own category of how Americans talk about it, which is that it's not integrated. And so the idea of making it personal, making it first, felt a little disorienting to me. And I remember April saying, I think we should really make it more personal. And I remember reading a passage to my mother on Dr. Maya Angelou that we had rewritten. And it was maybe a month before she died and she was still able to speak. And waking up in the morning, sitting down with her on a Sunday morning and reading the passage to her. And she looked at me and she said, that's it. That is it. And I said, well, doesn't it feel too personal? And she looked at me and I will never forget. And she said, isn't that the point? From that, we rewrote the entire manuscript of the book, everything. And now this book is the personal experience that it was always meant to be. We still think of black history as black history, not American history. And that's why I created this book, where all everyone in this room, myself included, is too casual about this. We are too casual about the integration of honoring the black pioneers who contributed to a way of life that all of you take for granted, all of us take for granted, that I used to take for granted. And this is somehow still not one of the most important cultural things that we speak about. We tend to relegate how we talk about our black pioneers to a couple of months a year. From my vantage point, that is unacceptable. And so I made something, instead of complaining about it, I made something to change the dialogue and the discourse around it. And so I was ruminating today on my way here that my mother, who used to work for the UN, was a worldly, sophisticated woman, traveled the world fearlessly, made herself comfortable in every room she was in, and created and made a son who followed in her footsteps that she would just be delighted by this today. So thank you so much. Thank you. OK. Next, NCBR member Sharon Coleman will present the California Translation Awards. Sharon? Good afternoon. Thank you for coming. The nominees for the California Translation and Poetry Award are Fiat Lux by Paula Abramo, translated from the Spanish by Dick Cluster. Fiat Lux is a beautiful and rich family history and poetry. The poems trace the path of Paulo Abramo's ancestors as political refugees from Italy and Eastern Europe to Brazil, Brazil to Bolivia, back to Brazil, and then to Mexico. The stories are loosely placed in chronological order and have a consistent theme that of striking a match and Fiat Lux. Let there be light. All of this adds to an engrossing poetic journey through time, place, and history. It must be a misunderstanding. Coral Brancho, translated from the Spanish by Forrest Gander. This collection by acclaimed Mexican poet Coral Brancho is dedicated to her mother, who died from complications of Alzheimer's in a memory care facility. In this bilingual edition in its original Spanish and translated here into English by Poet Forrest Gander, whose mother also died of Alzheimer's, we feel the tenderness and compassion of the people who are losing of the poet daughter as she tries to navigate, understand, and witness the daily struggles of people who are losing their grasp on language and themselves. A summer day in the company of ghosts, Wang Yin, translated from the Chinese by Andrea Lingenfelter. Wang Yin's bilingual new and selected, published here in its original Chinese and translated into English by Andrea Lingenfelter, spans almost 40 years, beginning with early work from the 1980s and including new poems, some written as recently as 2021. To quote Beidou, he is one of the most outstanding avant garde poets to emerge in China since 1980. And the California Translation and Poetry Award goes to A Summer Day in the Company of Ghosts, Wang Yin, translated by Andrea Lingenfelter. Thank you so much. This is a huge honor. And I feel doubly blessed. This is the second time I've received this award for a work from the Chinese. And I first met Wang Yin in 2007 on a rainy day in Shanghai, a summer rain. And we just met in a cafe and we talked because he was looking for a translator and I was looking for a poet that I could relate to and whose work would resonate with me. And we really hit it off. And I knew even before I read the poems in the book that he gave me that this was really going to be good. This was going to work. But it's been a very slow thing. I'm a very slow translator. I took many years. And it's just, you know, we had a residency 10 years after we met, a translation residency at the Vermont Studio Center. And that produced a lot of what the manuscript that became this book. But it is just a huge honor that all of this sort of quiet labor that we do as translators, much of it so solitary with the exception, of course, of wonderful translation groups with one of the other nominees for Dick Cluster had to call out. And Forrest Gander, who's been a huge supporter of Wang Yin and his work, I feel that I wouldn't have got this award without you two and your support. I'm going to read one of the poems from the book because I didn't really prepare a speech. And I'm a little tongue-tied right now. It's called Martians. It's one of the early poems. And it just has a particular quality. And I suppose it's about unlikely friendships, Martians, they gave me orange ice cubes, an airship, the same color. They drank tea at the table with me, shared cookies from a tin. They pincered my books as if lifting a corner of air and taught me to walk across embers on the water. No one but them, my only three friends, my friends as light as leaves, like music-painted porcelain. And once again with the night, they quietly withdrew beyond the mirror moon. So thank you. And thank you from Wang Yin as well. I'm going to let him know. He was very excited about this. So thank you. Thank you so much. The nominees for California Translation in Pros Award are The Old Woman with the Knife by Gu Bi-Yong Mo, translated from the Korean by Chi Yong Kim. 65-year-old Horn Claw lives alone in a small apartment with her dog Deadweight. She has a successful career as a disease control specialist, an actuality, an assassin. And has spent her life ruthlessly killing the targets she has been hired to eliminate. However, an unexpected injury changes everything. She has to seek help which results in an unexpected connection with a doctor. The translator does a superb job in keeping the flow of action and surprise. The performance by Claudia Petrucci, translated from the Italian by Anne Milano Appel. The arc of this novel involves a love triangle centered on Georgia, an actor who abandoned her career to live with Filippo, but by chance meets a former director Mauro who reawakens her passion for the theater. Well written and well translated, this story touches on borderlines of reality and fiction, possession and control, passivity and power. And the California translation in prose goes to The Performance by Claudia Petrucci, translated by Anne Milano Appel. Anne Milano Appel could not be with us today, so Dorothy Gilbert, winner of the 2016 Translation and Poetry Award, will accept the award on her behalf. Hello, everybody. I'm just delighted that this book has won a prize. It is quite fascinating what Claudia Petrucci has been able to do with these three distinct characters. And the actress, Georgia, and her lover, Filippo, and the director, Mauro. I'm going to read a statement by Anne Milano Appel, who couldn't be with us today. At one of the past award ceremonies, which I recall were held in April or May at the time, I commented on accepting the award that these occasions had become a rite of spring. As a three-time winner of the award and a five-time finalist, I am deeply grateful to everybody connected with this honor for the continued encouragement and support of my work. I always looked forward to these events, and I am very sorry to have to miss it this time. The translation being recognized today, the performance by Claudia Petrucci is the debut novel of a young Italian writer who currently lives in Australia. She has since published a second novel, The Perfect Circle, just out in Italy. And she recently has returned to Italy to promote it. What personally struck me about the performance was the aspect of manipulation of how the two male characters attempt to reinvent the protagonist, Giorgia, based on their own projections of what they want her to be. The story briefly revolves around Giorgia and Filippo, a young couple in Milan whose dull, routine life is the opposite of dreams they've left behind. Until Mauro, a theater director in Giorgio used to work with, comes back into her life and insists on her returning to the stage. Mauro knows that Giorgia's talent is based on the fact that she is unable to separate her true self from the role she is playing. When she suffers a dramatic psychotic break during the opening night of their show and ends up catatonic in a psychiatric clinic, the two men devise a plan to return her to normality by exploiting an exercise used in the theater. All they have to do is write a script in which the main character is Giorgia herself, or better yet, a new, improved version of her. In effect, the new version of Giorgia turns out to be a malfunctioning puppet, a partial, imperfect imitation, and what began as an exercise meant to restore Giorgia's core identity takes on a disturbing air of possession and manipulation. Giorgia is never master of her destiny, but a marionette in the hands of Filippo and Mauro. Viewed from a feminist slant, the book is disquieting and unsettling, a powerful, riveting portrayal of manipulation and control. Thank you again for your recognition of this work. If time permits, I would like to give you three minutes of how the skill with which the author and the translator have portrayed this woman and the others. Giorgia has been in the clinic, but she's been let out to have dinner with her lover, Filippo, and his parents who are very fond of her. I'm so happy, my mother says, after the espresso and liqueur, we missed you. There is a distinct moment of peace. I can see it clearly, the one where everything falls back in place. My footsteps are once again in front of me, and all I have to do is follow them. My footsteps are right here in a place that has known me since I was born in the eyes of the person I love whom I've come to know. Then Giorgia stands up. I want to wash the dishes, she announces. No, no, sweetheart, sit down. I'll do them later, my mother says, waving a hand. No, I really want to wash the dishes, Giorgia repeats. She starts gathering up the empty cups, glasses, teaspoons. My mother tries to take some of them out of her hands with no success. Joe, I call her. That's fine, come on, sit down. She gives no sign of having heard me. You don't have to, I say, leave something for my mother to do for later. But I'm considerate, she says, confused. Of course you're considerate, but there's no need to do spring cleaning. But I'm considerate. I start getting nervous, but I pretend to be calm. I feel my mother's eyes boring into my back. That's right, Joe, you're considerate. I want to clean up. I'm sure my parents prefer your company to a clean kitchen, I say, taking her gently by the hand. Come on back. She looks at her hand, then at my parents, then at me. By the time I spot the tears, it's already too late. In no time, Giorgia begins to cry. I feel the temperature in the room plummet. But I'm considerate, she repeats, looking at me as if I had accused her of an atrocious crime. Of course, of course, Joe, I say, placing my hands on her shoulders. Look at me, of course you're considerate. I try to stifle the panic, but she continues to cry. Her sobbing grows more intense, and her face starts turning red. Why don't you want me to clean up? She sobs, wiping her cheek with a sleeve. I just want you to enjoy your dinner. But I want to clean up! She says it with such anguish that my father gets up from the table. So let her clean, then, he says, standing behind her. What's the harm? I'm considerate, Giorgia says again, turning toward him. I say, you're right, go right ahead and clean. We watched Giorgia scrub the kitchen. The more she cleans, the more her good mood is restored. But it's time to clear away the bottles and linen from the table. She is radiant. Thank you, Dorothy. The nominees for the General Nonfiction Award will be presented by NCBR member Jim LeCure. Jim, wait, wait. Yeah, did I say general nonfiction? Yes, good. General nonfiction. No, here you go. Okay. Hi, I think this is a lovely, fine, beautiful little wonderful event. And think of all the energy and work that goes into it. The nominees for the General Nonfiction Award are Captain of her Soul, the Life of Marion Davies by Laura Gabrielle. Most people now know a little, very little about Marion Davies, a star in 48 films, one of the most popular and well-liked silent film actresses of early Hollywood. An energetic, fiercely independent woman who created and kept control of her life. She was pal or lover of Charlie Chaplin. She partied with the greats of the era. Laura Gabrielle is the reigning expert on Marion Davies. This is a spirited, well-researched, highly readable biography that will pull you straight back to those times. American Midnight, the Great War, a violent peace and democracy's forgotten crisis, Adam Hochschild. American Midnight is Adam Hochschild's history of the era from World War I to the beginning of World War II, from the corruption of war profiteering to the destruction of the Wobblies, to the infamous Palmer raids, and J. Edgar Hoover passed the roaring 20s and the Great Depression. American Midnight is an important addition to the history of the United States and a great read. Wise gals, the spies who built the CIA and changed the future of espionage by Nathalia Holt. From its origin in World War II, the CIA has been a man's world of dangerous espionage. Women worked as secretaries or office help. Into this came a group of highly intelligent women. They took risks like men, entered enemy territory, did everything a man could do and more. They gained respect as hardworking dedicated angels, ancients, yet they were treated as at first inferior with most important jobs held out for men. These wise gals helped lead the way in a struggle for women's rights. Listen, world, how the intrepid Elsie Robinson became America's most-read woman by Julius Shears and Allison Gilbert. In this fascinating book, we learn how Elsie Robinson became America's most-read woman and how she managed to create multiple lifetimes from working a gold mine to becoming William Randolph Hearst's most successful columnist. The women, thousands of other women reached out to for advice. Julius Shears and Allison Gilbert devoted over 11 years combing letters and columns that had never been collected before. Who killed, excuse me, who killed Jane Stanford, a gilded age tale of murder, deceit, spirits, and the birth of a university by Richard White. This intellectual who'd done it is a reconstruction of the early years of Stanford University. We learn that Jane Stanford fully intended for the new university to become a monument to her dead son. A committed spiritualist, Jane, used her vast fortune to hire and fire for the new university. We come to know which characters were suspect when her poisoning occurred. Multiple possibilities for her death are put forward with a great push to declare her death just by natural causes. And the General Nonfiction Award goes to Listenworld, how the intrepid. There to accept is Julius Shears. I was not expecting this. I prepared nothing. I didn't come with anybody. I ran into my friend, thankfully, and we sat together. But oh my God, I am so flattered. There are so many famous people here and so many big books and big authors. But this is incredible. I'm gonna blabber. So my agent did not want me to write this book because she said, nobody reads biographies of women. So thank you, thank you for this validation. It was an amazing book to write. It was a lot of fun. She is a hometown hero born in Benisha in 1880, dirt poor and just had this desire to become a writer, to become an artist, which she did. So you can imagine a woman born in the Victorian era, like all of the challenges and obstacles before her. She married a wealthy man, and which women, that's kind of the highest goal of the day, to marry well, to marry wealthy, which she did. She was miserable and she left him to go work in a gold mine and to learn the skill of how to write. Right? Right, she followed her dream, she followed her bliss. She was in Hornitos, California, working with a motley crew of men, the only woman in this gold mine. And at night, pecking away at a typewriter, trying to learn how to write and submitting stories to Sunset Magazine, to all of these magazines that no longer exist. But her drive was just incredible. Anyway, it was a very inspiring book to write after writing two relatively sad stories. My second one is on the Jonestown tragedy. Yeah, so I am just, I am blown away. I was not expecting this, so thank you. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. Thank you, Julia. Now for creative nonfiction. NCBR member Jonah Raskin will present the Creative Nonfiction Award. Jonah, there he is. There's the man of the hour, Jonah Raskin. Thank you, Joyce. This event is definitely the creation of many tribes who come together and it wouldn't happen if it wasn't for Joyce. She's amazing. Spy daughter, queer girl in search of truth and acceptance in a family of secrets, Leslie Absher. Journalist Leslie Absher explores two big secrets from the Cold War era in her suspenseful memoir, which is parts by story, part global thriller and part family melodrama. The first secret concerns gender and focuses on the author herself, the queer girl in the book's title. The second concerns her father, a spy for the US Central Intelligence Agency who operated under the radar in global hotspots and went to his grave with secrets. Leslie reveals hers. How to Read Now, essays, Elaine Castillo. In this tour de force for the age of Black Lives Matter and the hashtag me too movement, Castillo dismantles American pieties about ethnicity, class and gender. Inspired by the ideas of Toni Morrison, John Berger, among other, she offers trenchant critiques of Jane Austen, J.K. Rowling and Joan Didion. Castillo suggests that we might read fewer books, dive more deeply into them and become more aware than we are of the connections between literature and power. The man who could move clouds, Ingrid Rojas Contreras. Born in Bogota, Columbia, Ingrid Rojas Contreras explains near the end of her potent memoir that quote, magical realism was just realism to us. Violence, guerrillas, poverty, prostitution and legendary narcos such as Pablo Escobar, the head of the Medellin Cartel provide the backdrop to a non-linear narrative of a family that struggles to survive and that turns to doctors, priests and traditional healers known as Quaranderos. Creativity, where poems begin, Mary Mackey. A lyrical autobiography by a poet who discovered her true subject after false starts and elusive beginnings. Creativity makes poems and poetry accessible, comprehensible and enjoyable. The book includes nearly two dozen works by the author herself that illustrate her crystal clear ideas and that stand on their own as a testament to the endurance and persistence that enabled her to overcome quote, suffering, grief, loss, sadness and despair. Year of the Tiger, an activist life, Alice Wong. Soon after Wong was born in 1974, doctors gave her 18 months to live. Now at 49, she's alive and thriving though she needs a wheelchair for mobility and a ventilator full time. Despite disabilities, she emerged as an author, activist, founder and co-producer of the Disability Visibility Project, hosting a podcast, publishing essays and collaborating with StoryCorps. Wong says, I feel such a rush of creativity and the urge to tell my story. Being so intimate with suffering and death will do that to you. Creative non-fiction goes to Year of the Tiger, Alice Wong. Alice will accept by video with a text to speech computer app. Hello, everyone. I am sorry I cannot attend the award ceremony in person because I just got my flu shot and COVID booster recently and it was such an ordeal finding and appointment in my area that I had to do it and rest for the next few days. I'd like to thank everyone involved in the nomination of my book for the Northern California Book Award. I also want to congratulate the writers who are also nominated in the Creative Non-Fiction Category, Leslie Abcher, Elaine Castillo, Ingrid Oyas Contreras and Mary Muckie. As all of you know, it is quite a thing to write a book and for some it can be a culmination of decades of work and writers are not the only people involved in this production. My agent, Julia Cardin of HG Literary, my editor Anna Kaufman at Vintage Books and the entire team at Vintage who put my book together with such beauty and care. Last year was hell for me when I was in the ICU that summer a few months before the publication of Year of the Tiger. I almost died multiple times and lost the ability to speak, eat, drink or breathe without a ventilator, which is why I am speaking to you with the text to speech app. I feel such urgency to write now and before because I know that time is not on my side. And I wrote about my relationship with mortality in Year of the Tiger bookman. The last 12 months have really made that true. What kept me going was my friends and family and notably the disability community who shared so much of their time and resources with me as I adjusted to a radically new body and tried to heal and rest. My disabled friends and comrades took over my book promotion when it came out last fall because I was in no condition to do anything. This was my first book, aside from the anthology disability visibility which I edited in 2020 and I was worried about what would happen to it since many of us know the pressures of book promotion. With my input, my friends arranged to have people interviewed about my book and we co-organized a series of online book events featuring Asian American disabled writers and other disabled writers of color discussing Year of the Tiger. And in many ways, this is what it should be. Writers shouldn't shoulder the entire burden of promoting a book and they should bend and twist the conventions of the publishing industrial complex to make it accessible for our bodies and minds. Disabled people are still poorly represented in publishing as writers and industry professionals. I mentioned in Year of the Tiger, one of my ambitions is to become the editor in chief of an imprint from a big five publisher that solely publishes work by disabled writers and more importantly is edited by disabled people. I still have a voice and so many dreams ahead of me and I believe it will happen one day not just for myself but for all of us because disabled people deserve and demand more than the crumbs from publishing and popular culture. Thank you. Our reviewer, Lee Rossi, will present poetry. Lee's chair of the Poetry Committee this year. No, I didn't. Hi, it's nice to see everyone. Yeah, wow. So many amazing stories this afternoon. It's just wonderful and overwhelming. Let's hope I can get my stuff together here. All right, so there were many wonderful books to read this year. There always are. This year there was over 30. The nominees for the Poetry Award are Martian, The Saint of Loneliness by James Cagney. And this is a poetry collection that hooks us from the beginning using mixed forms and engaging an emotional range that leaps from this specific to the eternal. There is so much artfulness here with zero pretense. James Cagney's poems are honest, sometimes painfully honest and other times infused with the humor of telling it straight. Cagney's velocity and variety as an artist is an arrow to the heart. The next nominee is Of Mineral by Tiff Dressen. The poems here pay homage to wonder, wonder of the natural world, of rapture, of the gifts of paying close attention. The language is spare and considered, directing the reader to notice and examine, to linger in the poem's breathing open spaces. Tiff Dressen adheres to the vocabulary of science, a constraint that somehow flips the poems into the minute and personal. The poems speak of the essential, the sea, the body, darkness, the city, and how the vastness of the universe overpowers. Our next nominee is Customs by Solmah Sharif. In Customs, Iranian-American poet Solmah Sharif revisits themes and concerns from her earlier volume, Look, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Language is her weapon. And like abused and oppressed women in her various homelands, she resolves to carry on the fight. Quote, I wipe clean my blade, I wipe clean my blade, I tap at the door, I pass through, so that. And there the poem ends without really ending, signaling to the reader that the fight continues into the life of the poet and the world. Next nominee is Open Pit by Jose Antonio Villaran. History, poetry, social protest, this book chronicles the destructions of Maracocha, a small community in the Peruvian Andes. When the mountain is sold to a Chinese mining company for copper, molybdenum, and silver, the people are forced to relocate and leave their homes. Framed as a drama whose actors are human and non-human, he gives voice, Villaran gives a voice, both moving and morally urgent to the social and environmental tragedy. And finally, as she appears by Shelly Wong, got some fans out there. Intimate and intricate, Shelly Wong's debut collection tracks the aftermath of an 11-year relationship as Wong steps out onto Fire Island in a floating year. In poems that alternate between grief and joyful perception, Wong discloses to the reader her sense of finding oneself and one's desires renewed by loss. Many of the poems center on navigating public spaces as a queer Asian-American woman and finding solace and sustenance in the broader gay community. And the winner in poetry is Customs by Salma Sherry. But unfortunately, Salma Sherry came down with COVID. And I think it was either yesterday or today. And so she's not able to be here and she's very sorry. I think she's glad to have won this award. I hope she is. It's a terrific book. And just to give you a flavor of it, I'm gonna read one poem from it, okay? There are many poems in here that I was wrestling with. Which one? Which one? Okay, I'm gonna read something called Beauty. Frugal musicality is how Kristave, the philosopher and feminist, describes the speech of depression. Cleaning out the sink drain, the melted cheese, the soggy muesli. My life can pass like this, waiting for beauty. Tomorrow, I say. A life is a thing you have to start. The fridge is a thing with weak magnets, a little sweaty on the inside, a bag of shriveled limes, a rugula, frozen, then thawed, then frozen again, still sealed. I haven't touched anyone in a year. You asked for beauty in one morning, a small blue eggshell on the stoop, shattered open, its contents gone, likely eaten. M asked if I've ever made a choice to live, and why? I lied the way you lie to the suicidal. A few times I said, not most days, most mornings, no, not morning, morning I am still new, still possible. I'm still possibly, usually by three o'clock. When grandmother died, she hadn't been called beautiful in at least half a century. It's never described as such. Her fallen stockings, the way she spit, thwack of the meat cleaver, the little bones she sucked clean and piled on her plate, not really looking at anything, and certainly not me. Yeah, that poem moves. Thank you. Thank you, Lee. Okay, fiction, fiction. If I survive you, Jonathan, yeah. If I survive you, Jonathan, as Coffrey, the characters in this strong debut collection move through a world that constantly endeavors to reduce them. Their stories fling open the world of racism and pull the reader inside. Racism deep and broad and faceted, nuanced in ways that drive apart characters who together might have stood a chance. In the end, the series of standalone stories, each thoroughly engaging in itself, forms a mosaic of the life of one young, non-white man in 21st century America. Forbidden City, Vanessa Hua. Forbidden City draws the reader into its spectacularly detailed and immersive world to tell a largely unknown story that of the women of China's cultural revolution. Through protagonist Mei Zhang, who leaves the poverty of her village to become a dancer for party elites, and then chairman Mao's mistress, Hua brings to light the buried history of these women and girls recruited to serve their nation and what they believe to be a high calling. Hua is a master of her craft at the height of her powers. Divine madness, Lynn Kaufman. The elliptical novel narrated by the writer Elizabeth Hardwick tells the story of her love for, marriage to and divorced from, the poet Robert Lowell. Spanning three decades, it set in the lively milieu of New York City's literati during the second half of the 20th century. Kaufman handles language with the devotion of a poet and plot with the skill of a storyteller. She walks the tightrope of fiction about real people with panache, and the ending manages, despite the fact that it's already taken place, to be a perfect surprise. What we fed, yeah it is, what we fed to the manachore, Talia Lakshmi Kholuri. Talia Lakshmi Kholuri's collection of nine lush lyrical stories told from the viewpoints of animals, wild, domesticated, and in between, is at once achingly beautiful and sharply incisive. Both the animals and the settings vary widely. A polar bear and fox seeking solace in each other for the end of their world and the Arctic. A donkey painted as a zebra in a bombed zoo in Gaza. Themes of loneliness, consolation, and fierce loyalty thread through these shimmering tales. Nightcrawling, Le La Motley. Nightcrawling is spoken by Chiara, a black girl in East Oakland. She and her older brother Marcus live in an apartment complex, Regal High, and their landlord is raising the rent. When Marcus is unable to help with the money, desperate to avoid eviction, Chiara takes to the streets and on one of those nights she gets picked up by a cop and becomes sexually exploited by a group of Oakland policemen. It's a compassionate, deeply imagined book of the human spirit struggling for life against the pressures of poverty and neglect. Fiction goes to Nightcrawling, Le La Motley. Now Le La had a family crisis and can't join us today, but she sent this statement. Thank you to the Northern California Book Awards for this incredible honor to even be nominated beside these accomplished authors is such a privilege. So thank you all so much. It means so much to have a work that was so rooted in Northern California, specifically in Oakland, be recognized in this way. When I wrote Nightcrawling, my hope was to extend a vision of Oakland, my city, and my people that truly captured the honesty of a complicated city so often reduced and over-simplified to what is easy. The version of Oakland captured in Nightcrawling is not easy, but it is honest. It is full of joy, love, grief, terror, family, and liberation. So thank you for seeing the power in that and for recognizing it with this award. I appreciate every single person who has read this book, loved this book, shared this book, and understood it in both the complex realities of what this world can be for us and the miraculous ways we create hope and love anyway. So now we have one more thing on the agenda. One more thing on the agenda, the most fabulous thing, the Fred Cody Award. The Northern California Book Awards were co-founded by the late Fred Cody, legendary Berkeley bookseller and reviewer in 1981. He simply wanted to talk books over lunch. The award in his name has gone to an amazing array of our most crucial writers, from Audrey and Rich to Maxine Honkingston to Gary Snyder to Ishmael Reed to Brenda's husband Robert Hasse. I am thrilled and honored to present the Fred Cody Award for Lifetime Achievement and Service to Brenda Hillman. Brenda Hillman brings passion and love to everything she does, and she does a lot as writer, teacher, editor, translator, and activist. A poet first and completely. She's published 11 books of poetry, including Bright Existence, Finalist for the Pilotser, and Practical Water, Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire won the Griffin Poetry Prize, an extra hidden life among the days, won the Northern California Book Award. As throughout her career and deepening through time, she's experimental, fully present to the work, and even at her most mournful or troubled about our current climate, a poet of radiant play. An activist, she's pushed steadily for social and environmental justice. Her own work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Hillman's awards include the Academy of American Poets Fellowship and William Carlos Williams Prize. She's a Chancellor Emerita of the Academy of American Poets. She's Professor Emerita at St. Mary's College in Marraga, where she's the founder of the MFA in Creative Writing Program and is often called the mother of the program by her students, and was recently named Professor of the Year there. NCBR member Keith Eakus was writing of her new book in a few minutes before later, which we have here for you, Against ecological devastation and callous political crises, our ever-present sense of high alert, Hillman performs the poetic trick of slowing down time, of dilating moments in allowing multiple presences, people of all persuasions, animals near at hand, human detris and accomplishment onto the page. Hillman shows herself once again to be a poet of acute care, radical openness, and persistent invention. Please welcome Brenda Hillman, Fred Cody Award 2023. Hey, Brenda, here's your certificate. There you go. Thank you, Joyce. See that was amazing. Do not place anything on keyboard. Okay, okay, okay, well I'll do this. Thank you so much, my community. Oh, I'm so honored, so honored. Forrest Gander took that picture up in the Sierra. Yeah, in the tree, obviously. Oh, so when I read Joyce's, I wrote it so that I would time it. When I read Joyce's email informing me of this honor Bob and I were watching our miserable giant's tank for the umpteenth time and my first thought was lifetime achievement, how did it get to be so late? It's all been a blur since the all-star break. Jonah, I saw your, I saw your hat, you still have hope. Thank you to the committee, to the NCBR, for including me on the list with amazing writers who have won the Fred Cody Lifetime Achievement Award. Cody's books was such a major institution, both as a gathering place and as a safe haven. Malcolm Margolin has written that Berkeley, is a quote, provided all the necessary conditions for the flourishing literary scene, a diversity of independent bookstores to support locally produced books, a major university that supplied readers, and a diverse population hungry to explore rapidly evolving concepts of race, ethnicity, and gender. When I arrived in the Bay Area nearly 50 years ago, a hopelessly introverted but fairly plucky, paisley dressed, 24-year-old poet, I was terrified by Berkeley. I moved here to be with Leonard Michaels, a fiction writer who taught at Cal. We married and within a short time I was working at a bookstore myself, raising a blended family, trying to write. No cell phones. When the car broke down you walked to a phone booth. The baby got over three dozen ear infections in three years. People were quitting cigarettes and jogging at the same time. People hosted competing dinner parties, serving fondue in copper pots with sled-like handles, talking about Dairy Da. What saved me, what saved so many of us, was the life of writing, magical, packed, infinite, confusing. Here there were colliding, vivid, literary histories, San Francisco and Renaissance poetry, Black Arts movement, City Lights, Josephine Miles lived on Virginia Street, Robert Duncan and Tom Gunn lived in San Francisco, Lynn Heginian, Ishmael Reed, Al Young, and so many others lived in the East Bay, Maxine Hong Kingston, published Woman Warrior in 1976. Julia Vinograd walked on telegraph in a long dress, holding poems aloft. Sheamus Heaney visited frequently. Jack Shoemaker at Sand Dollar Books handed me a pale yellow chapbook by Leslie Scalapino featuring the letter O. Jack Spicer, language poetry, punk rock, Norma Cole translating French poets. Poetry Flash provided a monthly treasure trove of events. Thank you to the goddess Joyce Jenkins and Richie Silberg. Patricia Deans fry and I often spoke about the excitement of women's new presses, Kelsey Street Press, Shameless Hussy Press, and However Magazine. Life as a young working mother felt really hard. I was drawn to metaphors from medieval spiritual traditions like alchemy, to vocabularies from early modernism, to blends of bird song, document, unnamed punctuation, the impure, the possibilities of exploring form and showing others how to do it seemed boundless. When your soul is driven to the margins you write in the margins. Some committed acts of representational grouchiness but our community showed that there are enough words to go around. Literature expands around our dreams. Once when I visited Barbara Guest in her house in Berkeley toward the end of her life she said, Rinda, I have become a surrealist. I had become more of a bird lover. The natural beauty of the coast in peril drew me early on to eco-poetics. It was daunting to write as a woman in a largely male West Coast poetry tradition. Rex Roth, Snyder, Jeffers, Robert Hasse. Reader, I married him. Writing poems about geology led to a two decades long tetrology project about the classical elements, earth, air, water, fire, and then lichen followed. Now I'm working on a second tetrology about time, seasons, days, minutes, and centuries. Eco-poetics has now become an international movement connecting poets in Taiwan, Poland, and Brazil with poets writing in relationship to our planet in crisis. As a self-identified Celtic witch, I celebrate other creatures, hold the spirit world close, and talk to my salad before eating it. Northern California has been a nearly perfect place to try to write, living on a fault zone, trying and failing with like-minded souls to represent the moving center of this beautiful and troubled place. This award includes the word service. I've been called an activist poet because of my attempts at anti-war, pro-environment, social justice, anti-capitalist behaviors. I feel 90% of failure in that score. I've been booted off Twitter several times for ranting. I'm an Irish hothead. Nothing is more humbling than trying to organize social justice direct actions, especially if you are an introvert, but imaginative folks have to trust each other, lift each other up, look up from our phones long enough to face economic trauma, housing crises, fires, and self-righteous complaining about bugs on our organic produce. It's difficult to imagine how things will get better when there's so little will to address the widening economic disparities. The forms of service I'm proudest of are teaching and raising children, which I did partially well. I'm grateful to St. Mary's College for supporting me for nearly 40 years while I was writing my oddball poems. Our children and grandchildren have been our deep abiding joy. Thank you to everyone who reads books. Thank you to everyone who reads single poems. Reading is as important as writing, so thank you for bringing your creative energies to our renderings of beauty, terror, and silliness. Today, three friends came with us. Their initials are, and I'm not going to say their names because I don't want to embarrass them, D, N, and S. All creative readers who make the world better for their artistic engagements. Even the most successful writers I know suffer from crippling insecurities. So thank you for tweeting and saying nice things. Joining Zoom, book launches, and buying books that we know you have too many. Finally, and most of all, I want to thank Robert Hass, whose work I revered before I knew him. He's been my companion on my weird path for nearly four decades. I would have floated off in the ether without his daily brilliant lines, sentences, and his love. Yates refers to the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. The bottom of my heart has minnows from Strawberry Creek and Micah from the Sierra. So I want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart to all of you for being local and universal, for your commitments, for your love of what language makes possible. And I'll read one short, very short poem from the end of my book. It is, so the fact that's behind this lyric poem is that Golden Crown Sparrows return to the same, not just the same bush, but sometimes just to the same branch every year. They really know what they're doing when they say local. So thank you for the beauty you bring. On hearing the Golden Crown Sparrow half sweet squeal sounds like one hearing aid placed on the table. A song knows more than one way. When hills catch fire, this sparrow stays or returns to the same bush each year. We loved each other when we couldn't love ourselves, our life a time-shaped miracle. A new ash is covering the plants, planet, plans. The song's enchantment has a grainy hunger, finishingly, seep, seep, nightly finishing unearthbound like a Saturday. It's broad eyebrows, crowd, it's crown. When we are sad about poetry, when the immortals can't be heard because of fire, this staggered sound splits blinder about our height from the ground. Thank you so much. Thank you, Brenda Hillman. Now please join us for a reception with tasty snacks and libations in the Latino Hispanic meeting room starting now across the lobby. You know where it is and the books will remain in the lobby and you can peruse them, purchase them. The Booksmith has provided them. Be generous, support these authors and independent bookstores. Thanks to the San Francisco Public Library. Thanks for joining us. Thank you so much for coming.