“Takin’ It To The Streets…” Join Fourteen Hills at Litquake's Lit Crawl on Saturday October 9

Starving, hysterical, naked, dragging yourself through the streets for an angry fix? Well then, fans of text on the page or off the tongue, take note: Munich may have its Oktoberfest, but that’s when San Francisco mixes suds with words to shake the streets and alleys during LitQuake.

D.W. Lichtenberg performs at LitCrawl 2009

Originally hatched as “Litstock” over beers at the Edinburgh Castle pub in 1999, the idea ballooned and in 2002 was redubbed “LitQuake.” Well past time for tour books and city guides to meet their civic obligation to warn overflow crowds to leave their socks at home, since they’ll just be knocked off anyway during the week of live readings between October 1st and 9th. Highlights include the “Dawn of the Read” opening-night poetry party, mid-day “Off the Richter Scale Readings,” a snack-time “Kidquake,” and a chance to raise a glass of wine at “Flight of Poets” (co-curated by our editor-in-chief Hollie Hardy) on Wednesday October 6 at the Hotel Rex (562 Sutter Street).

But the event not to miss is on Saturday, October 9, during LitCrawl, Litquake’s infamous final night. At 8:30 pm, “Voices That Carry” echoes off the walls at Muddy’s Coffee House (1304 Valencia Street at 24th Street), featuring readers from both Fourteen Hills and Eleven Eleven.

Join us to see these featured readers for Fourteen Hills:

• Jeannine Hall Gailey is the author of Becoming the Villainess, which was published by Steel Toe Books in 2006. Some of those poems have been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac and on Verse Daily. Two were included in 2007’s The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. In 2007, Gailey received a Washington State Artist Trust GAP Grant and a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize.
• Lauren Hamlin has published in Zero Ducats, Poets & Writers, and Fourteen Hills where she read for the release party of issue 16.2. Watch it here. 
• Zara Raab is the author of The Book of Gretel and the forthcoming Swimming the Eel. Her poems appear in West Branch, Nimrod, Spoon River, Fourteen Hills, and elsewhere.

And these featured readers for Eleven Eleven:

• Aurora Brackett graduated with an MFA in fiction from San Francisco State University. Her stories and poems have been published in several literary journals and selected for awards, including the 2005 Wilner Award for the Short Story. She lives and teaches in Oakland.
• Catherine Meng is the author of the poetry collection Tonight's the Night (Apostrophe Books) and three chapbooks, 15 Poems in Sets of 5 (Anchorite Press), Dokument (Perichord Press), and Lost Notebook w/ Letters to Deer (Dusie Kollectiv).
• Loren Rhoads edited the cult nonfiction magazine Morbid Curiosity for ten years, and she has collected her cemetery travel essays in her book Wish You Were Here. Her short fiction has appeared in City Slab, Cemetery Dance, Not One of Us, the chapbooks Ashes & Rust and The Paramental Appreciation Society, and in the book Sins of the Sirens: Fourteen Tales of Dark Desire. Rhoads is a member of the Horror Writers Association and the Association for Gravestone Studies.

Since its inception in 1994, Fourteen Hills has been staffed exclusively by graduate students in the creative writing program at San Francisco State University, who collaborate to select and publish award-winning mixes of poetry, fiction, literary nonfiction, and cross-genre work by writers who have garnered such prestigious awards as the Pushcart Prize, the Flannery O’Connor Award, and been included in such anthologies as those put out by Best New Poets, 100 Distinguished Stories, Best American Gay Fiction, and O. Henry.

Eleven Eleven is the literature and art journal produced twice a year by the MFA Program in Writing and other members of the California College of the Arts community.

Our “Voices That Carry” may be eventually heard ’round the world, but why not hear them at their best—up close and personal at Muddy’s Coffee House? 

RSVP on Facebook and we'll see you there. (Arrive early to grab a seat.)

-Don Menn
Fourteen Hills staff