Written as the "War on Terror" morphed into an "Imperial War," Donatello’s Version carries on the Public Poetry tradition of such writers as Aeschylus, Sophocles, Horace, Juvenal, Dante, Milton, and Blake. These poems arise from the premise that words matter, that the res publica (the human value that individuals in a community place above their own self interest) also matters, and that the voice of the poet can make a difference.

James Scully’s poetry has appeared in many diverse periodicals. He has read at many colleges and universities, as well as the Theater of Latin America and the U.S. Congress. He has also written essays and plays and during the early 1980s he was general editor for Curbstone's Art on the Line chapbook series. He is the winner of the 1967 Lamont Award and was also the recipient of a 1973 Guggenheim Fellowship. He spent 1973-1974 in Santiago de Chile, during the early stage of the Pinochet regime, which he documented in his poetry book, Santiago Poems. His other works include Apollo’s Head,  Line Break: Poetry as Social Practice, and Quechua Peoples Poetry.

Jack Hirschman, San Francisco’s Poet Laureate, will introduce James Scully.

In February 2004, the San Francisco Chronicle began printing an enigmatic feature called “All Over Coffee.” Almost immediately, letters of love and hate, confusion and praise, poured in. Accustomed to the familiar formats of comic strips and cartoons, some readers struggled to understand a creation that seemed to live both within and beyond those boundaries.

All Over Coffee blends the timing of comics with the depth of poetry. Artist and writer Paul Madonna has fused art, literature, and comics by pairing timeless cityscapes with philosophical musings and poignant stories in masterfully rendered ink-wash drawings that surpass the art of Ben Katchor in elegance and architectural detail. His work has been compared to “a meeting of the tone of Edward Gorey, the uniqueness of Chris Ware, and the artfulness of Raymond Pettibon.”

Quirky, whimsical, and often profound, All Over Coffee’s stunning imagery and thoughtful writing combine to create a conceptual world, both dreamlike and familiar. This selection will delight anyone who has ever lived in or visited San Francisco – or dreamed of doing so – with its original, off-the-beaten path view of the city and its inhabitants.

Paul Madonna’s strip, All Over Coffee, appears weekly in the San Francisco Chronicle and on SFGate.com. Paul’s drawings and prints are shown several times a year in galleries, restaurants, and cafes. Other work can be found on his website, paulmadonna.com, and in various publications including the Believer Magazine, and the recent book A Writer’s San Francisco, written by author Eric Maisel. In 1994 Paul received a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University. That same year he was the first Art Intern at MAD Magazine, which he proudly received no money for. He currently lives with his wife in San Francisco.

On Sunday, May 6, 2007, Kerouac Alley in North Beach will once again be transformed into an open-air art gallery when we hold our 11th Art in the Alley event. The alley has been recently renovated into a stroll-friendly pedestrian way by the Chinatown Alleyway Improvement Association, among others. It has been beautifully repaved with modern cobblestones surrounding tablets engraved with quotations by LiPo, Confucius, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, as well as Jack Kerouac himself.

Over 30 emerging and established artists will showcase their work in the alley named for one of North Beach's most famous Beat icons.  A bountiful harvest of creativity will be on display including painting, poetry, sculpture, photography, prints, mixed media, and jewelry.  

Terry Van Zandt & the Keys will serenade the crowd throughout the afternoon.

Art in the Alley honors the irreverent spirit of North Beach by creating an opportunity for both local and regional artists to strut their stuff.  Janet Clyde, manager of Vesuvio, feels it's an ideal way to give back to the community and to celebrate this fabled neighborhood and its artistic roots. For more information, contact artinthealley@yahoo.com.

Amy Fusselman’s debut, The Pharmacist’s Wife, was published by McSweeny’s to rave reviews and launched her “delicate condition” tour when she was seven months pregnant in 2001. Now a new parent twice over, Fusselman chronicles marriage, motherhood, and the struggle to heal the old wounds of childhood abuse in 8: A Memoir.

Whether describing a cab ride or paraphrasing The Beastie Boys’ “Ch-Check it Out”, Fusselman’s elliptical style is immensely moving. Looping past and present together Fusselman returns to some subjects as she lets others go, retracing her life like the figure-eights of childhood skating lessons. From sleep training her son to the awful intimacy of childhood abuse, each subject offers fresh truth and the opportunity to heal. Full of Fusselman’s trademark sense of wonder, 8 also addresses monster trucks, motorcycling, robots, the nature of time, New York City, and, of course, figure skating and Oksana Baiul, the “Olympic figure skating/drunk-driver/platinum-blond hellion” as Fusselman refers to her.

Alternately heartbreaking, disturbing, and hilarious, 8 invites readers into Fusselman’s world, a place both strange and wonderful. Dark at moments but ultimately filled with hope, 8 reminds us that we are more powerful than we think.

For many in the Third World, life used to be what happened to them. No more. The decimation of Third World lives and livelihoods by the toxic resource extraction and relentless factory production of multinational corporations has been the catalyst for hitherto unimagined synchronicities and committed actions. Indigenous peoples and NGOs are massing thousands to stand in front of bulldozers and corporate offices. Activists, academics, journalists, finance professionals are coming together to reveal and redress the billions being siphoned from poor countries to offshore banks. Liaisons of churchgoers, environmentalists, human rights activists, and concerned citizens are using the power of their purchasing decisions to create a world that works for all. Come to hear more stories of the cresting wave!

Steven Hiatt is a professional editor and writer-but also has a long history as an activist. He has worked at the Stanford Research Institute, where he edited a series of research reports circulated to Global Fortune 1000 companies advocating standard neoliberal nostrums such as public-private partnerships and offshoring. He left SRI in 1987 and has since produced and edited books for Verso, The New Press, and other publishers, working with authors such as Alexander Cockburn, Mike Davis, Lewis H. Lapham, Christian Parenti, and Rebecca Solnit. He is the co-editor, with Mike Davis, of Fire in the Hearth: The Radical Politics of Place in America (Verso, 1989). Hiatt is currently president of Editcetera, a nonprofit Bay Area cooperative of publishing professionals.

Antonia Juhasz is a visiting scholar at the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Policy Studies and author of The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time (Regan/ HarperCollins, 2006), which explores the Bush administration's use of the military to advance a corporate globalization agenda in Iraq and throughout the Middle East (www.TheBushAgenda.net). Juhasz previously served as the project director of the International Forum on Globalization and as a legislative assistant to Congressmen John Conyers Jr. and Elijah Cummings. An award-winning writer, her work appears regularly on the Op Ed pages of the Los Angeles Times as well as numerous author newspapers and publications. She is contributing author to Alternatives to Economic Globalization: A Better World Is Possible (Berrett-Koehler, 2004).

Ellen Augustine is an author, activist, board member and founder of several progressive non-profit organizations focusing on media violence, mentoring youth at-risk, citizen diplomacy, and environmental restoration. She co-authored (as Ellen Schwartz) Taking Back Our Lives in the Age of Corporate Dominance and she currently speaks on Stories of Hope, profiles of people who are creating businesses which increase profits by being eco-friendly, communities and schools that nurture and sustain us, and initiatives that revitalize our environment (www.storiesofhope.us).

An innovative and engaging nonfiction debut by an original new voice and the second winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. In this sparkling nonfiction debut, Monson uses unexpectedly nonliterary forms–the index, the Harvard Outline, the mathematical proof–to delve into an equally surprising mix of obsessions: disc golf, the history of mining in northern Michigan, car washes, topology, and more. He reflects on his outsider experience at an exclusive Detroit-area boarding school in the form of a criminal history and invents a new form as he meditates on snow.

What has been said about Ander Monson's work:

“Unapologetically smart, unexpectedly emotional, and playful in ways that most nonfiction never attempts, Ander Monson’s Neck Deep and Other Predicaments is what we mean when we say essay.” —John D’Agata

“Elizabeth Bishop often remarked that she wanted poems and prose that register the mind in motion rather than at rest. Bishop would have loved the work of Ander Monson, as much for his yearning mind as his quick, restless, precise motion. ‘I HAVE BEEN THINKING ABOUT SNOW,’ Monson writes in Neck Deep . Yes, indeed, and one of the many copious and surprising things he's also obviously been thinking about is the new American essay, of which he is the latest Edison, to touch on the title of his earlier novel, Other Electricities. For Monson the essay is something like a schematics for our fiercest longings and most ecstatic inventions. Every time I turn to it I'm astonished all over again by the majesty of this book.” – Robert Polito, Judge

Founded in Maine by Matt O'Donnell, From the Fishouse is a non-profit (under section 501 (c) (3) of the Internal Revenue Code) that promotes the oral tradition of poetry. Their free online audio archive showcases emerging poets (defined for this purpose as poets with fewer than two published books of poetry at the time of submission) reading their own poems, as well as answering questions about poetry and the writing process. Their mission is to provide up-and-coming poets an outlet to a wider audience, to provide the public with greater access to authors reading their own work, and to provide an educational resource to students and teachers of contemporary poetry. From the Fishouse takes its name, and the spelling of "Fishouse," from the writing cabin of the late writer, Lawrence Sargent Hall. Hall renovated the former codfish-drying shack into his writing cabin and wrote in the space for 50 years, including his Faulkner Award-winning novel, Stowaway , and his O'Henry Award-winning short story, The Ledge, named in 1999 as one of The Best American Short Stories of the Century . An employee of Bowdoin College (where Hall taught) rediscovered the cabin in 2003, just as Hall left it when he died ten years earlier. With the generous permission of Lawrence Hall, Jr., O'Donnell moved the Fishouse to the woods behind his home to use as his own. Except for O'Donnell's own few writing tools, the Fishouse remains as Hall left it, down to the thesaurus and decanters, photo of Hall's dog, Jack, and even firewood for the stove.

Blood Run, published by Salt Press, is the latest collection of poetry from Allison Hedge Coke and testifies to the need to protect the remarkable ruins of the Indigenous North American city of Blood Run and the sacred remains she guards there in mounded tombs. The persona poems herein emanate its character embraced in architectural accomplishment designed in accordance with the sun and moon and multitudes of stars above.

Human Star, published by Heretical Texts, is the latest collection from Sarah Menefee. From the homeless streets and the poor places rubbled by war, the ‘I’ of these poems is that of the anonymous ‘nothing that is all.’ The voice of this singular and collective subject is the music of the fire that rises from the cracks in the old brutal order, as an intimate whisper and a cry of the heart.

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, of Huron, Tsa la gi, French Canadian and Portuguese descent, grew up in North Carolina, Canada, Texas, and throughout the Great Plains. She is the author of the poetry collections Dog Road Woman; Off-Season City Pipe; and the memoir Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer. She has been instrumental in creating Native American and incarcerated youth mentorship programs throughout the country, Hedge Coke now teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Sarah Menefee lives and works in San Francisco. Her previous books include I’m Not Thousandfurs and The Blood About the Heart (both from Curbstone Press), as well as numerous chapbooks. An Italian translation, Il Sangue Intorno al Cuore, was published by Multimedia Edizioni, and Human Star will be translated into Spanish in Caracas, Venezuela. She is a homeless and poor people’s rights activist, and a founding member of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America.

Aliki Barnstone is a poet, translator, critic, and editor. Her books of poems are Blue Earth (Iris, 2004), Wild With It (Sheep Meadow, 2002) ,a National Books Critics' Circle Notable Book, Madly in Love (Carnegie-Mellon, 1997), Windows in Providence (Curbstone, 1981), and The Real Tin Flower (which was introduced by Anne Sexton and was published by Macmillanin 1968, when she was twelve years old). She has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize twice. Her translation, The Collected Poems of C.P. Cavafy: A New Translation was published by W.W. Norton in 2006. She edited A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now (Schocken, 1980; second edition, 1992), The Calvinist Roots of the Modern Era (University Press of New England, 1997), The Shambhala Anthology of Women’s Spiritual Poetry (Shambhala, 1999; 2003), and she introduced and wrote the readers’ notes for H.D.’s Trilogy (New Directions, 1998) .Her poems and translations have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Boulevard, The Georgia Review, New Letters, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner,The Southern Review, TriQuarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She has recorded a collaborative C.D. with musician Frank Haney. Her study of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, Changing Rapture: The Development of Emily Dickinson’s Poetry, is forthcoming with University Press of New England. Barnstone currently is Professor of English in the Creative Writing International Program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Willis Barnstone is a poet, translator, editor, and educator. Born in Lewiston, Maine, and educated at Bowdoin, Columbia, and Yale, he taught in Greece at the end of the civil war (1949-51), in Buenos Aires during the Dirty War, and during the Cultural Revolution went to China, where he was later a Fulbright Professor of American Literature at Beijing Foreign Studies University (1984-1985). His publications include Modern European Poetry (Bantam, 1967), The Other Bible (HarperCollins, 1984) The Secret Reader: 501 Sonnets (New England, 1996), a memoir biography With Borges on an Ordinary Evening in Buenos Aires (Illinois, 1993), and To Touch the Sky (New Directions, 1999). His literary translation of the New Testament – The New Covenant: The Four Gospels and Apocalypse – was published by Riverhead Books in 2002. A Guggenheim Fellow and Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry, Barnstone is Distinguished Professor at Indiana University.