Gabrielle Selz's Light on Fire: The Art and Life of Sam Francis has been awarded a silver medal in nonfiction  in this year's California Book Awards! Founded in 1931 during the depths of America’s Great Depression, the Commonwealth Club’s California Book Awards will celebrated its 91st anniversary this year. The purpose of the awards is to highlight the work of California authors – a praiseworthy goal at a time when the publishing industry (then and now) remains focused on East Coast writers. Over the years, many of the most important voices in American literature, such as Joan Didion, Ishmael Reed, Amy Tan, Hector Tobar, and Viet Thanh Nguyen, have been honored with California Book Awards. Light on Fire is a biography of the abstract expressionist painter Sam Francis, who was deeply rooted in California. Congratulations to Gaby for this great honor! You can read the list of this year's winners here. … [Read more...]

A beloved holiday tradition of North 24th Writers is game that some people call a “Yankee Swap”, and others call “Dirty Santa.” Here’s how it’s played: Everyone draws a number from a hat – which establishes the order for picking from the wrapped books we’ve all brought. The person who drew number one goes first, picking a wrapped book. Number two can either steal the first player’s book or choose a wrapped one. It goes on from there until the ninth person has a book. Then it gets more interesting. Player one, who didn’t have the option to steal the first time, can steal any book on the table. Then comes a flurry of book thievery and laughter. This year’s most purloined prize? The Love Songs of W.E. Dubois, by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, with a surprising local contender as this year’s runner up, Lost Department Stores of San Francisco, by Anne Evers Hitz. There are no hard feelings because we share books with each other throughout the year. I was lucky enough to get the Lost Department Stores book, which several of us who grew up in the Bay Area coveted. Will I share it? Maybe! … [Read more...]

North 24thers took a field trip this weekend to see a retrospective exhibit of Judy Chicago’s work at the De Young Museum. In a surprising and welcome decision, the curators started with recent pieces by this feminist pioneer and moved back in time to her earliest creations. The show begins with ceramic, glass, and needle works that grapple with mortality, environmental devastation, and the Holocaust. It ends with exultant and joyful bursts of color in Chicago’s “Women and Smoke” series from the early 1970s, spotlighting some of the performances she staged with nude women and colored smoke in the California desert. I remember first discovering Judy Chicago as a teenager, when her show The Dinner Party opened in 1979 in San Francisco. The exhibit became a phenomenon, with its vaginal table settings that honored ancient female deities such as Ishtar and Kali, historical figures like Sojourner Truth, and artists such as Georgia O’Keeffe. The sketchbooks and preparatory studies for The Dinner Party fascinated us, as did Chicago’s crediting of the many needle workers and volunteers who contributed to her projects over the years. The Birth Project, which followed The Dinner Party, drew female volunteers from the U.S., Canada, and New Zealand. As someone whose most recent book focused on the experience of women working collaboratively with each other to fight a social injustice, I was moved by Chicago’s ability to inspire so many volunteers to come together to make art. Her joyful fireworks of brilliantly colored smoke were also a jubilant sendoff to the show. Julia Flynn Siler     … [Read more...]