Full program video: Amy Berkowitz and Caren Beilin: October 18, 2019
Video highlight clips: "Why the pain?" Amy Berkowitz reads from Tender Points | "She wanted to flood me with methotrexate...." Caren Beilin reads from Blackfishing the IUD
Book launch for Caren Beilin's Blackfishing the IUD (Wolfman Books, 2019), reading and conversation!
Join us for a special program in The Poetry Center's In Common Writers Series, supported by the Walter & Elise Haas Fund, as we host novelist Caren Beilin, whose new book out this Fall is a nonfiction memoir devoted to women's health, chronic illness, and medical gaslighting. Blackfishing the IUD will be launched tonight from Oakland small press Wolfman Books, who are also producing a "several-part podcast...to more broadly explore and shine a light on women’s experiences around reproductive healthcare and the medical industry." Beilin will be reading along with San Francisco writer Amy Berkowitz, author of Tender Points (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2015; now available from Nightboat Books). Berkowitz's book is "named after the diagnostic criteria for fibromyalgia, the book-length lyric essay explores sexual violence, gendered illness, chronic pain, and patriarchy through the lenses of lived experience and pop culture." More at amyberko.com/tender-points
The previous night Caren Beilin and Amy Berkowitz will each read and join in conversation with the audience at The Poetry Center. Both events are free and open to the public.
Amy Berkowitz is the author of Tender Points (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2015). Other writing has appeared in publications including Bitch, McSweeney's, and Wolfman New Life Quarterly. She's the host of the Amy's Kitchen Organics reading series, the coordinator of the Alley Cat Books writing residency, and the founder of Mondo Bummer, an experimental small press. She lives in a rent-controlled apartment in San Francisco, where she's working on her second book. More at amyberko.com.
Caren Beilin is the author of a novel, The University of Pennsylvania (Noemi Press, 2014), a memoir, SPAIN (Rescue Press, 2018), and a nonfiction book (and podcast), Blackfishing the IUD (Wolfman Books, 2019). She has published her writing in places such as The Offing, Territory, Fence, New Life Quarterly, Dreginald, and Full Stop Magazine. She lives in North Adams, Massachusetts, where she teaches creative writing at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.
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