Poetry Flash Reading Series

THE HISTORY: Poetry Flash curates one of the West Coast’s longest running reading series. From 1982-2006, the readings took place at Cody's Books on Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, the legendary independent bookstore. (The series originally began in the late sixties/early seventies.) The readings were then moved to Cody’s Fourth Street and then Cody’s Shattuck Avenue. During this time, Poetry Flash readings have also taken place at Moe’s Books and Black Oak Books in Berkeley, Berkeley City College, and at Diesel, A Bookstore, Oakland.

Poetry Flash reading series now takes place at Moe’s Books, Berkeley, and at Diesel, A Bookstore, Oakland. Over one-hundred poets are introduced each year by our host, Poetry Flash Associate Editor Richard Silberg. The series continues to be open to diverse poetics, while providing a forum for poetry's best. Please help poetry thrive by shopping at these fine independent bookstores!

[For more information on the closing of Cody’s, see below.]

For more information on the Poetry Flash Reading Series, call (510) 525-5476, or e-mail editor@poetryflash.org.
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THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 2008, 7:30
Poetry Flash at Moe’s Books
MICHAEL McGRIFF & ANDREW GRACE
Michael McGriff’s first book of poems, Dismantling the Hills, is the winner of the 2007 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. Ed Ochester praises it, “The poems...are love songs to the forests of the Pacific Northwest....Distinguished by their masterful craft and human sympathy, these poems constitute not just an unusually fine and readable first collection, but an evocation of place and spirit....” He is also the translator of Tomas Tranströmer’s The Sorrow Gondola. Among his honors are a Stegner fellowship from Stanford University, a Michener Fellowship from the University of Texas at Austin, and a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.
Andrew Grace, also a Stegner Fellow at Stanford for the last two years, has won an Academy of American Poets prize and the Southern Poetry Review’s Guy Owen Prize. His first book of poems, A Belonging Field, was published in 2002; his second, forthcoming collection, Shadeland, won the 2008 Ohio State University/The Journal Award.
MOE'S BOOKS, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, (510) 849-2087, www.moesbooks.com.
Parking at the Durant/Channing Garage, close to Telegraph. Channing is one block north.
For more information, Poetry Flash: (510) 525-5476.

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2008, 7:30
Poetry Flash at Moe’s Books
PETER NEIL CARROLL & JARED SMITH
Peter Neil Carroll’s new book-length narrative poem, Riverborne: A Mississippi Requiem, tells of two friends repeating their young men’s trip along the Mississippi in late middle age, a journey that flows through geography and history, intercut with quotes and allusions to Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This is a skillful, captivating book, a resonant, American journey that rises to an epiphany, a transcendent historical surprise as they approach the Mississippi delta. Former editor of the San Francisco Review of Books, Carroll is also the author of the prose work Keeping Time: Memory, Nostalgia, and the Art of History.
Jared Smith’s new book of poems is The Graves Grow Bigger Between Generations, selected as top pick in the September/October edition of Small Press Review, and recently favorably reviewed in The Midwest Quarterly and Home Planet News. He has published seven volumes of poetry. A two-time Pulitzer Prize nominee, he was also nominated for the National Book Award for his 2007 collection, Where Mages Become Imbued With Time. He has also released two CDs, Seven Minutes Before The Bombs Drop and Controlled by Ghosts. For more on Jared Smith, see http://www.jaredsmith.info/.
MOE'S BOOKS, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, (510) 849-2087, www.moesbooks.com. Parking at the Durant/Channing Garage, close to Telegraph. Channing is one block north.
For more information, Poetry Flash: (510) 525-5476.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2008, 3:00
Poetry Flash at DIESEL, A Bookstore
RICK BAROT & VICTORIA CHANG
Born in the Philippines and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Rick Barot is a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. His first book of poems, The Darker Fall, was the winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. His new collection is Want. Terrance Hayes says of it, “...I’ve grown too intoxicated, too gripped by this wonderful collection to reduce it to a single idea. In Rick Barot’s hands every poem casts at least two luminous shadows. Want is masterfully merciless and merciful at the same time.”
Victoria Chang’s first book of poems, Circle, was chosen for the Crab Orchard Review Award Series in Poetry and also won the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award. Her new book is Salvinia Molesta: Poems, whose title refers to a particularly virulent invasive species which, as Linda Gregerson says, “...can smother a lake in days. And under its proliferant injunction, Victoria Chang surveys the paths that brought us here. She charts her course through biosphere and boardroom, the intimate spaces of private infidelity, the vast terrains of state-supported slaughter...in art this finely pitched we have the one true antidote.”
DIESEL, A BOOKSTORE, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, (510) 653-9965, www.dieselbookstore.com. Near Rockridge BART.
For more information, Poetry Flash: (510) 525-5476.

THURSDAY, JANUARY 22, 2009, 7:30
Poetry Flash at Moe’s Books
SHARON DOUBIAGO & JUDITH ROCHE
Sharon Doubiago’s Love on the Streets: Selected and New Poems has just been published and is receiving heartfelt acclaim from journals like Bloomsbury Review, ALA Booklist, and others; here is the LA Weekly: “Her poetry is narrative by nature and epic by intent, and it achieves its state of white-hot imagination because Sharon Doubiago meets life so imaginatively.” Among her many books of poems are the feminist epic Hard Country, South America Mi Hija, and her most recent, Body & Soul. She’s published two collections of short stories, The Book of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes and El Niño. Her long-awaited memoir, My Father’s Love, is forthcoming.
Judith Roche’s new book of poems is Wisdom of the Body, winner of an American Book Award; Sharon Doubiago says of it, “Steeped in biology, Judith Roche’s poems come close to saying the Unspeakable---Wisdom of the Body is an outstanding achievement, the work of one of our most important poets in full maturity.” She’s published two previous books of poems, and she’s co-editor of First Fish, First People: Salmon Tales of the North Pacific Rim, poems, folk tales, histories, essays, and stories on this fish, so important to so many different peoples, with writing that tells of its near extinction through over fishing in our own time. This anthology also received an American Book Award.
MOE'S BOOKS, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, (510) 849-2087, www.moesbooks.com. Parking at the Durant/Channing Garage, close to Telegraph. Channing is one block north.
For more information, Poetry Flash: (510) 525-5476.

SUNDAY, JANUARY 25, 2009, 3:00
Poetry Flash at DIESEL, A Bookstore
JOHN ISLES & RUSTY MORRISON
John Isles’s new book of poems is Inverse Sky; Donald Revell praises it: “The poems&transpire in a magic climate conducive to old Edens and new Evangels. Here are wantoness and water-lights written starkly. And here, too, are tender shades I have not met before, in a further America.” John Isles’s first poetry collection was Ark. He received an NEA fellowship and an award from The Los Angeles Review.
Rusty Morrison’s new book of poems is the true keeps calm biding its story; winner of the 2007 Sawtooth Prize from Ahasahta Press, it was also chosen by Rae Armantrout, Claudia Rankine, and Bruce Smith for the 2008 James Laughlin Award for most outstanding second book of poetry published in America that year. Claudia Rankine says of it, “[T]he poem transforms into a machine for transmitting lines across impossible distances&In the end we, as readers, are left with a stunning collection, written into the silence of everlasting loss.” Her first book, Whethering, won the 2004 Colorado Prize for Poetry, and also received the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay DiCastagnola Award, among other honors. Rusty Morrison is the co-publisher of Omnidawn.
DIESEL, A BOOKSTORE, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, (510) 653-9965, www.dieselbookstore.com. Near Rockridge BART. For more information, Poetry Flash: (510) 525-5476.

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2009, 3:00
Poetry Flash at DIESEL, A Bookstore
Scarlet Tanager Press Reading:
MARC HOFSTADTER & ZACK ROGOW
This reading celebrates two new poetry releases from Scarlet Tanager Press.
Zack Rogow’s new book of poems is The Number Before Infinity; Cornelius Eady says of the book, “I was reminded of young Neruda’s love poems: here is that passion, tempered aninformed by the briars and grace of marriage and family. Bravo Love, Bravo Poetry.” Zack Rogow is the author, editor, or translator of seventeen books and plays, including six books of poetry, three anthologies, four volumes of translation, and a children’s book.
Marc Hofstadter’s new book of poems is Luck. He’s published three previous books of poems, House of Peace, Visions, and Shark's Tooth. His poems, translations, and essays have been published in over sixty literary journals, and also in Steeped, an anthology of writings about tea.
DIESEL, A BOOKSTORE, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, (510) 653-9965, www.dieselbookstore.com. Near Rockridge BART.
For more information, Poetry Flash: (510) 525-5476.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2009, 7:30
Poetry Flash at Moe’s Books
A Reading for The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry
edited by Francisco Aragón, presenting contributors:
Venessa Maria Fuentes
Adela Najarro
Paul Martínez Pompa
Lidia Torres
MOE'S BOOKS, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, (510) 849-2087, www.moesbooks.com.
Parking at the Durant/Channing Garage, close to Telegraph. Channing is one block north.
For more information, Poetry Flash: (510) 525-5476.

THURSDAY, MARCH 12, 2009, 7:30
Poetry Flash at Moe’s Books
DOBBY GIBSON & MATT HART
Dobby Gibson’s new book of poems is Skirmish from Graywolf Press; Tony Hoagland says of it, “This is a poetry of---in Gibson’s own terms---echolocation, that makes us grapple with the ghosts of speech and world at once. The poems of Skirmish are both entertaining and troubling and full of complex contemporary sensibility.” Gibson’s first collection, Polar, was a Beatrice Hawley Award-winner.
Matt Hart’s full-length collection of poetry is Who’s Who Vivid; he’s also the editor of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking, & Light Industrial Safety.
MOE'S BOOKS, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, (510) 849-2087, www.moesbooks.com.
Parking at the Durant/Channing Garage, close to Telegraph. Channing is one block north.
For more information, Poetry Flash: (510) 525-5476.

SUNDAY, MARCH 15, 2009, 3:00
Poetry Flash at DIESEL, A Bookstore
ETEL ADNAN, HAYAN CHARARA & FADY JOUDAH
Etel Adnan’s new book, a book-length series of prose poems, is Seasons. Megan Pruiett says of it, “A series of mediations following the sun...Intimate with ephemera, alert to what’s hidden, Seasons seeks the universe within and beyond the spirit's changeable weather, finding everywhere its center.” Adnan, born to a Greek Christian and a Muslim Syrian father, has published seven books of poetry and the novel Sitt Marie-Rose.
Hayan Charara is the editor of Inclined to Speak, An Anthology of Arab American Poetry which includes Adnan, herself, and such well-known poets as Naomi Shihab Nye, Jack Marshall, Lawrence Joseph, and many others. Charara is a poet himself, author of two poetry books.
Fady Joudah’s first book of poems, The Earth in the Attic, has been chosen by Louise Glück for this year’s Yale Younger Poets selection. In her Foreword to the book she says, “These are small poems, many of them, but the grandeur of conception is inescapable. The Earth in the Attic is varied, coherent, fierce, tender, impossible to put down, impossible to forget.” Joudah, also in Charara’s anthology, is a Palestinian-American medical doctor and a field member of Doctors Without Borders since 2001. He has translated the late Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry in a recently published collection, The Butterfly's Burden.
DIESEL, A BOOKSTORE, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, (510) 653-9965, www.dieselbookstore.com. Near Rockridge BART. For more information, Poetry Flash: (510) 525-5476.

SUNDAY, APRIL 5, 2009, 3:00
Poetry Flash at DIESEL, A Bookstore
Poetry Solos, Duos & Three-sided Exchanges:
DIANE di PRIMA, MICHAEL McCLURE & DAVID MELTZER
DIESEL, A BOOKSTORE, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, (510) 653-9965, www.dieselbookstore.com. Near Rockridge BART. For more information, Poetry Flash: (510) 525-5476.

THURSDAY, APRIL 16, 2009, 7:30
Poetry Flash at Moe’s Books
JULIE CARR, CAROL SNOW, & BRIAN TEARE
MOE'S BOOKS, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, (510) 849-2087, www.moesbooks.com.
Parking at the Durant/Channing Garage, close to Telegraph. Channing is one block north.
For more information, Poetry Flash: (510) 525-5476.

THURSDAY, APRIL 30, 2009, 7:30
Poetry Flash at Moe’s Books
Sixteen Rivers Press Reading:
LYNNE KNIGHT & CAROLYN MILLER
MOE'S BOOKS, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, (510) 849-2087, www.moesbooks.com.
Parking at the Durant/Channing Garage, close to Telegraph. Channing is one block north.
For more information, Poetry Flash: (510) 525-5476.

SUNDAY, MAY 3, 2009, 3:00
Poetry Flash at DIESEL, A Bookstore
MARILYN KALLET & TBA
DIESEL, A BOOKSTORE, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, (510) 653-9965, www.dieselbookstore.com. Near Rockridge BART. For more information, Poetry Flash: (510) 525-5476.

THURSDAY, JUNE 18, 2009, 7:30
Poetry Flash at Moe’s Books
CYNTHIA KRAMAN aka CHINAS COMIDAS
MOE'S BOOKS, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, (510) 849-2087, www.moesbooks.com.
Parking at the Durant/Channing Garage, close to Telegraph. Channing is one block north.
For more information, Poetry Flash: (510) 525-5476.

~Check back for more readings.~

Recent Past Events:
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2008, 3:00
Poetry Flash at DIESEL, A Bookstore
JAN BEATTY & MOLLY FISK
Jan Beatty’s new book of poems, her third, is Red Sugar; Alicia Ostriker enthuses about it, “Jan Beatty’s Red Sugar is a hard-rocking book, a gorgeous sexual book, a fearless way high up and way down deep roller-coaster book of poetry....It is full of strong language and full of love....” Beatty’s previous two collections are Boneshaker and Mad River, which won the 1994 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. She’s also won the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, and she’s received two fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Beatty is the co-host and producer of “Prosody,” a weekly radio show featuring the work of national writers.
Molly Fisk’s full-length book of poems is Listening to Winter, about which Jane Hirshfield said, “Molly Fisk brings to her readers a poetry of great emotional power, linguistic invention, and courage. She looks long and hard at the world, and speaks to what she sees with both clarity and depth.” Molly Fisk has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and directs the Poetry Boot Camp online peer poetry workshop. She has also released two CDs of her popular radio commentaries, Using Your Turn Signal Promotes World Peace and Blow-Drying a Chicken.
DIESEL, A BOOKSTORE, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, (510) 653-9965, www.dieselbookstore.com. Near Rockridge BART. For more information, Poetry Flash: (510) 525-5476.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2008, NOON-4:00
WATERSHED ENVIRONMENTAL POETRY FESTIVAL
Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Jane Hirshfield,
California Poet Laureate Al Young with bassist Dan Robbins,
Joseph Lease, Camille Dungy, Avotcja with bassist Eugene Warren, Sonoma County Poet Laureate Mike Tuggle, Chris Olander, open mic, CPITS/River of Words/Poetry Inside Out K-12 student poets & much more
presented alongside the Berkeley Farmers' Market, near Berkeley BART,
Civic Center Park, downtown Berkeley (rain venue: Berkeley City College)

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2008, 7:30
Poetry Flash at Moe’s Books
ED PAVLIC & SEAN HILL
Ed Pavlic’s new collection of prose poems, Winners Have Yet to Be Announced, is about 1970s soul singer Donny Hathaway, who died, presumably of suicide, at the age of thirty-three, and who is known for his many recordings, including “A Song for You” and “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black.” Terrence Hayes says of the collection, “Ed Pavlic shapes the ineffable (some call it Duende, some call it Soul) into a language haunting the borders of the sayableand unsayable, the sung and the unsung.” Other of Pavlic’s books include Labors Lost Left Unfinished and Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue. He’s also the author of a scholarly work, Crossroads Modernism, on African American literary culture.
Sean Hill’s debut collection of poetry is Blood Ties & Brown Liquor. Each poem builds on the poetic landscape created from his hometown, Milledgeville, Georgia, offering a portrait of the town’s black community. A multitude of voices rises from the pages to celebrate to create a call and response across six generations of the family of the fictional character Silas Wright, a black man born in 1907. These poems spread before us a sensuous world of quotidian lives punctuated by love and violence. Sean Hill is a Cave Canem fellow; he is currently a Stegner fellow at Stanford University. “Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Bishop: these are among the select few whose first books signaled a new vision of form and vernacular, an everyday elegance. We can now add Sean Hill’s transcendent debut to that remarkable list.”---Kevin Young.
MOE'S BOOKS, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, (510) 849-2087, www.moesbooks.com.
Parking at the Durant/Channing Garage, close to Telegraph. Channing is one block north.
For more information, Poetry Flash: (510) 525-5476.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2008, 3:00
Poetry Flash at DIESEL, A BOOKSTORE
ELLEN BASS & JANE HIRSHFIELD
Ellen Bass’s new book of poems is The Human Line; Billy Collins praises it, “Ellen Bass’s frighteningly personal poems about sex, love, birth, motherhood and aging are kept from mere confession by the graces of wit, an observant eye, an empathetic heart, and just the right image deployed at just the right time.” She’s published many books of poems, including the most recent, Mules of Love, which won the 2002 Lambda Literary Award. She was co-editor of the ground-breaking feminist anthology No More Masks! and her prose book The Courage to Heal sold over a million copies. Among her honors are a Pushcart Prize, the Pablo Neruda Prize from Nimrod/Hardman, and a New Letters Poetry Prize.
Jane Hirshfield’s newest book of poems is After, which carries a quote from the late Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz: “A profound sympathy for the suffering of all living beings....It is precisely this I praise in the poetry of Jane Hirshfield....In its highly sensuous detail, her poetry illuminates the Buddhist virtue of mindfulness....She is among the most outstanding of my fraternity of California poets.” Among her five previous books of poems are Given Sugar, Given Salt and The Lives of the Heart; she has also published the book of essays Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, edited the anthology Women in Praise of the Sacred, and published the volume of translation The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan. Among her honors are Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, and multiple appearances in the Best American Poetry and the Pushcart Prize anthologies.
DIESEL, A BOOKSTORE, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, (510) 653-9965, www.dieselbookstore.com. Near Rockridge BART. For more information, Poetry Flash: (510) 525-5476.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2008, 7:30
Poetry Flash at MOE’S BOOKS
ROBERT HASS, MAXINE HONG KINGSTON
& editor FRED MARCHANT
read from WILLIAM STAFFORD’S ANOTHER WORLD INSTEAD
ANOTHER WORLD INSTEAD: The Early Poems of William Stafford 1937-1947 has just been published by Graywolf Press, edited and with an introduction from Fred Marchant. This is the first publication of William Stafford's early work as a conscientious objector. Robert Hass says of it, “Three widely read American poets---Robert Lowell, William Everson, and William Stafford---were conscientious objectors during World War II. They represent, among them, a powerful and difficult moment in the tangled history of conscience and military violence in America.” Stafford (1914-1993), one of America's most celebrated poets, was the author of more than fifty books, including Thinking Through the Dark, winner of the 1966 National Book Award, and The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems; among his many honors were his appointment as U.S. Poet Laureate (Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress), 1971-72, and his appointment as Poet Laureate of Oregon in 1973.
Robert Hass and Maxine Hong Kingston are two of our country’s most celebrated writers and two of its most noted writers against war. Time and Materials, Robert Hass's new book, this year's winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, contains searing anti-war poetry, along with so much else. Maxine Hong Kingston, also a National Book Award winner is a tireless activist for peace, leader of veterans’ workshops in writing and meditation, and author, most recently of The Fifth Book of Peace and editor of Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace.
Fred Marchant, as well as editing this book, has published four acclaimed volumes of poetry and co-translated the work of Vietnamese poet Nguyen Ba Chung. In 1970, Marchant became one of the first Marine officers ever to be honorably discharged as a conscientious objector from the Vietnam War.
MOE'S BOOKS, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, (510) 849-2087, www.moesbooks.com.
Parking at the Durant/Channing Garage, close to Telegraph. Channing is one block north.
For more information, Poetry Flash: (510) 525-5476.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 3, 2008, 7:30
Poetry Flash at Moe’s Books
A Sendoff Reading for the Sweeneys:
RICHARD SILBERG, CHAD SWEENEY & JENNIFER K. SWEENEY
Chad and Jennifer K. Sweeney, who have done so much for Bay Area poetry, are moving to the Midwest! Join us at this sendoff reading to wish them the best.
Richard Silberg, Associate Editor of Poetry Flash, is a poet, critic and translator. His most recent book of poems is Deconstruction of the Blues. He’s author of Reading the Sphere: A Geography of Contemporary American Poetry, essays from Poetry Flash, and co-translator of The Three Way Tavern, poems of the South Korean poet Ko Un, winner of the Northern California Book Award in Translation. Chad Sweeney is the author of two new books of poems, An Architecture, BlazeVOX, and Arranging the Blaze, forthcoming from Anhinga Press. Andrew Joron says of the first, “In Sweeney's swift architecture, memory assumes the power of imagination, and language becomes a platform for the mind’s multiplicity.” A longtime WritersCorps teacher, Sweeney is co-editor of the literary journal Parthenon West Review, and he's also author of the chapbook A Mirror to Shatter the Hammer. Chad Sweeney is the editor of “Listening In,” the Poetry Flash feature on MFA poets and poems. Jennifer K. Sweeney’s debut book of poems, Salt Memory, is the winner of the 2006 MSR Poetry Book Award. Her poems enact unusual combinations, high velocity yet sharply sculpted, surreal yet grounded in nature and feeling. She’s a powerful poet, widely published in journals like Hayden’s Ferry Review, RUNES, and New York Quarterly, finalist for both the 2004 Center for Book Arts Chapbook Competition and the 2005 Brittingham/ Felix Pollak Prize. She is the recipient of a Cultural Equities Grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission.
MOE'S BOOKS, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, (510) 849-2087, www.moesbooks.com. Parking at the Durant/Channing Garage, close to Telegraph. Channing is one block north.
For information, Poetry Flash: (510) 525-5476.

The last Poetry Flash at Cody's Telegraph reading was held on June 4, 2006. The last Poetry Flash at Cody's Downtown Berkeley reading was held on June 7, 2008. Poetry Flash readings continue to thrive at other locations!

After 52 years, Cody's Books will shut its doors effective June 20, 2008. The Berkeley bookstore has been a beacon to readers and writers throughout the nation and across the world. Founded by Fred and Pat Cody in 1956, Cody's has been a Berkeley institution and a pioneer in the book business, helping to establish such innovations as quality paperbacks and in-store author readings. Throughout the 1960s and 70s, Cody's was a landmark of the Free Speech movement and was a home away from home for innumerable authors, poets and readers.

The Board of Directors of Cody's Books made this difficult decision after years of financial distress and declining sales.

According to Cody's president, Hiroshi Kagawa, "[It] is a heartbreaking moment…in the spring of 2005 when I learned about the financial crisis facing Cody's, I was excited to save the store from bankruptcy. Unfortunately, my current business is not strong enough or rich enough to support Cody's. Of course, the store has been suffering from low sales and the deficit exceeds our ability to service it."

"When I met Cody's 25 years ago, I was a freelance journalist, enraptured by its books and atmosphere. It means so much to me and I apologize to the people who have supported Cody's for not being able to keep this landmark independent bookstore open. Cody's is my treasure and more than that, Cody's is a real friend of Berkeley community and will be missed."

Cody's would like to thank all of our loyal customers for their years of patronage.

For further information contact: Mindy Galoob, General Manager at mindy@codysbooks.com.

BERKELEY'S TELEGRAPH AVENUE TO LOSE CODY'S BOOKS;
CODY'S REMAINS STRONG ON FOURTH STREET IN BERKELEY
AND ON STOCKTON STREET IN SAN FRANCISCO

Andy Ross, owner and president of Cody's Books, Inc., has announced that Cody's oldest store, on Telegraph Avenue near the University of California in Berkeley, will close its doors on July 10, 2006.

Cody's Books on Fourth Street in Berkeley and Cody's Stockton Street in San Francisco, as well as Cody's School and Book Fair division, remain open, healthy, and intent upon continuing to provide the best of independent bookselling.

Ross noted the fifteen-year sales decline in the south-of-campus area, resulting in Cody's Telegraph Avenue doing only one-third of the business it did in 1990. The company's attempt to keep this store open has caused a loss of over $1,000,000.

"It is with a heavy heart that I must announce that Cody's will be closing our doors at the Telegraph Avenue store for the last time on July 10. We will continue to operate our stores on Fourth Street in Berkeley and on Stockton Street in San Francisco.

The Telegraph store has been declining in sales for more than 15 years. We are now doing only 1/3 of the business that we did here in 1990. We have lost over $1,000,000 attempting to keep the store open. As a family business, we cannot continue to afford these ruinous losses.

The book business has changed over this period. Many of our customers have found other sources for their books. In particular, the Internet has taken quite a bite out of sales, particularly the scholarly and academic titles that have always been our specialty.

This is Cody's 50th year in business and our 43rd year at this location. During this period, Cody's has been engaged in the great issues of our time. As America increasingly turned to huge mass merchants and disembodied Internet retailers in their buying habits, Cody's always urged people to support stores in their communities.

During the 60's, Cody's was part of the great anti-war movement that began in Berkeley. In 1989, we were the first victim of international terrorism in the United States. We were bombed during the Rushdie Affair. After the bombing, Cody's staff voted unanimously to continue carrying The Satanic Verses, even in the face of threats to our lives. This was a great and heroic act of commitment to humanistic values by simple booksellers. It was truly our finest hour.

Throughout this period, we spoke of the dangers of economic concentration in bookselling on the part of chain stores. Sadly our warnings have come to pass. Stores like Cody's have become truly rare. The few that remain are cherished by their communities.

Cody's is an idea, not a building. That idea will endure in our other stores on Fourth Street and in San Francisco.

We leave Telegraph with great sadness, but with a sense of honor that we have served our customers and our community with such distinction; and that in our own way, we have changed the world for the better and will continue to do so.