Maxine Hong Kingston and James Ragan

11 SEPTEMBER 2011 — sunday

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Maxine Hong Kingston, reading from her memoir-in-verse I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, and James Ragan, Too Long A Solitude, Diesel, A Bookstore, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, 3:00 (510/653-9965, dieselbookstore.com; wheelchair accessible, ASL interpreters for the deaf and hearing impaired may be requested a week in advance by email, editor@poetryflash.org)

More about the readers
Maxine Hong Kingston's new book is a memoir-in-verse, I Love a Broad Margin to My Life. Her previous memoirs and books of fiction include The Woman Warrior, China Men, Tripmaster Monkey, and The Fifth Book of Peace. She is also the editor of Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace, writings from more than a decade of writing-and-meditation workshops she's led for Vietnam veterans and others to heal themselves through art. Among her honors are the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, PEN West Award in Fiction, and a National Humanities Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

James Ragan's new book of poems is Too Long A Solitude, which C.K. Williams has praised as "fine-grained, a remarkable range of history." Among his previous books of poems are In the Talking Hours, Womb-Weary, and The Hunger Wall. In 1985 he was one of three Americans, including Bob Dylan and Robert Bly, invited to perform their poetry at the First International Poetry Festival in Moscow. He has also written for stage and film and worked in various production capacities for many films, among them the Academy Award-winning The Deer Hunter. His most recent films are The Last Story of the Century, based on the siege of Sarajevo, and The Shoe.