Featured Events in Palo Alto in June 2025 (August Updated)

Join poets Brandel France de Bravo and Weijia Pan at Books Inc. Palo Alto for a reading and discussion of their new collections Locomotive Cathedral, and Motherlands! About Locomotive Cathedral: With wit and vulnerability, Brandel France de Bravo explores resilience in the face of climate change and a global pandemic, race, and the concept of a self, all while celebrating the power of breath as “baptism on repeat.” Whether her inspiration is twelfth-century Buddhist mind-training slogans or the one-footed crow who visits her daily, France de Bravo mines the tension between the human desire for permanence and control, and life’s fluid, ungraspable nature. Poem by poem, essay by essay, she builds a temple to the perpetual motion of transformation, the wondrous churn of change and exchange that defines companionship, marriage, and ceding our place on Earth: “not dying, but molting.” Praise for Locomotive Cathedral: “Kinetic and spectral, wise and suspicious of wisdom, Brandel France de Bravo’s Locomotive Cathedral chugs into an expansive, vaulted space, where ‘any raised surface can be an altar,’ via a hybrid text of poems, prose poems, and brief lyric essays. There is even a companion crow with one foot, René, who, like the speaker, is compelling and brilliant and makes no promises. Deft with figurative language—‘Like restaurant carp, we are learning to live in this aquarium,’—France de Bravo also questions the whole enterprise. ‘Metaphors can seem so transactional, language doing business, swapping currency,’ she writes, in a zuihitsu on giving and taking. Nothing here is undisputable, even the tools of the trade, and I love it. I love her parables breathing contemporary life into twelfth-century Tibetan Buddhist slogans on mind training—‘And then, there was the time I drove a dangerous highway, / thumb-drive buried in my bun . . . files and poems bobby-pinned / to my skull.’ I love the poems on flood and fire and plague, on dryer lint and home improvement, on the subject/object conundrum, on the woman, a mature, exhilarative presence, and on the one-legged crow, who has the first word, and the last.”—Diane Seuss, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of frank: sonnets and Modern Poetry “The muse of this collection is a one-legged crow, and crow it does, with an insinuating, insistent music and a wily, restless aesthetic that hops from brilliant image to sly aphorism to tender insight. These poems are luminously dark, keenly observant, and endlessly curious about the whole symphony of existence, where nothing is lost, everything is transformed, and we live our lives ‘not dying, but molting.’ Locomotive Cathedral is marked by its unflinching yet compassionate gaze; we are blessed to have it.”—Michael Bazzett, author of The Echo Chamber “Brandel France de Bravo’s Locomotive Cathedral is a panoramic meditation ushering us into stillness. With grace and humility, in a skillful range of forms, France de Bravo sings a praise song to surrender. When living means ‘cycling through the stink and stain,’ France de Bravo celebrates the sacred pause, reminding us that ‘any raised surface can be an altar, a place to kneel.’”—Rage Hezekiah, author of Yearn About Brandel France de Bravo is the author of the poetry collections Provenance and Mother, Loose and the editor of Mexican Poetry Today: 20/20 Voices. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2024, 32 Poems, Barrow Street, Conduit, Diode, Salamander, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. About Motherlands: Chosen by Louise Gluck for the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, this engrossing debut interrogates history, identity, and the power of poetry to elucidate both. Motherlands opens with a child drawn early to poetry. In summer I write. Two lines at a time, two vying souls / running up the wall. The collection follows this speaker-poet through a childhood in post-Maoist China and an eventual move to the United States, laying bare cultural and linguistic tensions in both historical and modern settings. He cites Chinese laborers toiling in American factories--an echo of the brutalities endured by those who constructed the Transatlantic Railroad--and speaks to anxieties around belonging, assimilation, and identity. If I forget one character a day, he writes. I will have forgotten Chinese / by the end of 2042. In these attentive, imaginative poems, Weijia Pan questions the artist's duty--his duty--as a chronicler of truth, especially through issues of displacement and global injustice. What can the poet do but observe? And yet, in unpacking ancestral traumas connected to Maoist China and modern-day bigotry exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, he still finds himself turning to art as a way to understand both the self and the world at large. Through elegant juxtapositions, Pan crafts an emotional world that is at once regional and universal--Li Bai and Du Fu sit alongside Glenn Gould and Sviatoslav Richter, pepper used to bless new roads is repurposed in the mace used against protesters, two languages compete on a single tongue. Lyrical and visionary, this collection embodies poetry's capacity to ground us, teach us, and change us. About Weijia Pan is a Chinese poet and translator. In 2023, his debut poetry collection, Motherlands, was selected by Louise Glück for the Max Rivto Poetry Prize and subsequently published by Milkweed Editions in 2024. Information Source: Books Inc. | eventbrite

Join poet and essayist Brandel France de Bravo at Books Inc. Palo Alto for a reading and discussion of her new collection Locomotive Cathedral! Brandel will be in conversation with fellow poet Weijia Pan. With wit and vulnerability, Brandel France de Bravo explores resilience in the face of climate change and a global pandemic, race, and the concept of a self, all while celebrating the power of breath as “baptism on repeat.” Whether her inspiration is twelfth-century Buddhist mind-training slogans or the one-footed crow who visits her daily, France de Bravo mines the tension between the human desire for permanence and control, and life’s fluid, ungraspable nature. Poem by poem, essay by essay, she builds a temple to the perpetual motion of transformation, the wondrous churn of change and exchange that defines companionship, marriage, and ceding our place on Earth: “not dying, but molting.” “Kinetic and spectral, wise and suspicious of wisdom, Brandel France de Bravo’s Locomotive Cathedral chugs into an expansive, vaulted space, where ‘any raised surface can be an altar,’ via a hybrid text of poems, prose poems, and brief lyric essays. There is even a companion crow with one foot, René, who, like the speaker, is compelling and brilliant and makes no promises. Deft with figurative language—‘Like restaurant carp, we are learning to live in this aquarium,’—France de Bravo also questions the whole enterprise. ‘Metaphors can seem so transactional, language doing business, swapping currency,’ she writes, in a zuihitsu on giving and taking. Nothing here is undisputable, even the tools of the trade, and I love it. I love her parables breathing contemporary life into twelfth-century Tibetan Buddhist slogans on mind training—‘And then, there was the time I drove a dangerous highway, / thumb-drive buried in my bun . . . files and poems bobby-pinned / to my skull.’ I love the poems on flood and fire and plague, on dryer lint and home improvement, on the subject/object conundrum, on the woman, a mature, exhilarative presence, and on the one-legged crow, who has the first word, and the last.”—Diane Seuss, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of frank: sonnets and Modern Poetry “The muse of this collection is a one-legged crow, and crow it does, with an insinuating, insistent music and a wily, restless aesthetic that hops from brilliant image to sly aphorism to tender insight. These poems are luminously dark, keenly observant, and endlessly curious about the whole symphony of existence, where nothing is lost, everything is transformed, and we live our lives ‘not dying, but molting.’ Locomotive Cathedral is marked by its unflinching yet compassionate gaze; we are blessed to have it.”—Michael Bazzett, author of The Echo Chamber “Brandel France de Bravo’s Locomotive Cathedral is a panoramic meditation ushering us into stillness. With grace and humility, in a skillful range of forms, France de Bravo sings a praise song to surrender. When living means ‘cycling through the stink and stain,’ France de Bravo celebrates the sacred pause, reminding us that ‘any raised surface can be an altar, a place to kneel.’”—Rage Hezekiah, author of Yearn Brandel France de Bravo is the author of the poetry collections Provenance and Mother, Loose and the editor of Mexican Poetry Today: 20/20 Voices. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2024, 32 Poems, Barrow Street, Conduit, Diode, Salamander, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. Weijia Pan is a Chinese poet and translator. In 2023, his debut poetry collection, Motherlands, was selected by Louise Glück for the Max Rivto Poetry Prize and subsequently published by Milkweed Editions in 2024. Information Source: Books Inc. | eventbrite

Join bestselling Bay Area author Christopher Newman at Books Inc. Palo Alto for a reading and signing of his new novel, packed full of adventure, Found at Sea! Based on a true story, Found at Sea is the account of how 19-year-old Pete O'Brien, while attempting to circumnavigate the globe, is interrupted on his journey by his arrest on drug charges in Bangkok, Thailand and incarcerated in a prison in the heart of that city, along as what follows when he is eventually deported to the custody of a U.S. Consul in Singapore. Once arrived there, he is offered employment aboard an American merchant vessel as an alternative to a flight back to the United States in disgrace and the day that he boards a consulate launch for a trip out into Singapore harbor to meet the captain and crew of a brand-new super tanker, he has only just turned twenty, weighs 127 pounds after barely surviving a severe case of amoebic dysentery in Afghanistan, and has no idea of what he might be getting into. The consul has informed him that in order to do the job he will be required to join the National Maritime Union as well as sign something called Foreign Articles, a legal document that will require him to remain on board for either a calendar year or until the ship docks at a port somewhere in the continental United States. The year is 1972, the Vietnam conflict is still in full swing, and the SS Spirit of Liberty is operating under a Military Supply and Transfer Service charter, sailing between the Ras Tanura oil refinery in Saudi Arabia and military bases all over the western Pacific, delivering high-altitude jet fuel to the US Navy and Air Force. A majority of the crew ship's crew are World War II vets old enough to be Pete's father, many of them expatriates who have outstanding warrants pending against them and can't return to the United States. Not yet old enough to drink in his native California, Pete quickly finds himself forced to learn how to negotiate this new world of drunken debauchery and sexual depravity while still retaining some measure of his own integrity. Found at Sea, as told to best-selling author Christopher Newman, is a truly unique story of self-discovery and survival; one that will forever change Pete O'Brien's view of the world and set him apart from a vast majority of his peers. Remarkable in in both its frankness and the historical context within which it is framed, this is truly the adventure of a lifetime. Born in San Francisco, Christopher Newman was raised in California's Santa Clara Valley before the tech revolution turned it from prune, apricot, and cherry orchards to Silicon. He has received a BA in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of California at Santa Cruz and an MFA in Creative Writing from San Diego State University. In addition to publishing nine bestselling Joe Dante novels and several non-series crime novels, he has also written a number of non-crime novels under his Pete O'Brien pseudonym, was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award by the Mystery Writers of America in 1992, and has also co-authored a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Mr. Newman currently splits his time between the central coast of California and Lexington, KY. Information Source: Books Inc. | eventbrite

Join local author Kirsten Michelwait at Books Inc. Palo Alto for a celebration of her new novel The Ashtrays are Full and the Glasses are Empty! Kirsten will be in conversation with fellow writer Irena Smith. Raised in New York’s Gilded Age, pampered heiress Sara Wiborg dreams of a more creative life than the rigid future prescribed for her. It’s only when she meets Gerald Murphy that she finds a man who shares her creative, aesthetic ideal and, after a friendship of eleven years, they marry despite the strong disapproval of her family. Against the sizzling Jazz Age backdrop of 1920s Paris and Antibes, Sara’s innate style and gift for friendship attract the bohemian elite of the new century—including Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Picasso, and Dorothy Parker. But by the 1930s, her fortune is lost and tragedy strikes—not once, but twice. Sara’s strength and resilience allow her to find a new equilibrium over time, long after the parties have ended. A heartbreaking story of love and loss, The Ashtrays are Full and the Glasses Are Empty follows Sara through her very modern life to reveal how tragedy can be healed by faith, unconditional love, and a creative mind. Kirsten Mickelwait is a longtime resident of the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a copywriter by day and a writer of fiction and creative nonfiction by night. She received a degree in English from UC Berkeley, where she expanded her love of James Joyce and the expatriate creatives of 1920s Paris-including Sara and Gerald Murphy. She is a repeat alumna of the Napa Valley Writers' Conference as well as the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, the Kauai Writers Conference, and the Paris Writers' Conference. Her memoir, The Ghost Marriage, was published in 2021; The Ashtrays are Full and the Glasses are Empty is her debut novel. Irena Smith is a former Stanford admissions officer, writer, and public speaker. Information Source: Books Inc. | eventbrite

Join local author Greg Le Sage at Books Inc. Palo Alto for a reading and discussion of his book Quantum Eschaton. In a world where encryption protects society's secrets, a quantum computing breakthrough changes everything. James, a brilliant scientist at the tech giant Alpheus, discovers a method to break even the strongest codes, destabilizing the systems that governments, banks, and nations rely on. Lured by promises of immense wealth and luxury, James becomes entangled in a high-stakes conspiracy led by Seth, a charismatic mastermind with dangerous ambitions. When £100 million vanishes from the Bank of England, global panic ensues. Is this the end of secure systems? Quantum Eschaton is a gripping thriller exploring ambition, cutting-edge technology, and the perilous consequences of reshaping the future. Gregory Peter Le Sage is a Ph.D. scientist working for the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford. He has published over 100 scientific papers. This book marks his first venture into fiction writing. He calls this story future fact because he believes events like these could one day become reality. Information Source: Books Inc. | eventbrite