Small Press Traffic

Beginning October 27th, poet Zoe Tuck will lead a four-part workshop on the writing and poetic stylings of Hoa Nguyen.

In each class, Tuck will guide the group through discussions of Nguyen’s work and lead generative writing exercises. These will include drawing details from daily life, the domestic, the local ecology, or spirituality, and using techniques like imitation, translation, found language, divinatory tools (I-Ching, tarot), collage, and Oulipian procedures. Hoa Nguyen herself will join the workshop for its final session.

A joint project of Small Press Traffic and the Belladonna* School for Feminist Practice and Poetics, this class will culminate in a zoom reading, and publication in the seednotes chaplets series.

Sign up now through the link in our bio!
💞

Packed house for Renee Gladman!

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this truly momentous event — a real celebration.

We’re happy to share that Renee Gladman’s reading is available to watch in full on our youtube page (link in bio!). She reads a foundational essay on art, writing, and looking as well as the first few pages of “TOAF” (recently reissued by ).

💗

It’s the autumn equinox! Daytime and nighttime will be exactly the same length and Cheryl E. Leonard has arranged a gathering of field recordings for your sonic pleasure.

Composed of natural sounds encountered in Yosemite, the Pinnacles, Lassen Volcanic National, Point Reyes, and the Marin Headlands, Leonard presents “Autumn Orisons” for The Back Room.

Listen through the link in our bio!

🍂

We are thrilled to announce our next director: Maxe Crandall! 🎊

A poet, playwright, and theatrical director with deep ties to the Bay Area’s artistic communities, Crandall will bring his acumen to Small Press Traffic’s mission of creating programs and publications dedicated to the rich history and ongoing practice of boundary-pushing literary arts in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond.

Last March, we collaborated with Crandall, who developed and produced one of the most successful SPT programs of the past decade — a standing-room-only night of Poets Theater at The Lab. Co-directed by Elena Gross and featuring seven multidisciplinary plays and performances, the night brought impressive production value to a community-grounded affair.

Crandall’s appointment follows Syd Staiti’s immensely successful five-year tenure as director of Small Press Traffic, in which he led the push to stabilize and revitalize the organization. “I am delighted by the appointment of Maxe Crandall as the next director of Small Press Traffic. I know he will bring new levels of enthusiasm and innovation to this organization. In our work together on his Poets Theater program, I’ve seen Maxe demonstrate an investment in supporting the organization’s rich history, while creating a welcoming space for new individuals and communities. I look forward to seeing the vibrant new directions he will take Small Press Traffic in the years to come.”  

Please join us in welcoming Maxe, who we could not be more excited to have at our helm!

We’re bringing some rare books from our archive to the San Francisco Art Book Fair! Come out this weekend (July 18 - July 21) to check out a sample of our collection, which will include, among other gems: signed copies of Robert Glück and Bruce Boone’s “La Fontaine.”

Shout out to our friends Et al. () for sharing their table with us! We’re looking forward to celebrating poetry, art, and book-making this weekend with so many small presses, writers, and artists we admire.

See you there!

Party polaroids from Gabrielle Civil’s “Where Would I be Without You”!

Taken as part of an original performance about San Francisco, literary community, and friendship, these pics will now enter our archive as part of Small Press Traffic’s material history.

During Civil’s residency with Small Press Traffic the question “Where would I be without you?” was explored through film, music, poetry, archival pasts and social gatherings. It resonates time and time again!

Do you traffic in small presses? Pick up one of our 50th anniversary tote bags at the San Francisco Art Book Fair next weekend!

It was a lot of fun to make these bags in collaboration with Bay Area artists and writers Cliff Hengst, Aki Neumann, Floss Editions and Paul Ebenkamp. We’ll be bringing the last of our stock to the book fair so get yours before they are gone forever! 🕳️🖤‼️

shout out to the best: for letting us share their table.

Today is the longest day of the year, as the sun moves across the Northern Hemisphere at its greatest vertical tilt. Happy first day of Summer!

Spend it with The Back Room’s latest: The Burning, a sonic composition improvised and recorded by Danishta Rivero on the occasion of the summer solstice.

While it’s temperate in the Bay, a heat wave, or, if you are in New York, a heat “dome” has most of the world in its grasp. This kinetic, rupturing—occasionally breathing piece of multi-tonal improvisation conjures that burning.

Find a link in our bio! 🌞

Gabrielle Civil’s collaboration with SPT and upcoming performance “My San Francisco,” is featured in KQED!! 🌻💛🌻

“For Civil, Where Would I Be Without You? has been an opportunity to marvel at the criss-crossing networks represented in SPT’s holdings, then turn around and create even more connections within the present-day literary circles.

‘What I try to do is set an experience for people to open up in their imaginations,’ she says, ‘and have opportunities to consider themselves, and the people around them, and this whole weird thing of poetry that we’re trying to make together in some new ways.’”

Where would our arts community be without brilliant writers like Sarah Hotchkiss? Grateful as ever to her pen and presence!

Get to The Lab () this Saturday, June 22nd for “My San Francisco,” a one night only performance! And, the unmissable culmination of Civil’s five-part series, Where Would I Be Without You?

~ link in bio! ~

We are excited to announce that next Saturday, the brilliant Gabrielle Civil will debut “My San Francisco,” an original solo performance ‼️

“My practice—all of my work—is to create and contribute to an archive of Black women’s creative expression. I’m so haunted by what has been lost. At the same time, we have to acknowledge that the archive cannot hold everything. I’m interested in that tension.” —Gabrielle Civil

“My San Francisco” continues this work as Civil explores SPT’s archive and the interlocking communities of writers it reveals as a catalyst for sharing her personal experiences of San Francisco and its place in her own coming of age narrative.

Join us Saturday, June 22nd at The Lab () for “My San Francisco,” the unmissable culmination  of Civil’s astounding five-part series, Where Would I Be Without You?

🪽registration link in bio!🪽

After almost a year of collaborative work, we’re celebrating a huge event in our archive project: we’ve got shelves!

Soon, we’ll be ready to welcome researchers and visitors to our archival print collection (housed at !) of over 2,500 rare small press books, magazines, chapbooks, and ephemera.

This exciting progress would still be a pipe dream without the community of writers, poets, artists and supporters that has come together to keep SPT vibrant and engaged in its 50th year. Thank you! 🥹

[Last Image: SPT’s print collection coordinator Noah Ross holding a favorite book from our archive: “Sheeper” by Irving Rosenthal.]

Sarah Cargill!CHISARAOKWU.!
Heman Chong!
River 瑩瑩 Dandelion!
Priyanka D’Souza!
Aidan Koch!
D**g Li!
Angie Sijun Lou!
Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta!
Willa Smart!

Now on The Back Room! We’re delighted to present “Future Past,” ten artists and writers in conversation with “Into View: New Voices, New Stories,” a group exhibit at the Asian Art Museum organized by Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art & Programs Naz Cuguoğlu.

“Future Past” is also a collaboration with Headlands Center for the Arts; five of our commissioned artists are spring 2024 residents.

Read their words now through the 🔗 in our bio! And check out “Into View: New Voices, New Stories,” on view through August 5.

“Self Portrait San Francisco Financial District 1973,” 2019, Michael Jang, Barry McGee © Asian Art Museum
“Fire Season” (detail), 2021, Jenifer K. Wofford © Asian Art Museum
“Lucky Face,” 2021; “Three Mask Face Jug,” 2021, Jiha Moon © Asian Art Museum

This Friday, join us for a friendly social and reading put together by Gabrielle Civil!

There will be food, drinks, balloons (!) and readings by Bay Area poets soledad con carne, hector son of hector, erica lewis, Gillian Conoley, Truong Tran, Damon Potter, Eric Leigh, and, of course, Gabrielle Civil.

Together we will party in celebration of those friends that help us carry on. 💞

Register through the 🔗link🔗 in our bio!

Now on The Back Room !! two new pieces presenting the pungent, brilliant, “bare-balls” writing of French-Egyptian poet Joyce Mansour.

We bring you a thoughtful conversation on the nature of translation between poet and City Lights editor Garrett Caples and translators Emilie Moorhouse and C. Francis Fisher. Additionally, we’re delighted to have published six poems by Mansour, translated by Moorhouse and Fisher, on our site.

Caples and Moorhouse recently published “Emerald Wounds” () a collection of Mansour’s work, and Fisher’s new translation of her work, “In The Glittering Maw,” () came out just yesterday!

Find these pieces through the 🔗🔗 in our bio!

⛲️🗡️🐑

Gabrielle Civil’s five-part series, Where Would I Be Without You?, continues with a friendly reading and social on the last day of May!

With an interest in the lived experience of literary communities, Gabrielle reached out to acclaimed Bay Area poets and asked them to share their work and also invite a friend to read alongside them.

soledad con carne invited hector son of hector, erica lewis invited Gillian Conoley, Truong Tran invited Damon Potter, and Gabrielle invited her longtime poetry pal Eric Leigh.

Together they will help lift up those who help us carry on. 💞

Register through the 🔗link🔗 in our bio!

On June 1st, we’re celebrating Steve Dickinson, Elyse Ficarra and their years of organizing poetry readings at San Francisco State’s beloved Poetry Center, on the occasion of their retirement.

While the future is uncertain, the Poetry Center’s past includes an incredible bulwark of readings and events since its 1954 founding (after a small donation from W. H. Auden). We highly recommend looking through their video archive, which has documentation of basically every great poet to visit San Francisco in the last 50 years. In a piece for Open Space, Steve called this archive “an exercise to keep Mnemosyne occupied.”

There will be cake!

This Friday, Krupskaya launches three new titles (!) : The Dogs by Noah Ross, “a smutty werewolf rip off of Hervé Guibert and others”; Cinders by Maria Sledmere, a quotidian tale of Cinderella meets Derrida;  and Comeback Death by Jennifer Soong, which weaves poetic lineages of, in Soong’s words: “dread, gender, sarcasm, sublimation of pain, fruit, ambition, and fecundity.”

Join us at 7 pm, May 10, to celebrate these new books as well as the 25 year history of . Our expansive archival collection of their titles will be on display at the reading!

We’re lucky to have Jennifer Soong in town from Denver and Maria Sledmere all the way from Glasgow, Scotland to read from their new books alongside our very own Noah Ross.

As always, more information in our bio! 🐕

Now on The Back Room, musician Tim Perkis pens a dispatch from Gothenburg.

After decades working in the Bay Area’s worlds of improvisation and electronic music, Perkis recently decamped for Sweden to initiate a new part of life. Awash in a foreign language, this essay asks what it means to uproot a comfortable existence in your 70s, “the sudden-death overtime period.”

“It may sound morbid, but there is something positive about reaching the time in life when your future is unavoidably short. So this becomes an immediate matter: What is worth doing, and what isn’t?”

🔗 in our bio!

We recently acquired a collection of titles from Krupskaya, a beloved press that’s been based in the Bay Area for over 25 years! As our print collection archive grows, and we prepare to make it available to the public, we’re excited to share it with you.

Founded in 1998, and dedicated to publishing experimental poetry and prose, Krupskaya is structured as a collective of writer-editors with equal responsibility for the reading, selection, editing, and support of the books produced. Over the past 25 years they’ve published titles by Norma Cole, Tyrone Williams, Lisa Robertson, Julian Brolaski, Kevin Killian, past SPT director Samantha Giles, our current director Syd Staiti. . . and many other excellent writers.

Join us May 10 for the launch of Krupskaya’s three newest publications “The Dogs” by Noah Ross, “Cinders” by Maria Sledmere and “Comeback Death” by Jennifer Soong. Our archival collection of their books will be on display at the reading!

🐕

“I crave abduction by aliens. I want to be probed, to find out what kind of specimen I am to an advanced species. It might not be so scary –– I’ve touched and been touched by hundreds of men, most of whom I didn’t know.”

For the Back Room, multi-disciplinary artist Miguel Gutierrez viscerally considers the sexual body as it ages, craving and knowing certain gestures. The essay is accompanied by intimate pencil drawings by Gutierrez rendered on intentionally soiled sheets of paper.

Read it now through the 🔗 in our bio!

🕳️

This Saturday, Gabrielle Civil will host a digital screening of Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied (1989), transforming the often solitary activity of watching a movie online into a collective experience.  📼🖤📼

Thinking carefully about how films are watched in relation to others, Civil will be joined by poet S*an D. Henry-Smith, who will discuss the film’s q***r Black poetics. This viewing experience will not be passive! Civil and Henry-Smith will guide participants with writing prompts, context for the film, and tools for activating responses. After the 55 minute screening, there will be reading, sharing, and discussing.

This workshop will run about 90 minutes. Closed captioning will be provided.

Use the link in our bio to register for this workshop! 🌼🔗🌼 On the day of the program we will send out a zoom link and instructions on how to access the online event.

For the past few months, performance artist, poet, and educator Gabrielle Civil has been spending time with our print collection archive and helping it grow. Here are just a few of the titles she’s been working with!

slide 1: Nikki Giovanni’s “Black Feeling, Black Talk” (Broadside Press, 1970)

slide 2: Kathy Acker’s “Hello, I’m Erica Jong” (Contact II Publications: 1982)

slide 3: Issues 1 - 4 of “Clamour” edited by Renee Gladman (1996 - 1999)

slide 4: Wanda Coleman’s “Moon Cherries” (Sore Dove Press, 2005)

Collaborating with the material history SPT has collected after 50 years of supporting small presses, poetry collectives, magazines, and reading series, Civil has built the five-part program “Where Would I Be Without You” that reckons with literary ambition, friendship, sexuality, lineage, and her own coming of age as a poet.

The next event in the series is an online watch party for Marlon Riggs’s 1989 experimental documentary “Tongues Untied”, co-hosted by Civil and S*an D. Henry-Smith. Use the link in our bio for more information! 📼💞