Readings by José Vadi, Alan Chazaro, and Rae Alexandra
Come join us for City Lights’s First Fridays in collaboration with the North Beach Poetry Crawl! This month we are excited to bring in California writer and skater, José Vadi, and celebrate his new book, Chipped: Writing from a Skateboarder’s Lens. Vadi has invited KQED’s own Alan Chazaro and Rae Alexandra to read with him. Come revel in Bay Area musings and skater antics with us at 5pm in Kerouac Alley.
hosted by Carlos Quinteros III and soledad con carne
About the readers:
José Vadi is the author of Inter State: Essays from California and Chipped: Writing from a Skateboarder’s Lens (Soft Skull Press). His work has been featured by the Paris Review, McSweeney’s, the PBS NewsHour, the San Francisco Chronicle, Free Skate Magazine, Alta Journal, and the Yale Review.
Alan Chazaro is the author of This Is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album (Black Lawrence Press, 2019), Piñata Theory (Black Lawrence Press, 2020) and Notes from the Eastern Span of the Bay Bridge (Ghost City Press, 2021). He is a graduate of June Jordan’s Poetry for the People program at UC Berkeley and a former Lawrence Ferlinghetti Poetry Fellow at the University of San Francisco. He was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area by Mexican immigrants and is an Arts Reporter at KQED. He never learned how to ollie, but hella respects those who can.
Rae Alexandra is Staff Writer for KQED Arts & Culture, and the creator/author of the Rebel Girls From Bay Area History and Bizarre Bay Area series. Born and raised in Wales, she started her career in London, as a music journalist for uproarious rock ’n’ roll magazine, Kerrang!. In America, she got her start at alt-weeklies including SF Weekly and the Village Voice, and freelanced for a great many other publications. Her undying love for San Francisco has, more recently, turned her into a history nerd. In 2023, Rae was awarded an SPJ Excellence in Journalism Award for Arts & Culture.
Made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation.