Writers With Drinks features wild poetry, robotics, and LGBTQ storytelling!

When: Saturday, Jan. 10, from 7:30 PM to 9:30 PM, doors open 6:30 PM
Who: Octavio Solis, Sandra Lim, S. Bear Bergman, Joshua Davis, Stefani Silverman, and Tim Johnston!
How much: $5 to $20, all proceeds benefit the CSC
Where: The Make Out Room, 3225 22nd. St., San Francisco

About the readers/performers:

Author of over 20 plays, Octavio Solis is considered by many to be one of the most prominent Latino playwrights in America. With works that both draw on and transcend the Mexican-American experience, he is a writer and director whose style defies formula, examining the darkness, magic and humor of humanity with brutal honesty and characteristic intensity. His imaginative and ever-evolving work continues to cross cultural and aesthetic boundaries, solidifying him as one of the great playwrights of our time.

Award-winning writer, educator and storyteller S. Bear Bergman is the author or editor of six books as well as the founder of Flamingo Rampant, a children’s press focused on feminist, LGBTQ-positive, racially-diverse children’s books. His most recent book Blood, Marriage, Wine, & Glitter made several Best Of lists and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. A much-loved speaker and storyteller at universities and festivals alike, Bergman’s signature blend of wit and warmth brings all the people to the yard regardless of their sex designation, gender identity, or gender expression, which he would like to remind you are not at all the same thing.

Sandra Lim is the author of The Wilderness (W.W. Norton, 2014), selected by Louise Glück for the most recent Barnard Women Poets Prize, and a previous collection of poetry, Loveliest Grotesque (Kore Press, 2006). Her work has been published in Guernica, VOLT, Columbia Poetry Review, Literary Imagination, Boston Review, and other journals. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Getty Research Institute. Lim was born in Seoul, Korea and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. She teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell and lives in Cambridge, MA.

Joshua Davis is the co-founder of Epic Magazine and has been a contributing editor at Wired Magazine for a decade. He has written for The New Yorker, GQ, Outside, Mens Journal, Mens Health, Maxim and Food & Wine. He was a finalist for the 2014 National Magazine Award in feature writing and his work is anthologized in the 2012 edition of "The Best American Science and Nature Writing," as well as the 2006, 2007 and 2009 editions of "The Best Technology Writing." In 2014, Farrar Strauss Giroux published his third book, Spare Parts, a chronicle of the triumph of a small robotics team.

Tim Johnston is the author of the debut adult novel Descent, the story collection Irish Girl, and the young adult novel Never So Green. Published in 2009, the stories in Irish Girl won an O. Henry Prize, the New Letters Award for Writers, and the Gival Press Short Story Award, while the collection itself won the 2009 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. In 2005 the title story, “Irish Girl,” was included in the David Sedaris anthology of favorites, Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules. Johnston’s stories have also appeared in New England Review, New Letters, the Iowa Review, the Missouri Review, DoubleTake, Best Life Magazine, and Narrative Magazine, among others. He holds degrees from the University of Iowa and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He currently teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Memphis.

Stefani Silverman is a San Francisco based comic dedicated to finding meaning in life through humor. She has performed at Cobb’s Comedy Club and is a regular at the Sunday New Talent Show case at the SF Punchline.