Booksmith and The Bindery are very pleased to host a virtual event with Arisa White for her new book Who's Your Daddy. She'll be joined for a group reading by former students (bottom row, from R-L) Dan Alter, Michael 'MJ' Jones, Hernan De La Cruz Ramos & A.A. Vincent.

Free and all ages, but RSVP is required. Event link will be sent to everyone who registers.

You can order a copy of Who's Your Daddy here. We're currently offering free shipping throughout San Francisco and the East Bay.

About the book

A lyrical, genre-bending coming-of-age tale featuring a queer, Black, Guyanese American woman who, while seeking to define her own place in the world, negotiates an estranged relationship with her father.

"This beautifully, honestly conceived genius of a book shook me to the core.” – Dara Wier

"What she gives us are archives, allegories, and wholly new songs.” – Terrance Hayes

“In these crisply narrative poems, which unreel like heart-wrenching fragments of film, Arisa White not only names that gaping chasm between father and daughter, but graces it with its true and terrible face." – Patricia Smith

About the authors

Arisa White is a Cave Canem fellow and the author of You’re the Most Beautiful Thing That Happened, A Penny Saved, and Hurrah's Nest. Her poetry has been nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, NAACP Image Award, California Book Award, and Wheatley Book Award. The chapbook “Fish Walking” & Other Bedtime Stories for My Wife won the inaugural Per Diem Poetry Prize. She's the co-author of Biddy Mason Speaks Up, the second book in the Fighting for Justice series for young readers, which received the Nautilus Book Award Gold Medal for Middle-Grade Nonfiction and the Maine Literary Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Who's Your Daddy is her poetic memoir debut from Augury Books. Arisa serves on the board of directors for Foglifter and Nomadic Press and is an assistant professor of creative writing at Colby College. Author photo by Nye' Lyn Tho.

Dan Alter’s poems and reviews have been published in journals including Field, Fourteen Hills, Pank, and Zyzzyva; his first collection My Little Book of Exiles will be out in 2021 from Eyewear Press. He lives with his wife and daughter in Berkeley and makes his living as an IBEW electrician. 

Michal ‘MJ’ Jones is a poet and parent in Oakland, CA. Their work is featured or forthcoming at Anomaly, Kissing Dynamite, Borderlands Texas Poetry Review, and TriQuarterly Review. They are an assistant poetry editor at Foglifter Press, and have received fellowships from the Hurston/Wright Foundation, VONA/Voices, and Kearny Street Workshop. They are currently an MFA graduate fellow at Mills College.

Hernan De La Cruz Ramos is a poet from northern NJ and he currently resides in Oakland, CA. He has been published in The Night Heron Barks and can be found on social media @penpalsocks

A.A. Vincent is a disabled poet and essayist, and is a product of Chicago’s South Side and its suburbs. Her work has appeared in Santa Clara Review, SF Weekly, Quiet Lightning, and Street Sheet SF. She received her MFA in writing from the University of San Francisco.

This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.