Sunday, August 14, 2011
Saturday, August 13, 2011
BANG OUT this Saturday at Amnesia!
Please join us for the next BANG OUT reading, Volume XII: BLANK on Saturday, August 13th at Amnesia on Valencia Street in San Francisco!
Amnesia Bar (Valencia Street btwn 19th and 20th)
7-9 pm
FREE and open to the public
With fresh new work banged out on the theme "BLANK" by local writers:
Sarah Fran Wisby
Suzanne Kleid
Diana Turken
Brittany Billmeyer-Finn
Jen Sullivan Brych
Brent Armendinger
Aneesa Davenport
"BLANK" is... the perfect anti-theme, or the spaces we leave or that exist between us, between all things; what we choose to fill them with or how. Blank stares, shooting blanks, whatever the blankety blank -- we always welcome any and all interpretations of the theme.
Sarah Fran Wisby writes poetry, fiction, memoir and essays, preferring always to deepen and subvert genre by way of the hybrid form. Her book Viva Loss was published in 2008 by Small Desk Press. Recent work can be found in Eleven Eleven Journal and Rumpus Women Volume 1, and heard on Invisible Cities Audio Tour #2: The Armada of Golden Dreams. She’s also been published in Instant City, Sparkle and Blink, Digital Artifact, and The Encyclopedia Project Volume 2, F—K, for which she was honored to write the entry for fuck. She performs her work all over the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond, and was a Literary Death Match champion in December 2010.
Suzanne Kleid is the manager of Readers Bookstore at the Main, a used bookstore inside the San Francisco Main Library. Her essays and fiction have appeared in the Believer, Bitch Magazine, Other Magazine, Watchword, Pindeldyboz, and We Still Like.
Diana Turken was born and raised in Los Angeles, Ca. She is currently working on her MFA degree in Poetry at Mills College. She likes to write about railroad barons, cowboys, and Californians. She is a cable news junkie, a basketball fanatic, and makes her own biscuits from scratch. She lives and works in Oakland.
Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, a Michigan Native and Oakland transplant moved here last August to attend Mills College. She is currently an MFA Poetry candidate at Mills, part time retailer, Maya Deren enthusiast, vintage dress collector and loves all things crystals, shells and feathers. Brittany lives in Downtown Oakland where her fellow poet housemates, graph paper notebooks and Magic, their cat, constantly inspire her. Also, Brittany is currently madly in love.
Jen Sullivan Brych has written plays, fiction and journalism for places like the Los Angeles Times, Wired, The Rumpus, Killing My Lobster, the Bay Guardian and blah blah blah. She was a finalist for the Third Coast fiction prize and teaches creative writing and English at City College. She can be seen wrangling her huge baby at various city parks.
Brent Armendinger is a satellite orbiting San Francisco while he also teaches creative writing at Pitzer College in Claremont, CA. His chapbook Archipelago was published by Noemi Press.
Aneesa Davenport lives in San Francisco. Her work has appeared in Fanzine, Beeswax Magazine, Kitchen Sink, Monday Night, The South Carolina Review, and elsewhere. She has read with Quiet Lightening, Funny/Sexy/Sad, and Don’t Mention It, a 24-hour literary reading. Find her at http://paragraphed.wordpress.com/.
--
From Amick Boone and Kevin Hobson, former curators of the Ecstatic Monkey Reading Series, BANG OUT Reading Series provides writing prompts to encourage new work that is “banged out” for its readings. Hosting bi-monthly readings since October 2008, our aim is to inspire our readers to write and present work that’s fresh and spontaneous and to hear how some of our favorite writers interpret our prompts.
--
BANG OUT: A Quick and Dirty Reading Series
www.bangoutsf.com
Amnesia Bar (Valencia Street btwn 19th and 20th)
7-9 pm
FREE and open to the public
With fresh new work banged out on the theme "BLANK" by local writers:
Sarah Fran Wisby
Suzanne Kleid
Diana Turken
Brittany Billmeyer-Finn
Jen Sullivan Brych
Brent Armendinger
Aneesa Davenport
"BLANK" is... the perfect anti-theme, or the spaces we leave or that exist between us, between all things; what we choose to fill them with or how. Blank stares, shooting blanks, whatever the blankety blank -- we always welcome any and all interpretations of the theme.
Sarah Fran Wisby writes poetry, fiction, memoir and essays, preferring always to deepen and subvert genre by way of the hybrid form. Her book Viva Loss was published in 2008 by Small Desk Press. Recent work can be found in Eleven Eleven Journal and Rumpus Women Volume 1, and heard on Invisible Cities Audio Tour #2: The Armada of Golden Dreams. She’s also been published in Instant City, Sparkle and Blink, Digital Artifact, and The Encyclopedia Project Volume 2, F—K, for which she was honored to write the entry for fuck. She performs her work all over the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond, and was a Literary Death Match champion in December 2010.
Suzanne Kleid is the manager of Readers Bookstore at the Main, a used bookstore inside the San Francisco Main Library. Her essays and fiction have appeared in the Believer, Bitch Magazine, Other Magazine, Watchword, Pindeldyboz, and We Still Like.
Diana Turken was born and raised in Los Angeles, Ca. She is currently working on her MFA degree in Poetry at Mills College. She likes to write about railroad barons, cowboys, and Californians. She is a cable news junkie, a basketball fanatic, and makes her own biscuits from scratch. She lives and works in Oakland.
Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, a Michigan Native and Oakland transplant moved here last August to attend Mills College. She is currently an MFA Poetry candidate at Mills, part time retailer, Maya Deren enthusiast, vintage dress collector and loves all things crystals, shells and feathers. Brittany lives in Downtown Oakland where her fellow poet housemates, graph paper notebooks and Magic, their cat, constantly inspire her. Also, Brittany is currently madly in love.
Jen Sullivan Brych has written plays, fiction and journalism for places like the Los Angeles Times, Wired, The Rumpus, Killing My Lobster, the Bay Guardian and blah blah blah. She was a finalist for the Third Coast fiction prize and teaches creative writing and English at City College. She can be seen wrangling her huge baby at various city parks.
Brent Armendinger is a satellite orbiting San Francisco while he also teaches creative writing at Pitzer College in Claremont, CA. His chapbook Archipelago was published by Noemi Press.
Aneesa Davenport lives in San Francisco. Her work has appeared in Fanzine, Beeswax Magazine, Kitchen Sink, Monday Night, The South Carolina Review, and elsewhere. She has read with Quiet Lightening, Funny/Sexy/Sad, and Don’t Mention It, a 24-hour literary reading. Find her at http://paragraphed.wordpress.com/.
--
From Amick Boone and Kevin Hobson, former curators of the Ecstatic Monkey Reading Series, BANG OUT Reading Series provides writing prompts to encourage new work that is “banged out” for its readings. Hosting bi-monthly readings since October 2008, our aim is to inspire our readers to write and present work that’s fresh and spontaneous and to hear how some of our favorite writers interpret our prompts.
--
BANG OUT: A Quick and Dirty Reading Series
www.bangoutsf.com
Thursday, August 11, 2011
State's high school dropout rate nearly 20 percent
(08-11) 14:53 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- Nearly one out of every five students in California's projected class of 2010 - 18.2 percent - dropped out of high school before graduation day, meaning 94,000 teenagers hit the streets without a diploma, according to data released today.
Perhaps more alarming are the 17,000 eighth grade students who quit before attending a single day of high school, about 3 percent of their class.
These numbers are believed to be California's first accurate assessment of the dropout and graduation rates using a data system that tracks individual students over their four-year high school career, according to the state Department of Education.
Overall, 74 percent of high school students graduated on time. The remaining 7 percent who didn't graduate or dropout were students still enrolled in school or who earned a GED.
In past years, the state used an unreliable system that relied on schools to manually track students and report dropout rates to the state. The data was sketchy at best, with rates fluctuating year to year and among districts with similar demographics.
Over the last decade, reported dropout rates statewide have fluctuated between 11 percent to 22 percent. "For far too long, the discussion about graduation and dropout rates has revolved around how the results were obtained," said state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson, in a statement. "Now, we can focus on the much more important issue of how to raise the number of graduates and lower the number of dropouts."
Jump to the complete story.
Perhaps more alarming are the 17,000 eighth grade students who quit before attending a single day of high school, about 3 percent of their class.
These numbers are believed to be California's first accurate assessment of the dropout and graduation rates using a data system that tracks individual students over their four-year high school career, according to the state Department of Education.
Overall, 74 percent of high school students graduated on time. The remaining 7 percent who didn't graduate or dropout were students still enrolled in school or who earned a GED.
In past years, the state used an unreliable system that relied on schools to manually track students and report dropout rates to the state. The data was sketchy at best, with rates fluctuating year to year and among districts with similar demographics.
Over the last decade, reported dropout rates statewide have fluctuated between 11 percent to 22 percent. "For far too long, the discussion about graduation and dropout rates has revolved around how the results were obtained," said state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson, in a statement. "Now, we can focus on the much more important issue of how to raise the number of graduates and lower the number of dropouts."
Jump to the complete story.
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