volume 1, number 1 more about August Kleinzahler more about Lewis Buzbee more about Thomas Gladysz more about Julie Huffman more about Lisa K. Buchanan more about Tom Tomorrow

volume 2, number 1 more about John Tranter more about C.E. Shue more about Tom Erikson more about Thomas Gladysz more about Matt Leahy more about Lewis Buzbee

Booksmith regular and neighborhood resident AUGUST KLEINZAHLER'S most recent book, Red Sauce, Whiskey and Snow (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) was praised by a Guy Davenport, Thom Gunn, James Laughlin, John Ashbery and Allen Ginsberg - a remarkably diverse group of writers. His earlier books include a volume of new and selected poems published in Australia, Like Cities, Like Storms (Picador); as well as Earthquake Weather (Moyer Bell), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1989; and Storm Over Hackensack (Moyer Bell), which won the 1985 Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. Kleinzahler has also been the recipient of a Lila Acheson Wallace/Reader's Digest Award and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. August's most recent book is The Strange Hours Travelers Keep: Poems published in Fall 2003

Neighborhood resident, Booksmith regular and one time employee LEWIS BUZBEE is the author of Fliegelman's Desire (Ballantine), a sleek, exquisite novel whose main character, Fliegelman, works in a bookstore. Buzbee teaches writing at the University of California, Berkeley Extension and his work has appeared in Harper's, GQ, Paris Review, Bloomsbury Review and ZYZZYVA. A recent poem, "Sunday, Tarzan in His Hammock" was chosen for Best American Poetry, 1995 (Simon & Schuster) and included in Lights, Camera, Poetry (Harcourt, Brace). "Scar" is from Sheer, a recently completed manuscript of linked short stories.

Widely published in newspapers and literary journals, Booksmith employee THOMAS GLADYSZ has been interviewing contemporary poets & writers since his college days, when he sat down with Diane Wakoski for a four hour interview. Since then he has interviewed or profiled Joseph Brodsky, Allen Ginsberg, Jackson Maclow, Ed Sanders, Robert Hass, William Stafford, August Kleinzahler, Michael Palmer, Robert Peters and others. He currently serves on the Bookseller Advisory Board of the Paris Review.

Former Booksmith employee JULIE HUFFMAN is the author of Solitare (Malibu Comics). The versatile Huffman has also written for multimedia, designed web pages for Soul Divine and Neurotic Records and is an aspiring screenplay writer. She is currently at work on various fiction projects.

Lisa K. Buchanan’s fiction has appeared in Cosmopolitan, Mademoiselle, Smokelong Quarterly, several anthologies and on public radio. She holds an M.F.A. from Mills College and lives in San Francisco.

JOHN TRANTER (b.1943) is the leading Australian poet of his generation. He spent his youth on a farm on the South-east coast of Australia, a countryside rather like that of the mid-Californian coast. He attended country schools, and took his B.A. in 1970 after attending university sporadically. He has worked mainly in publishing and radio production for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and has travelled widely, making reading tours of the United States, England and Europe in recent years.

He has visited and read his poems in San Francisco many times, and it is one of his favorite cities, just as Booksmith on Haight is one of his favorite bookstores and the bar across the street one of his favorite bars. He has lived at various times in Melbourne, Singapore, Brisbane and London, and now lives in Sydney. He has received several senior fellowships and other grants from the Literature Board of the Australia Council.

Ten collections of his verse have been published, including a Selected Poems in 1982 (Hale & Iremonger), and At The Florida, his latest book, in 1993 (University of Queensland Press). The Floor of Heaven, a book-length sequence of four verse narratives, appeared from Harper Collins Australia in 1992. A pamphlet of thirty two prose-verse hybrid poems will be published in April 1997 by Equipage in Cambridge, England, to coincide with John Tranter's appearance at the Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry. His work appears in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, and he has published in the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement as well as in US magazines such as the Paris Review, Grand Street, New American Writing, Boulevard, Berkeley Poetry Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Columbia Poetry Review, B-City, and Verse.

He recently edited Martin Johnston-Selected Poems and Prose for UQP, and (with Philip Mead) the Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry, published in Britain and the USA as the Bloodaxe Book of Modern Australian Poetry. Its 474 pages showcase the work of eighty-six modern Australian poets from around 1940 to the present day.

Cocktail recipe courtesy of John Tranter: a Citron Deux Chevaux (pun intended): Pour a double shot of lemon vodka over ice, add a dash of lemonade, garnish with a slice of lemon.

Booksmith customer C.E. Shue is a great fan of the store's Author Reading Series. Her work has appeared in The Short Story Review, Kingfisher, Paragraph, The Southern California Anthology, and The Australian Book Review. Her story, "Playgrounds," won the 1996 Noe Valley Voice literary contest for fiction. The author can be contacted via email at CEShue@aol.com.

Tom Erikson is a San Francisco photographer and writer whose work has been published in The New York Times, The San Francisco Examiner, Speak Magazine, Columbia Journalism Review, Pulse Magazine, The Exploratorium Quarterly, Whole Earth Review, POV Magazine and elsewhere. He is a regular contributor to The San Francisco Bay Guardian and a busy free-lance photographer specializing in music photography, both promotional and documentary, and family portraiture. He is currently compiling an archive of portraits studying the parent / child relationship.

Tom can be reached at (415) 826-2270 or phototom@juno.com.

MATT LEAHY, a spiritual heir to the great poet "Idaho" Ernie Ford, carries on that rich tradition in his work. He composed his contributions to The Booksmith Reader after defeating actor Jack Lemmon in a fistfight.

Longtime customer TOM TOMORROW (a.k.a. Dan Perkins) is a nationally syndicated cartoonist whose books are Greetings From This Modern World (St. Martin's), Tune in Tomorrow (St. Martin's) and The Wrath of Sparky (St. Martin's). Besides designing the official Booksmith t-shirt and postcard, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, Spin, Utne Reader, Village Voice, Washington Post and elsewhere. He was once described as "the most important cartoonist in America" by some drunk guy at a party. Tomorrow's most recent book, The Great Big Book of Tomorrow: A Treasury of Cartoons, was published in 2003.