The Booksmith is thrilled to welcome the author of S is For, William Archila, along with fellow poets Lori Bedikian, Leticia Hernández-Linares, and Dorianne Laux for an evening of readings.

RSVP is not required, but appreciated.

About the S is For

S is For is an investigation by poet William Archila of the Central American migrant crisis haunted by the past of the civil war in El Salvador, the meanings of family spirits, and trees disappearing to urban sprawl—always wielding the voice of the immigrant, the refugee, and the ever-present exile as a weapon against invisibility and displacement. Inventive and compassionate, Archila’s poems navigate the meanings of family spirits, weeds and wildflowers, and the irreverence to lay down roots with our dead. The collection expresses the importance of an inner voice from the perspective of exile—people with no country, no language, ghosts split between present and past, between home and foreign. In a variety of forms—quasi-sonnet, sestina, ekphrastic, syllabic, lyric, memorial—the poems create a bridge between flaws and fractures, between the northern region of Central America and the beloved north which is the US.

S is for: every letter never uttered, but evoked.

About the author

Pulitzer Prize finalist Dorianne Laux’s most recent collection is Life on Earth, (W.W. Norton, 2024). She is also author of Only As The Day Is Long: New and Selected, The Book of Men, winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize and Facts about the Moon, winner of the Oregon Book Award. A textbook released in 2024: Finger Exercises for Poets. Laux is founding faculty at Pacific University and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She lives with husband Joseph Millar and their bunny, Odin, in Richmond, CA. 

Lory Bedikian’s second book Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body won the 2023 Prairie Schooner/Raz-Shumaker Book Prize in Poetry, published by the University of Nebraska Press. Her first collection The Book of Lamenting won the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. Her work received the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and is included in the anthology Border Lines: Poems of Migration, KNOPF, 2020. Bedikian has received grants from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and was chosen to be part of the 2024 Poets & Writers Poetry publicity cohort. Bedikian teaches poetry workshops in Los Angeles and elsewhere.

 Leticia Hernández-Linares is a bilingual, interdisciplinary writer, artist, and racial justice educator. She is the author of Mucha Muchacha, Too Much Girl, Alejandria Fights Back! ¡La lucha de Alejandria! and co-editor of The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States. Widely published, her work appears in anthologies such as Maestrapeace, San Francisco’s Monumental Feminist Mural and Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology. A five-time San Francisco Arts Commission grantee, she received the Flor y Canto Festival Community Appreciation Teyolía Award in 2023. She has lived on the same block of the Mission District for thirty years, and teaches in the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State.

William Archila is the winner of the 2023 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry for his collection S is For. He is the author of The Art of Exile and The Gravedigger’s Archeology. He was awarded the 2023 Jack Hazard fellowship. His work has appeared in AGNl, APR, Copper Nickle, The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly and the anthology Latino Poetry: The Library of American Anthology. He has work forthcoming in New Ohio Review. He is an associate editor at Tía Chucha Press. He lives in Los Angeles, on Tongva land.

About the bookstore

The Booksmith is an independent bookstore located in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco since 1976.

Please note:

• Check-in for the event will begin at 6:45pm.
• Priced ticket holders will have seats held until 7pm. Arrivals after 7pm will be allowed admission, but seats are not guaranteed.
• General admission ticket holders will be offered seats at check-in on a first-come, first-served basis. May be standing room.
• Space at the door on the day of the event is usually available, but not guaranteed.
• ADA accessible. Bathrooms on site during event hours.
• Events typically end between 8:30 and 9pm.
• Questions? tickets@booksmith.com