$7-$10

Join us at our opening party screening for the biennial SF Bay Area Sex Worker Festival, now  in it’s 20th year!  Our opening program is one of the best with a range of political, raunchy, sexy and wise movies by and about sex workers. 

The evening is a benefit for Poor Magazine with CD launch from welfareQUEENS CD in honor of our Festival curator, Laure McElroy, who passed in 2018. The evening also includes a DVD Launch for award winning “No Humans Involved” by PJ Starr.

Sex workers provide a ‘whores-eye-view,’ a vantage point from which to view social hypocrisy, expressed in many contexts—from the lawmakers who use their services, then sponsor policies which further criminalize us (like FOSTA SESTA)— to the wanna-be saviors who claim to ‘rescue’ us. 
Check out our archives of selected work from past festivals at http://www.sexworkerfest.com/videos/ and read about our unique perspectives in sex worker movie history. http://sexworkerfest.com/readings.html 

Please visit  sexworkerfest.com, for the list of movies on May 22nd at ATA and info about the range of other events from March 22-26th.
The Festival’s sexy, fierce, angry and intimate collection surveys issues and perspectives of sex workers focusing on sex workers’ rights; organizing efforts and working conditions for strippers; global sex work; sex work as a labor issue on the international agenda; sex workers as artists; queer and trans sex workers; sex work and gender identities; sex education, sex art, porn and erotica; portraits of strippers, prostitutes, doms, madams and more. The Sex Worker Festival strives to include sex workers within a broad range of genders, races, ethnicities, ages, classes and sizes from around the world.

$7-$10

Anna Moschavakis

is a poet, a translator, and an editor.

Anna Moschovakis is a writer and translator with an interest inthe edges where languages, forms, and subjectivities meet. Her books of poetryinclude the James Laughlin award-winning Youand Three Others Are Approaching a Lake, and They and We Will Get Into Trouble for This. Her first novel,  Eleanor,or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love, came out last year. Mytranslations from French include Albert Cossery’s The Jokers, Annie Ernaux’s ThePossession, and Bresson on Bresson,and experimental translations of and with the Algerian poet Samira Negrouche. Arecipient of grants and fellowships from New York Foundation for the Arts, ThePoetry Fund, the Howard Foundation, and apexart, Moschovakis has taught in thegraduate writing programs at Bard, Pratt, and Columbia. She is also a longtimemember of the publishing collective Ugly Duckling Presse and a co-founder ofBushel, an art and community space in Delhi, NY.

Tonya M. Foster

Tonya M. Foster was born in Bloomington, Illinois, and raised in New Orleans. She earned a BA from Newcomb College, Tulane University, and an MFA from the University of Houston.

Tonya M. Foster is theauthor of the bilingual chapbook “La Grammaire des Os,” and of the new poetrycollection “A Swarm of Bees in High Court.” A co-editor of “Third Mind:Creative Writing through Visual Art,” Tonya is an assistant professor ofwriting & literature and of graduate writing at California College of theArts. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Callaloo, Western HumanitiesReview, NYFA Arts Quarterly, the Poetry Foundation website, and elsewhere. Sheis a recipient of grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, theMacDowell Colony, the Ford and Mellon Foundations, among others. Tonya is apoetry editor for Fence Magazine. A New Orleans native and recent Bay Areatransplant, Tonya makes a decent gumbo.

about small press traffic

Since 1974 Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center (SPT) has been at the heart of the San Francisco Bay Area innovative writing scene, bringing together readers, writers, and independent presses to engage, create, present, critique and archive their work.

BROWN/GRUFFAT’s TAKE IT DOWN
Two true-traveling troubadours of first-person filmmaking deliver news from the South to their avid fans at OC–lucky for us to serve as a stop in their country-wide campaign! Bill Brown and Sabine Gruffatnot only teach in the esteemed universities of North Carolina, but both have also been witness to the raging controversies and audacious actions around their region’s Confederatestatuary. Tonight’s centerpiece is Sabine ’s eponymous effort, employing antique postcards,35mm single-framing, and color-positive solarization to demonstrate how Southern identity still draws from Civil War/Jim Crow legacies. ALSO premiering: Gruffat’s Framelines, an abstract scratch made by laser-etchingonto wide filmstrips, then photogrammed. PLUS Brown ’s XCTRY (diary of a Midwestroad-trip), and his Life On The Mississippi (his essay on that river that borrows Mark Twain’s famous title). For openers, we’re throwing into the hearty gumbo some archival excerpts, providing more context for a conversation about, well, our historical trauma.*$7.77