Just steps away from sponsored fun runs, endurance challenges, and ultra-marathons, in Tamara Johnson's Not Far From Normal, San Diego's hidden residents play games of survival side-by-side with official city events. However one feels about the rise of dark tourism, it has never been necessary to travel far to experience either the dangerous or the exotic. Part poetry, part photo essay, part field guide, Not Far From Normal tells the secret history of San Diego,s parks and missions as told by their current inhabitants. From the crash of PSA Flight#182 to the - I don't like Mondays - school shooting and other dark episodes that don't make it into San Diego's official story, Not Far From Normal is a compelling history of everyday life on the wild side of Southern California.

Not Far from Normal

Literature & Fiction

Tamara Johnson

Literary

San Diego City Works Press

Kowit is one of the best-known poets in San Diego with an enormous following. The poems are based on the ancient amatory poems of India written in Sanskrit. Art--drawings, portraits, and sketches accompany the poems throughout the text.

The Gods of Rapture: Poems in the Erotic Mood

Kowit, Steve

Poetry

Like the first edition of Sunshine/Noir this anthology presents the reader with a wide range of contemporary San Diego writers of fiction and nonfiction alike as well as poets, artists and photographers. It explores San Diego and Tijuana's border culture; San Diego's multiple identities and lost history; the city's natural beauty and endangered ecologies; its role as a center of the culture of war; and San Diego writers attempts to explore the meaning of place. By using a multicultural, multidisciplinary, pan-artistic approach, this anthology offers the reader a fresh look at a city yet to be explored in such a fashion. Sunshine/Noir II is not comprehensive, but rather stands only as a place marker in the continuing exploration of literary San Diego that leaves many borders yet to be crossed. This anthology includes many acclaimed and award-winning poets and writers as well as emerging authors. While most of the authors anthologized here are from San Diego, a few are not, though we welcome them as good hosts. All in all, we think we have assembled a gorgeous hybrid monster. Enter at your own risk.

Sunshine/Noir II: Writings from San Diego & Tijuana

Jim Miller - Editor

Kelly Mayhew - Editor

Genre Fiction

Fact and fantasy mingle in this work which looks squarely at grave social and personal ills - abuse, prejudice, neglect, and loss - while heralding the intellectual and creative triumphs of seven provocative figures from history. Subjects included are Dorothy Dandridge, Bettie Page, Margaret Sanger, and Bayard Rustin.

Unmaking of Americans: 7 Lives

Freilicher, Mel

Contemporary

Last Days in Ocean Beach is the story of William, a scientist working at the Center for Extinction Studies, a think tank at the College of the Sun funded by a green billionaire. William lives “on the border between dread and wonder” as he desperately works to raise the alarm about climate change and its dire consequences to an apathetic public, learns to live with grief, and hold on to love. Along the way, we meet the residents of his wonderfully shabby apartment complex in Ocean Beach--bikers, hippies, skate punks, adventure tourists, reggae singers, aimless young professionals, Iraq war veterans, decadent retirees, a hospice nurse, and a Buddhist monk, all of whom are searching for something, looking to live more fully. Last Days in Ocean Beach is a blues song moaning and rocking the beach party at the end of the world.

Last Days in Ocean Beach

MILLER, JIM

An extraordinary collection of poetry that takes the reader from the depths of despair through outrage, to transcendent joy. In this searingly intense collection of poems, Baca inhabits the subjects of his poems and makes them sing.

Rita and Julia

BACA, JIMMY SANTIAGO

Novel based on the life of Job Harriman, socialist candidate for mayor in Los Angeles in 1911, and co-founder of the Llano Colony in northern L.A. County. Harriman was a well-known free speech lawyer and, in 1911, becamse the Socialist Party's candidate for mayor of Los Angeles. This is a fictionalized account of his life in the utopian Llano del Rio Cooperative Colony which Harriman helped to establish north of Los Angeles in 1914.

Dynamite and Dreams: A Novel Based on the Life of Job Harriman

Hine, Professor Robert V.

More than eighty contributors offer up unique views of food and drink, what we hunger for, what pains us, what sustains us, what brings us joy as individuals, as families, as a culture. This collection of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and art invites you to sit at the collective table that we share as the human community.

Hunger and Thirst: Food Literature

Cookbooks, Food & Wine

Nancy Cary

Cooking Education & Reference

Itchy Brown Girl Seeks Employment is an ironic Curriculum Vitae where life and work experiences one wouldn't want a potential employer to know are highlighted using vulnerability, wit, observation, and candor. Ella deCastro Baron a first generation Asian American woman challenged by her parents' faith, inherited sickness, and questionable life choices shares of beginning and ending relationships, restlessness, miracles, prejudice, entitlement, and community. She leaves it up to the reader to decide, after assessing her background, education, professional experience, fieldwork, high (and low) achievements, if she is someone worth investing in.

Itchy Brown Girl Seeks Employment

Biographies & Memoirs

deCastro Baron, Ella

Community & Culture

Lantern Tree: Four Books of Poems is a luminous collaboration that explores life's spaces- the lantern of relation, journey, spirit, desire, loss, and home. At once disparate and entangled, the voices found here are those of Chris Baron in Under the Broom Tree, Heather Eudy in Bills of Lading, Cali Linfor in A Book of Ugly Things, and Sabrina Youmans in Pacific Standard Time. Published by San Diego City Works Press and distributed by Sunbelt Publications

Lantern Tree: Four Books of Poems

Chris Baron

Heather Eudy

Cali Linfor

Sabrina Youmans

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Books by San Diego City Works Press