Litquake is now taking submissions for the 2012 Festival (Oct. 5-13). If you're local and have published a book or other significant work in the last two years, you could be a reader at Litquake 2012.

Don't wait: submission deadline is June 1.

Brooklyn, NY, Lit Crawl: May 19
NYC Lit Crawl: Sept. 15
San Francisco Lit Crawl: Oct. 13
Austin, TX Lit Crawl: Oct. 27

Litquake San Francisco isn’t until October, but we already have a lively lineup for the first months of the year.

On February 13, local literati read their favorite overwrought passages at Love Hurts: Litquake Preps You for Valentine’s Day with Readings From Some of the Most Wretched Passages on Love and Lust Ever Written.

Join Litquake and NoisePop on February 22 with Way Behind the Music: From Ozzy to Jewel, at the Make-Out Room.

And that’s not all.

Litquake’s Epicenter series continues on the last Tuesday of every month through September. Steve Erickson (These Dreams of You, editor of Black Clock) headlines the Feb. 28 event; followed by Geoff Dyer and David Thomson on March 14; and Adam Johnson on March 27. Check out the full Epicenter schedule for January through June.

Stay tuned for more announcements!

Join us for the final Epicenter event of 2011, when GuyWriters community teams up with Litquake for this one-time event, Writing Down the Past: Gay Men Reveal Their Histories.

The night of poetry and prose features six authors who examine the path each gay man is on and take a look at their own private histories. Readers include poets James J. Siegel (Ghosts of Ohio, GuyWriters Director), Baruch Porras-Hernandez (co-host Queer Open Mic), and Jim Roderick; and authors Mark Abramson (Russian River Rat, Beach Reading), Vincent Meis (Eddie’s Desert Rose), and Gabriel Lampert.

This Epicenter runs 6-8pm at the GLBT History Museum, 4127 18th St. in the Castro. Donation is suggested $5 but no one turned away for lack of funds.

GuyWriters is a community network for gay writers in the San Francisco Bay Area, and provides opportunities for members to develop new writing, access publishing resources, and meet other people in the literary world.

Litquake’s Epicenter Series pairs the folks behind San Francisco’s Literary Festival with literary journals, reading series, publishers, schools, and more at free monthly gatherings for the literary-minded. Come to drink, eat, think, and listen.

Join Litquake favorite Neal Pollack for a special evening at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, as this bestselling author presents his new novel Jewball, a funny, gritty historical noir about a tough Jew on the brink, as a great American game comes into its own.

Local sports journalist and author Dan Fost will chat with Neal about Jewish culture, basketball, and why Neal decided to publish this book himself.

1937. The gears of world war have begun to grind, but Inky Lautman, star point guard for the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association, America’s greatest basketball team, is dealing with his own problems. His coach has unwittingly incurred a massive gambling debt to the German-American Bund. His main basketball rival is self-righteously leading public protests against the rise of homegrown American fascism. And his girlfriend wants him to join a Jewish student organization that’s all talk and no action. It’s more than Inky can deliver. He just wants to play ball and occasionally beat people up for money. The tides of history are flowing against a guy like Inky. Can he make his free throws and still make it through the season alive? This…is Jewball.

The JCCSF is located at 3200 California St., event begins at 7 pm. Tickets are $12 general public, $10 for members and students.

Neal Pollack is author of several acclaimed books of fiction and nonfiction, including the bestselling memoirs Alternadad and Stretch, the cult classic The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature, and the rock novel Never Mind the Pollacks. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and son. And he is the only author to have appeared at Litquake in San Francisco, the Lit Crawls in both New York and Austin, and our event in Los Angeles with PEN USA. We’re not sure how it happened either. Go see this show!