Literary Death Match: Litquake Edition

Literary Death Match returns to Litquake with a head-to-head poetry match for the ages! Literary Death Match features a mix of four established and emerging writers who perform their most brilliant work before a live audience and a panel of three all-star judges. After a pair of readings, the judges take turns spouting hilarious, off-the-wall commentary, and select two  finalists. Then the show trades in its literary sensibility for an absurdly comical climax to decide who will be the Literary Death Match champion. $15 adv / $20 door

Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her debut novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree was the silver medal winner in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and a New York Times editor’s choice. Her essays and short stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Cut, and Zyzzyva, among others. The Man Who Could Move Clouds, a true family story about her curandero grandfather, came out from Doubleday on July 12, 2022. She lives in California.

Tomaz Moniz’s debut novel Big Familia was a finalist for the 2020 PEN/Hemingway, the LAMBDA, and the Foreward Indies Awards. He edited the popular Rad Dad and Rad Families anthologies. He’s a 2020 Artist Affiliate for Headlands Center for Arts and 2022 UCross Resident. He teaches writing at Berkeley City College. He has stuff on the internet but loves penpals: PO Box 3555, Berkeley CA 94703. He promises to write back.

Ploi Pirapokin is the Nonfiction Editor at Newfound Journal, and her work is featured in Tor.com, Pleiades, Ninth Letter, Sycamore Review, Gulf Stream Magazine, and more.

Colin Winnette is the author of several books, including the indie best-seller Coyote and Haints Stay. His most recent novel, The Job of the Wasp was an American Booksellers Association’s Indie Next Pick. Colin was the winner of Les Figues Press’s NOS Book Contest, a runner-up for Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Award, and a finalist for Gulf Coast Magazine’s Donald Barthelme Prize for Short Prose. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including McSweeney’s, Playboy, The Believer, The Paris Review, and more. A former bookseller in Texas, New York, Vermont, and California, Colin is now a writer living in San Francisco. His next novel, Users, will be published by Soft Skull Press in February 2023.

Olga Zilberbourg's English-language debut Like Water and Other Stories (WTAW Press) explores “bicultural identity hilariously, poignantly,” according to The Moscow Times. She grew up in St. Petersburg, Russia and is the author of four Russian-language collections of stories. A resident of San Francisco since 2003, she once moonlighted as a Litquake volunteer and currently serves as a consulting editor of Narrative Magazine, a co-facilitator of the San Francisco Writers Workshop, and together with Yelena Furman runs Punctured Lines, a feminist blog on post-Soviet and diaspora literatures.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

The Valencia Room, 647 Valencia Street, San Francisco, United States