Name: Sranger Than Fiction Reading Series
Start: 2026-02-22T14:00:00-08:00
Location: Specs Bar

Mark your calendars, grab a beer, and join me to celebrate six raw and real literary voices within the hallowed walls of Specs Bar in North Beach, including new work by Grant Faulkner, Cintra Wilson, Emma Binder, Alan Black, Sezin Devi Koehler, and Ren Weber. "Good lit in a dark bar." Bios below:
Grant Faulkner is the co-founder of 100 Word Story, the co-founder of the Flash Fiction Institute, and the co-founder of Memoir Nation (and the co-host of the Memoir Nation podcast). He is the author of several books, including "The Art of Brevity", "Fissures", and "All the Comfort Sin Can Provide". He just published something out there in the distance, a "flash novel" of linked short-short stories written to Gail Butensky's photographs.
Writer/performer/painter/former "New York Times" columnist Cintra Wilson is the author of four books, including the prescient “Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny.” Since the ignominious death of the publishing industry and American literacy, she has been writing "Cintra Wilson Feels Your Pain" weekly on Substack. In 2026 she is going on tour with Michelle Shocked, performing the one-man show, "Krapp's Last Tape" by Samuel Beckett.
Emma Binder is a fiction writer from Wisconsin. They have received a Stegner Fellowship in fiction from Stanford University, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, a Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Fellowship, and the James Jones First Novel Fellowship. Their short stories have been selected for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories and have received an O. Henry Prize, the Gulf Coast Prize in Fiction, the Indiana Review Fiction Prize, and a Wisconsin Writers Award. Currently based in Wisconsin, they are working on a novel.
Alan Black has been a bartender for forty years. He is also a prolific writer and spoken word artist and has published multiple books. Alan Black always puts the “strange” in Stranger Than Fiction and is a regular in our line-up.
Sezin Devi Koehler is a multiracial Sri Lankan/Lithuanian American and author of "Much Ado About Keanu: A Critical Reeves Theory" (April 2025, Chicago Review Press), a socio-cultural deep dive into what makes Keanu Reeves so extraordinary as a performer and artist. Pop-culture writer, entertainment journalist, and Rotten Tomatoes-certified film and TV critic for Black Girl Nerds, Sezin's bylines also include Entertainment Weekly, The Daily Beast, Black Girl Nerds, Queerty, Teen Vogue, and many more. Her poetry has appeared in Tension Literary and Verse News.
Ren Weber is a mixed writer from San Francisco. She has been published in the "The New York Times'" Modern Love Column: Tiny Love Stories, as well as "The Rumpus" and "Elsewhere Magazine". She has been nominated for Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers.