Wednesday, January 30 - Mariah K. Young

Tonight at 8 PM on Bibliocracy Radio, on KPFK 90.7 FM.  MARIAH K. YOUNG. I’ve read in articles and reviews of tonight’s guest - a debut writer - that she began writing her collection of short stories as investigative journalism, perhaps accounting for their integrity, and honest portrayal of lives found in the shadows, missed by plenty of journalists and even creative writers.  Born in San Leandro, Mariah K. Young lived and watched and wrote in East Oakland, where the characters of the nine stories in Masha’allah and Other Stories also live and work.  This excellent collection won the inaugural James D. Houston Award sponsored by the good folks at Heyday, and includes an epigraph from Khalil Gibran, ironic and striving and brave: “Work is love made visible.” The environs of the Bay Area’s most ignored and abused are illuminated in Young’s careful attention to the stark poetry of too little good work and the struggle for love, and for justice.  A family raising fighting dogs, a failed pot grower, a bar maid, a cab driver, a  hair stylist who sees her clients in the houses that she also cleans, these are voices we ignore at our peril, with the chance to catch up, here, right now, in this collection.  For more on Heyday and Mariah K. Young:  https://heydaybooks.com/mariah-k-young-first-winner-of-the-james-d-houston-award/

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