News

2025 NEWS

READINGS for Woman, Life, Freedom: Poems for the Iranian Revolution

Friday, November 14 at 6pm, Pegasus Books, 2349 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley

Saturday, November 15 at 4:30pm, Bird & Beckett, 653 Chenery Street, San Francisco

PANEL on Noir Fiction & Crime

Howard Zinn Book Fair, 1125 Valencia Street
Sunday, December 7, 4:30 pm
Join Owen Hill, Jonathan Lethem, Gary Phillips, Summer Brenner

How They Will Be Remembered, Red Door (Denmark) page 18

“The Missing Path” South Writ Large, essay.

Woman Life Freedom – Guernica Editions, anthology
including "Afterwards" and "Beautiful Stranger"
Woman Life Freedom: Poems for the Iranian Revolution - Harvard Review

INTERVIEW at Rain Taxi about Dust with Jane Rosenberg LaForge

Dust in AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW

https://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2025/02/summer-brenner-dust.html

VIDEO from HILLSIDE CLUB/Panel discussion of memoir

INTERVIEW at Jewish Lens about Dust

REVIEW of Dust by Ava Homa, author of Daughters of Smoke and Fire: A Novel
This memoir caught me off guard in the best way. I fell in love with David, his singing, his humor, his sensitivity, the way he moved through the world with defiance and fragility. Summer Brenner writes about her brother with such intimacy and restraint that his death felt like a personal loss. The same is true for their father and I realized only after the fact how carefully she’d led me there. Dust doesn’t announce itself as heartbreaking, but it is. It’s also tender, funny, and full of quiet beauty. I couldn’t put it down.

INTERVIEW about Dust with Lola Opatayo, host of JOURNEY OF THE ART


2024 NEWS

Dust, A Memoir now available online/at local bookstores

Dust, A Memoir featured in LITHUB

Listen to Summer Brenner read from Dust at KALW/New Arrivals

From BERKELEYSIDE (Joanne Furio)

From BAY CITY BOOKS (Frances Dinkelspiel)

Listen to poems presented at Woodland Pattern 2024: YouTube channel—day 1, starting @10:39 (introduced by David Wilk/City Point Press)

Visit Poets Reading the News for "Blue Innocents," a poem dedicated to Gaza

From DUSIE: Tuesday poem #568 : Summer Brenner : A BIRD SEES

From FICTION ATTIC

The Missing Lover, Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2022
Updated edition with color illustrations by Lewis Warsh
ISBN: 978-1-959556-00-8 Available online

"Multum in Parvo" in Hello Goodbye Apocalypse, editors, Owen Hill & Carol Jameson, 2021 

"Identity Theft" in Berkeley Noir, editors Jerry Thompson and Owen Hill, Akashic Books, 2020

Richmond Tales, Lost Secrets of the Iron Triangle; Oakland Tales, Lost Secrets of The Town; Ivy, Homeless in San Francisco are available online.

From CUKE, read "On the Way to Tassajara" (pdf)

WITHIN ... WITHOUT (in English and Arabic)

When she wakes, she can see the color of the day. Clouds..The rising moon..Stars. Through the window is the future.

On her side of the glass is the past. A room filled with books she once read. Odors of cardamom and kebab she cooked yesterday. Photos of loved ones,alive and dead..

Maybe it's obvious from the curtain. A woman lives in this room..It's not made to be a curtain but a simple piece of beautiful cloth..Perhaps found in the market. Or given to her as a gift from an aunt or grandmother.

Sometimes she uses the curtain rod as a clothesline where she hangs stockings or a blouse to dry against the glass..

The curtain covers the window's lower half so she can hide from the outside. But the upper half is open to the sky that reveals what is beyond the Earth. Beyond war. Beyond even herself.

We don't know her name. So much of the history of women has been nameless..

She appears as "Jassim al-Assadi's wife (name unknown)" on the List of Iraqi academics assassinated in Iraq during the US-led occupation..

On the list of 324, she is #71..

All we know is she was Jassim al-Assadi's wife, a Lecturer at the College of Administration and Economy at Baghdad University. The date of death associated with #71 is October 2, 2006. Mohammed Jassim al-Assadi, Professor and Dean of the College of Administration and Economy at Baghdad University appears in the list as #70, killed in a targeted attack with a son.

Days, months, years, over a decade has passed, but the living remember. Perhaps family and friends think of her on her birthday and the anniversary of her death. Maybe one of them has her scarf or a vase. Maybe another the photos of her son as a baby. Her name is passed among them. A name we don't know..

Yet we too remember her.


Title of print:: Within ... Without

Name: Summer Brenner, USA

Print technique: Digital chromogenic

Text and photo exhibited with "Shadow and Light," Arab Art Festival, Liverpool, 2019