Ivy Anderson & Devon Angus Alice:The 10th Anniversary

About this event

City Lights and Heyday Books celebrate the 10th anniversary edition of Alice: Memoirs of a Barbary Coast Prostitute (With a New Preface) Edited by Ivy Anderson & Devon Angus Published by Heyday Books In 1913 the San Francisco Bulletin published a serialized, ghostwritten memoir of a prostitute who went by the moniker Alice Smith. “ A Voice from the Underworld” detailed Alice’s humble Midwestern upbringing and her struggle to find aboveboard work, and it candidly related the harrowing events she endured after entering “the life.” Never had prostitute narratives been as frank in their discussion of topics such as abortion, police corruption, and the unwritten laws of the brothel. The response to Alice’s story was unprecedented: Four thousand letters poured into the Bulletin, many of which were written by other prostitutes ready to share their own stories; and it inspired what may have been the first sex worker rights protest in modern history. With Alice, filmmakers and writers Ivy Anderson and Devon Angus present the memoirs of Alice Smith and a selection of letters her story elicited. In an introduction contextualizing Alice’s story, they reveal themes that extend from Alice’s experience in the early twentieth century to issues facing sex workers today. This edition features a new preface detailing the discoveries made about this history since the book’s original publication in 2016. Ivy Anderson is a San Francisco–based writer who focuses on issues of ecology and radical history. Her reportage on water management issues was published in Water Efficiency Magazine and and her poetry in Poecology. She holds a B.A. in environmental studies with a minor in geography, runs a community garden, and is on the board of a bookstore collective in San Francisco. Devon Angus is an artist, activist, and historian based in San Francisco. He composed and performed a conceptual folk operetta based on San Francisco history, The Ghosts of Barbary, throughout the Bay Area, Switzerland, and Italy. He organized and published a series of oral histories of immigrants in the Catskills region, and was the recipient of an arts grant through the New York State Council on the Arts for his show Songs and Stories of Old New York. This event made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation

Who

• Ivy AndersonAuthor
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• Devon AngusAuthor
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• Alice: Memoirs of a Barbary Coast Prostitute (With a New Preface)Author

Books

• Alice: Memoirs of a Barbary Coast ProstituteIvy Anderson
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Venue

Canneti's Bookshop

Moraga Way, Orinda, CA 94563

Venue website

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