Beast Crawl

If you can’t wait till October’s high magnitude Litquake and the wildly popular Lit Crawl, the East Bay has its own literary bar hop. Uptown Oakland’s Beast Crawl, now in its 6th year, is a mammoth literary festival featuring 150 writers performing at 40 local galleries, bars, restaurants, cafés and storefronts. It’s a three-legged beast and each leg lasts one hour, and offers as many as a dozen readings to chose from. The readings come from literary journals and zines, small presses and writing groups. Some of this year’s many and varied events include spoken word, poetry slams, open-mic, elderotica, word performances and curious consortiums like Tourettes Without Regrets, which  has been called "The Fight Club of Underground Art.”