Matt Werner's Blog, page 3

Google employees team up with the African Advocacy Network to teach computer literacy class

On Thursday, April 24, 2014, Google employees and African Advocacy Network (AAN) employees led a computer literacy class for clients at Dolores Street Community Services.

The nonprofit at 20th and Valencia in San Francisco's Mission District helps the Bay Area’s African immigrant and refugee community adjust to life in the Bay Area and empowers them by giving them tools to manage their immigration paperwork online. The AAN works to close the digital divide in San Francisco by giving immigrants access to technology and training through computer literacy classes.


African Advocacy Network co-founders Adoubou Traore and Joe Sciarrillo led the first part of the workshop, giving an overview to attendees on the value of computer literacy skills, and then instructed the 15 workshop attendees on how to check immigration case status updates using the US Citizenship and Immigration Services website and how to make InfoPass Appointments online.

The workshop leaders stressed how computer skills are necessary to find employment and housing in San Francisco. They tutored attendees on how to do things such as checking email for housing, job, and immigration forms online, to finding work and housing using Craigslist, and using Google search and Maps to navigate their new neighborhoods.


The second part of the class was led by Matt Werner and Joe Sadusky, technical writers at Google who focus on Google Apps and Chromebooks. They focused on how to use Chromebooks and PCs to do essential tasks, such as formatting a resume using Google Docs, to using Google Search, Gmail, and Google Translate. Matt also gave tips on how to use Craigslist to find housing and employment, and answered questions from class participants ranging from advanced spreadsheet functions to more simple questions like "What is Facebook?"


At the end of the workshop, Matt Werner shared with participants how to use Google Glass and Chromebooks. This workshop was made possible due to laptops provided by two grants from Google: a Home, Sweet Home community grant and Google Goodware laptop donation. The laptops are available at the African Advocacy Network for clients to use for free.


For more photos from the class, see the photo album.

Why I Backed Rodzilla's "He Think Too Much" Kickstarter Campaign

Rodzilla (AKA Rodrick Freeman) is a Sacramento spoken-word artist who's about to release his first book He Think Too Much featuring poetry, essays, short stories, political satire, testimonies and ruminations he's composed over the past decade. Rodzilla is a provocative thinker, and I'm looking forward to his book which chronicles "the journey of the progressive, unapologeticly African socially conscious Black man in America."

He's a unique voice in the Northern California spoken-word scene, in that he's a Millennial who continues in the tradition of Gil Scott-Heron and Amiri Baraka, and brings his own voice to the table. I'm always interested in local, self-published work, and I'm especially excited to read He Think Too Much.

You can back his Kickstarter campaign before November 3, 2013.

Oakland Unseen now available to purchase at local bookstores

Oakland Unseen on the newspaper rack at Diesel Books, Rockridge
Oakland Unseen, Oakland, California's premier source for fake news, is now available for purchase (for $1) at bookstores in Oakland, Berkeley, and San Francisco. For the latest complete listing of stores carrying Oakland Unseen, see the Oakland Unseen website.

Oakland Unseen is an Onion-style fake newspaper satirizing life in Oakland and the Bay Area. Copies are also available at select Oakland public library branches, and you can download the PDF here: http://goo.gl/iOsMiH.

Oakland Unseen release party - October 4, 2013

Oakland Unseen - Fall 2013 print version
Oakland Unseen features fake news stories and satire in the tradition of The Onion about life in Oakland and the San Francisco Bay Area. The Fall 2013 print edition is being released on October 4 at the 25th Street Collective in Oakland from 6-10pm. See the Oakland Unseen website for more details.
Oakland Unseen front page
Copies of Oakland Unseen ready to deliver

50th Anniversary of Dr. King's I Have a Dream speech

Today's the 50th anniversary of Dr. King's I Have a Dream speech. Here's a DJ mix I made back in college of his first time giving the I Have a Dream speech:

Jorge Luis Borges's 114th birthday

It's Jorge Luis Borges's 114th birthday. Two years ago, I was fortunate to work with the Google Doodle team to provide feedback on the Borges Doodle and write the Google Books blog post explaining the doodle.
Google Doodle honoring Jorge Luis Borges on August 24, 2011 by  Sophia Foster-Dimino
It's been amazing to see how this Argentinean author's influence has increased over the years, as evidenced by two new books out about Borges. Six years ago, I met Jorge Luis Borges's widow in Buenos Aires, and she showed me his library and archives. This became the basis for my story Meeting Maria Kodama in my first book Papers for the Suppression of Reality. Today, I hold up my mate gourd and bombilla in honor of Borges.

African Street Festival celebrates African dance, culture in San Francisco

On Sunday, July 21, 2013, the African Advocacy Network (AAN) put on the African Street Festival. This event held in San Francisco's Mission District featured dance performances from local Congolese, Ghanaian, Guinean, South African, Zimbabwean, Haitian & Sudanese groups, as well as local DJs. Bissap Baobab at 19th street (between Cap and Mission) provided delicious Senegalese food, signature cocktails, and soft drinks.
The event was held to celebrate the vibrant cultures of Africans living in the Bay Area and showcase some of the top local dance groups. Joe Sciarrillo, who works at the African Advocacy Network and helped plan the event, hoped the event would be a fun way to raise awareness about the refugees and asylees living in the Bay Area. Joe has written in the past for this blog about African immigrants' experiences resettling and finding housing in San Francisco.
For more details on the event, see https://www.facebook.com/events/195100080649552 and http://aansf.org. View photos from the event on Google+.

Ise Lyfe shows that the story of East Oakland is "Brighter than Blight"

"Oakland is Proud" painted on the former Greenside Projects in East OaklandOakland is often condemned by critics saying that its public schools lack parent involvement and that certain neighborhoods lack community involvement. However, visiting Ise Lyfe's "Brighter than Blight" community art exhibit on June 30, 2013 presented a different side of East Oakland than what you often find in the media. In the shell of the former Greenside Projects at Bancroft and 77th Avenue stood an art exhibit showcasing photography, paintings, and art installations by East Oakland artist Ise Lyfe. The exhibit had many attendees over the last two weekends of June, and was covered by several outlets, including Oakland Local and 38th Notes.
Vashti Means, Deborah Wysinger, Mildred Powell, and Matt Werner at Brighter than BlightWhat stood out to me was not just Ise Lyfe's artwork. I already knew he was a Renaissance Man having seen his one-man play Who's Krazy, read his book Pistols and Prayers, and purchased his albums Spread The Word and Prince Cometh. But what stood out to me was the civic involvement and how parents throughout Oakland and community members rallied behind this project and made it happen. California Affordable Housing Initiatives and Oakland City Councilmember Desley Brooks helped sponsor the exhibit. And community members like Vashti Means, Deborah Wysinger, and Mildred Powell in addition to many others with the Oakland Housing Authority and other organizations supported Ise Lyfe in showcasing this exhibit in East Oakland.

The exhibit featured some of the highlights of life in East Oakland, such as two former public housing units converted into a 1990s-era grandmother's house, fit with a kitchen playing Bill Withers' Grandma's Hands when you walked in:
Inside Ise Lyfe's Grandma's House exhibitThe exhibit also touched on some of the more difficult aspects of life in Oakland, such as Uncle Randy, a character from Ise Lyfe's one-man play Pistols and Prayers. Ise Lyfe wrote in the pamphlet for the exhibit that this piece is "a statement about the invisibility of homeless people in our nation."
Uncle Randy by Ise LyfeAnother interesting aspect of the exhibit was that it incorporated Oakland's car culture into it by having a parking lot featuring classic cars and the owners showing off their cars. Often Oakland's car culture is associated with sideshows and whistle tips, so it's good to see Ise put a positive spin on this important part of Oakland's culture.
Harrison showing off his blue NovaAnd what was great about the exhibit with so many thought-provoking pieces was that Ise Lyfe was there for the duration of the 6 days, and you could discuss the pieces with the artist himself.
Ise Lyfe at his exhibit Brighter than Blight
Article by Matt Werner, author of Oakland in Popular Memory. Photos are by Joe Sciarrillo, co-author of Bay Area Underground. See the full photo album on Google+.

Baby Boomers' War on Millennials: Student Loans

The author graduating in 2007, unaware that the Great Recession was months away.You can’t read more than a couple columns in a newspaper today without running into an article bashing Millennials--those born between 1980-2000. Having been born in 1984, I fall into this Millennial group, which Time Magazine recently called “The Me Me Me Generation” in a May 29, 2013 cover story pretending to be journalism. Other more sympathetic articles have titles like Why Millennials Aren’t Lazy, Entitled Narcissists. So the generation that’s brought us climate change and two endless wars is now setting us up for financial ruin with one of the only means we have of upward mobility: Education.

Let’s examine the facts:

Congress just let the subsidized loan rate of 3.4% double to 6.8%. This will add to the over $1 trillion dollars in outstanding student loan debt that my generation needs to pay off. And now for my personal experience. University of California tuition has increased from around $6,000 when I graduated in 2007 from UC Berkeley to approximately $13,000 per year in 2012. That’s over doubling the tuition in just 5 years! And I’m lucky to have graduated when I did--even though I landed in one of the toughest job markets in recent history.

After working an unpaid internship at McSweeney’s Publishing and a paid internship at Pearson Higher Ed, I went back to school to get a Master’s in English literature. I was fortunate to get a scholarship to cover my tuition in the United Kingdom, but I took out US Federal Stafford Subsidized and Unsubsidized student loans to help pay for living expenses of attending the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. I was fortunate that I got hired at Google when I was finishing up my Master’s thesis and was hired when I was still technically a student in early 2010. I didn’t have to go through the 1 to 2 years of job hunting many of my friends have gone through as Recession graduates.

However, even graduating under these ideal circumstances, I still had student loans from 6.5 years of higher education to pay off, including: 1 year at Boston College, 1 year at Diablo Valley College, 3 years at UC Berkeley, and 1.5 years at the University of Edinburgh. These loans totaled in the tens of thousands of dollars--but luckily not in the hundreds of thousands like some of my English major classmates who stayed at Boston College (with its $40K+ annual tuition) and went onto grad school.

Even under my auspicious circumstances, it’s been difficult to pay off the loans I incurred at a 5.5% fixed rate. Paying these off at the default 10-year rate, I would be paying tens of thousands of dollars in interest on top of the original amount that I borrowed. Because of this, I’ve been living as cheaply as possible for the last three years (sleeping on a bunk bed in a commuter house), paying a large percentage of my salary each month toward my student loan to accelerate my 10-year repayment timeline down to just a few years.

The author contemplating how he's going to pay off massive student loan debts.Generation Debt

I can’t imagine a student graduating a UC today, with the tuition double what it was for me ($13K x 4 years = $52,00), and then having to deal with a 6.8% rate. There’s a 6-month grace period, but that hasn’t been enough time for many of my friends to find jobs. And then there’s the issue of underemployment, where candidates work at a job they're overqualified for, or for fewer hours than they'd like. Think of the law school grads working at Starbucks.

Here are the numbers:

When I was at UC Berkeley, the average annual tuition was $6K/year, multiplied by 4 years, equals $24K for your college education. Under the old student loan interest rate of 3.4% over 10 years, you’re paying back a total of $28K. But now, with UC tuition at $13K per year, multiplied by 4 years, you have to pay back $52K. Under the new student loan interest rate of 6.8%, over 10 years, you’re paying a total of $71K! And that’s just for tuition--not counting room and board. And that’s for in-state tuition at one of the more affordable state universities.

Private school costs much more. True, you can often get more financial aid at a private school, but image how difficult it is nowdays to work your way through school. Even working your way through attending a California community college is quite difficult. It cost just $11 per unit when I was attending Diablo Valley College in 2003, and it’s now $46 per unit! That’s over a 300% increase in less than a decade! It’s still one of the best deals for the price, but what used to be free for all California residents, and then reasonably priced when I attended, is now a difficult-to-pay-for education, especially when you factor in books, lab materials, and room and board.

I’ve been lucky to have landed an excellent job right out of grad school, and I’ve had great advice along the way on paying off student loans, from my siblings who attended UC Berkeley, and a financial advisor who also attended Cal. But even under these ideal circumstances, it’s been hard to pay off these loans on top of paying for living expenses in the Bay Area.

It’s hard to believe that a 17-year-old signing that promissory note to a UC today really understands what he’s getting himself into--locking himself into paying at least $71K through his adult years. And unlike the Mortgage Crisis--you can’t claim bankruptcy to get out of student loans. Recent grads who can’t find a job can claim hardship and request deferment or forbearance, or go into a 25-year Extended Repayment Plan. If you try to default on the loans, the government and collection agencies will go after you, and automatically deduct the amount you owe from your paycheck.

Imagine that a decision that you make at age 17 will be holding you down in debt until you’re 47 years old. This Student Loan Crisis, unlike the Mortgage Crisis won’t happen suddenly, but it won’t disappear in a decade, either. As other articles have pointed out, it can negatively impact Millennial’s major life decisions for years to come--from starting a business, buying a car, buying a house, getting married, and having kids.

Our student loan system needs to be fixed. Hopefully Congress will lower the rate before the school year begins, but this likely won’t change the long-term issues with this system. Is the solution to go the route of other developed countries like Australia and give loans at zero-percent interest? Or is there a better way we can fund higher education?


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My name is Matt Werner, and I am a student loan debt survivor. Have comments or student loan stories to share? Please email me at editor[at]thoughtpublishing.org

New York's Most Fun Literary Events

Over the past 3 months, I attended every literary event I could in New York City. Outside of work, I averaged attending a few literary events per week, maxing out at 7 events in 6 days the week of May 13, 2013, and nearly reaching that during BEA. Below is my top-5 list of monthly/quarterly events and top-5 one-time or annual events.
Aerialist Seanna Sharpe reads Hafiz in between doing acrobatics over the audienceH.I.P. Reading Series - at The Paper Box, 17 Meadow Street, Brooklyn. The June 14 event featured National Book Award finalist Téa Obreht, author of The Tiger's Wife, and Ayad Akhtar, the 2013 Pulitzer Prize winner for Drama for American Dervish. What was remarkable about the event was the circus theme, a clown, popcorn, and that the event began with an aerialist who swung from the rafters of the Brooklyn warehouse and read lines of Hafiz from parchment scrolls she pulled from her hair in between doing aerial stunts above the crowd. Edwidge Danticat reads at the Franklin Park Reading SeriesFranklin Park Reading Series - at Franklin Park Bar and Beer Garden, 618 St John's Pl, Brooklyn. The June 10 event featured prize-winning Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat, and the May 13 event featured an entertaining reading from Leigh Newman reading from Still Points North, her memoir about growing up in the wilderness of Alaska, and her father's macabre sense of humor about using his carcass in a survival situation. Rivington Was Ours by Brendan Jay Sullivan and I Would Die 4 U by Touré projected onto a brick wall across from Bar 2A
Big Umbrella - at Bar 2A, 25 Ave. A, Manhattan. The June 11 event featured Touré reading a scintillating passage detailing Prince’s sex life. I learned that Prince is not gay, but he likes to bathe women and brush their hair. Brendan Jay Sullivan read from his forthcoming Rivington Was Ours about how Stefani Germanotta transformed from a gogo dancer on the Lower East Side into Lady Gaga. At the May 14 event, Ashley Cardiff read from her sexual memoir Night Terrors about how she had extended sexual dreams involving Prince.  Teju Cole reads at Bar 2A as part of the May 2013 Fiction Addiction
Fiction Addiction - also held at Bar 2A, 25 Ave. A, Manhattan. The May 28 event featured Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole reading from Open City. What is remarkable about this venue is that with both the Big Umbrella and Fiction Addiction reading series, they project the authors reading onto the 50-foot brick wall across the street to provide a stunning visual to go along with the reading. PEN Night reading was at WORD Bookstore in Brooklyn
PEN Night - at WORD, 126 Franklin Street, Brooklyn. The May 16 event featured Pulitzer Prize Finalist Jonathan Dee and New Yorker writer and McSweeney's author Ben Greenman. The authors were very accessible and took the audience for drinks afterwards.
Top 5 One-Time or Annual Literary Events in NYC:
BookExpo America - This is the top literary event in New York simply because it is where nearly everyone in publishing converges for 4 days each year. There are many afterparties associated with the event put on by each of the major publishing houses and businesses like the Bookrageous BEA Bash put on by Kobo at Housing Works. And who knows, at the conference, you might bump into a bestselling author like Daniel Handler, Doris Kearns Goodwin, or Snooki :). Brooklyn Lit Crawl - There were several literary events throughout Brooklyn on May 18, similar to San Francisco's Lit Crawl. My favorite event was the literary trivia put on by Tin House called Fighting Words, hosted by short story writer Seth Fried.Jessica Greenbaum, D. Nurkse and Beth Bosworth - This reading at the Brooklyn Library's Main Branch featured the Poet Laureate of Brooklyn from 1996 to 2004, Dennis Nurkse. This April 17 reading was a very "Brooklyn" event, in that the authors spoke of Brooklyn's literary heritage going back to Whitman. Afterwards, the authors took everyone across the street to a new condo highrise for a free, fully catered rooftop deck party overlooking Brooklyn and Manhattan.n+1 Issue 16 Launch Party -  This event packed 300+ people into Secret Project Robot, a Williamsburg artist warehouse. It seemed like most in attendance were aspiring writers/editors. It was also interesting to meet the n+1 editors at this April 13 event who were much younger than I expected--being all in their 20s and 30s.An Illustrated Guide to Cocktails Book Launch and Happy Hour - This May 17 book release party at powerHouse Arena featured free cocktails to complement the discussion of vermouths and other types of alcohol by drink expert Orr Shtuhl.Favorite Venues:
powerHouse Arena - This massive space in the DUMBO neighborhood with tall ceiling and an expansive floor can fit any sized-literary event, and its spaciousness, coupled with moving bookshelves and church pews to sit in made it a unique and fun venue for a literary event.Housing Works Bookstore and Cafe - This Nolita store has an old-school two-story bookstore feel, while having the modern conveniences of a cafe and stage area for literary events, as well as enough room in the back for a photobooth.Best literary event host/MC:
Seth Fried running the Tin House literary trivia event Fighting Words. His dry sense of humor, combined with drinks flowing from the bar, brought a lot of fun to the event, similar to the Monthly Rumpus in San Francisco hosted by Stephen Elliott and Isaac Fitzgerald. Seth Fried was the perfect host for the literary trivia event.For more photos from events, see the album Literary New York.