Crossroads 2012 features Renee Gibbons reading from her new memoir, Longing for Elsewhere: My Irish Voyage Through Hunger, History and High Times. Dublin-born Gibbons will read from her memoir and also perform songs, both reflecting how San Francisco has become an anchor to her life.

Renee Gibbons was born in a Dublin tenement in the middle of the 20th century. At 17 she escaped to Paris with the help of a Hollywood actor and a kind stranger. Always restless and full of dreams she spent years searching for the meaning of life and what role she was meant to play in it. She has worked at 30 different kinds of jobs including model, courier, photographer, pre-school teacher and retail buyer and has spent time in more than 150 countries. While traversing the Panama Canal on a ship bound for Egypt with her year-old daughter Ashling, she met and fell in love with a radical longshoreman from San Francisco. For the next three decades that Bohemian city became the base for her world travels and her life as a writer, actor, singer and peace activist. A former columnist for the Irish Herald she lives in North Beach with her husband and cat. Her memoir 'Longing for Elsewhere' explores the themes entangled in her journey: identity, adventure, creativity, the burden of history and the passion for justice.

A Co-production with the 9th Annual Crossroads Irish-American Festival.