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Chimera Space: Monstrous, Lovely, and Liminal

Bay Area Book Festival Podcast

Release Date: 08/14/2025

Short Cuts: Renee Swindle - Francine's Spectacular Crash and Burn show art Short Cuts: Renee Swindle - Francine's Spectacular Crash and Burn

Bay Area Book Festival Podcast

BABF Short Cuts is a Podcast of the Bay Area Book Festival where we introduce some of the authors and partners who will join us for the 2026 Festival in Berkeley from May 29–May 31.  In this episode, you get to meet Renee Swindle who is talking to us about her book .  You can find more 2026 festival authors and upcoming events at . 

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Short Cuts: Introducing the 2026 Festival & new BABF podcast Hosts show art Short Cuts: Introducing the 2026 Festival & new BABF podcast Hosts

Bay Area Book Festival Podcast

BABF Short Cuts is a Podcast of the Bay Area Book Festival where we introduce some of the authors and partners who will join us for the 2026 Festival in Berkeley from May 29–May 31.  In this first episode, you get to meet our new podcast hosts, hear about some of the authors booked for the 2026 festival, find out more about what we do year around and how you can support all of this work! Upcoming events: Social Justice Children' Book Fair https://www.eventbrite.com/e/2025-social-justice-childrens-book-fair-tickets-1967246325717?aff=oddtdtcreator Pints and Pages...

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Short Cuts: Nico Lang show art Short Cuts: Nico Lang

Bay Area Book Festival Podcast

Nico Lang is joining us for an event at Kepler's books on September 9th, 2025. Get your tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/trans-narratives-of-america-tickets-1485118843439 Join us for a timely evening at Kepler’s Books as acclaimed authors Carolina De Robertis (So Many Stars: An Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color) and Nico Lang (American Teenager: How Trans Kids Are Surviving Hate and Finding Joy in a Turbulent Era) come together for a dynamic conversation about the vital importance of preserving and honoring the lives and voices of trans...

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Narrating the Mother show art Narrating the Mother

Bay Area Book Festival Podcast

Join the Bay Area Book Festival and Litquake for an intimate (virtual) conversation with Iman Mersal and Kate Briggs, two writers who reshape our understanding of motherhood and the art of living. Mersal, acclaimed Egyptian-Canadian poet and essayist who most recently authored Motherhood and Its Ghosts, excavates the invisible labor and haunting absences of motherhood, blending irony, empathy, and unsparing honesty as she searches for lost women and lost selves. Her work is a bridge between personal memory and cultural critique, always aware of what remains unsaid. Briggs, Rotterdam-based...

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So Many Stars: A Celebration of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color show art So Many Stars: A Celebration of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color

Bay Area Book Festival Podcast

Join us for an insightful conversation surrounding So Many Stars: An Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color by Caro De Robertis. In this groundbreaking work, De Robertis brings together the voices of trans, nonbinary, genderqueer, and two-spirit elders of color, offering an intimate look into their personal stories, struggles, and triumphs. This event will include an introductory conversation between De Robertis and acclaimed author Nayomi Munaweera, followed by conversation with narrators from the book—iconic artists and activists Crystal Mason, Tina...

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A Memoir for Remembrance show art A Memoir for Remembrance

Bay Area Book Festival Podcast

A shape is composed of its outline and the space inside, meaning that the people around us play an integral role in forming who we are. In navigating the questions left behind following tragic loss, the authors of this poignant memoir panel honor their loved ones through writing, and, in doing so, redefine their own selves along the way. After grieving in silence for years, Susan Lieu, the daughter of refugees from the Vietnam War, finally tells her family’s story in The Manicurist’s Daughter, which details Lieu’s twenty-year journey of piecing together her mother’s life in Vietnam and...

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Wound is the Portal: Healing into the Future and Incantation for Future: Closing Headliner & Portal Closing show art Wound is the Portal: Healing into the Future and Incantation for Future: Closing Headliner & Portal Closing

Bay Area Book Festival Podcast

This poetry portal explores the wound not as an end, but as a powerful beginning. Join us for a journey where language becomes a site of transformation—where grief, memory, and survival are not just revisited, but reimagined. Mimi Tempestt breaks open conventions with a voice that insists on reclamation and the sacredness of Black queer futurity. Her work spirals through personal and collective histories, creating a radical space for becoming. Salvadoran poet Marian Urquilla mines personal and political terrain, forging poems that speak to displacement, resilience, and empowerment. With...

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Seeking Justice in Historical Fiction show art Seeking Justice in Historical Fiction

Bay Area Book Festival Podcast

What lengths would you go to to prove your innocence? For Anglo-Indian nurse Sona, it’s following a cryptic note and four paintings that lead her around Europe to uncover details about the complicated personal life of the renowned painter she is suspected of killing in Six Days in Bombay by Alka Joshi. The story of a wrongly accused Irish maid in San Quentin Prison garners the attention of an aspiring photographer grappling with infidelity and gentrification in Meredith Jaeger’s The Incorrigibles, a novel exploring the different ways in which we are imprisoned and how we can break free....

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Women, Cyborgs, Revolutionary Petunias, and Other Creatures show art Women, Cyborgs, Revolutionary Petunias, and Other Creatures

Bay Area Book Festival Podcast

This reading celebrates the wild, wired, and the wondrous. Inspired, and the fierce multiplicity of the natural world, this portal brings together five poets whose work transgresses borders—of body, genre, and possibility. These poets will open portals that invite us into places of resistance and rage, that when honored transform into generative and sacred places. Rachel Richardson’s work bends time and language, drawing from historical fragments and embodied memory to question whose stories survive and how. Her poems illuminate what’s hidden beneath the surface of the everyday. Language...

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In Search of Sanctuary: Stories of Migration, Hardships and Hope show art In Search of Sanctuary: Stories of Migration, Hardships and Hope

Bay Area Book Festival Podcast

Shining a light on the often invisible and incredibly complex experience of migration, the established scholars of this panel examine migration through human-centered lenses by documenting the difficult reasons people move away from an old home and the realities they must face upon arrival in their new one. Sin Padres, Ni Papeles details Stephanie L. Canizales’ academic study about how undocumented Central American and Mexican teens in LA navigate unthinkable material and emotional hardship, find the agency and hope that is required to survive, and discover what it means to be successful as...

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Enter the liminal. In this portal, hybridity is power, and contradiction is poetry. Chimera Space brings together a group of poets whose work inhabits the monstrous, the beautiful, and the in-between—bodies, identities, and voices that resist categorization and embrace complexity. Cindy Juyoung Ok writes into multiplicity, turning silence into disruption and fragmentation into form. Her poems invite readers into nonlinear truths. Grayson Thompson conjures the poetic tenderness and fire, exploring queer embodiment and psychic rupture. Adela Najarro brings the force of nature and cultural inheritance to the page, her poetry fusing eco-consciousness with the surreal. Amanda Hawkins explores desire, disorientation, and liminality with language that glows from within. Her work vibrates with strange beauty and invites us into the sensual space of the unknowable. Mia Ayumi Malhotra writes from the rich interstices of lineage and displacement. Her lyric inquiries unfold slowly, like memory, threading together multiple inheritances and the ghosts that come with them. Join us as these poetic guides read us into the borderlands—offering a space where transformation is not only possible, but inevitable. A panel discussion will follow the reading.