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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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....
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
Living Legacies: Native Authors on Memoir and Memory
Bay Area Book Festival Podcast
From the very first contact, Indigenous people have been spoken about more than they have been heard. Early "autobiographies" of Native individuals were often penned by outsiders, distorting the essence of the genre by denying autonomy to the very subjects for whom autobiography—by definition—should uplift. In recent years, seminal works of First Nations storytelling have come to the forefront, and this panel features three recent additions to the Native voices now taking center stage to tell their own stories. Métis storyteller and Montana Poet Laureate Chris LaTray combines diligent...
info_outline
Essay as Form
Bay Area Book Festival Podcast
The essay’s subjective and fragmented nature enables writers to grapple with complexities without the restrictions of systematic, traditional approaches to writing (Theodor W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form”). It liberates the essayist to take a nuanced look at the world, as cultural essayist and social critic Steve Wasserman does in Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It’s a Lie: A Memoir in Essays, an exhilarating account of the awakening of an empathetic sensibility and a lively mind, featuring personal reflections on politics, literature, influential figures, and the tumults...
info_outlineNico 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 people. Moderated by Brandy Collins, this event will delve into the connections between the stories of trans youth and elders, exploring how shared histories, struggles, and triumphs form the backbone of resistance and resilience. Whether you are trans, queer, an ally, or someone seeking deeper understanding, this conversation promises to be moving, illuminating, and deeply human.
Nico Lang is the creator of Queer News Daily and an award-winning reporter, editor, essayist, author, and critic. You can read their work in Rolling Stone, Esquire, Teen Vogue, Them, the Advocate, Vice, the Wall Street Journal, Out, the Daily Beast, HuffPost, BuzzFeed News, and the L.A. Times, among others. Their newest book, American Teenager: How Trans Kids Are Surviving Hate and Finding Joy in a Turbulent Era chronicles trans youth living their lives in seven states across the U.S.