Fighting for Our Right to Read
Bay Area Book Festival Podcast
Featuring critically-acclaimed authors who frequently experience censorship of their books, this rousing panel will highlight the escalation of book bans around the country and how we can fight back against them. While promoting The Day the Books Disappeared, National Leader of Authors Against Book Bans Joanna Ho was forced to leave a school after refusing to comply with the school’s demands forbidding them from mentioning book bans or gay books, sparking discourse about the deeply unconstitutional movement to limit the freedom to read. Palestinian American author and publisher Hannah...
info_outline
Maps for Worlds Still Becoming: Experiments in Genre, Language, and Form
Bay Area Book Festival Podcast
How do we write futures that don’t yet exist? How do we map territories we’re still dreaming and discovering? In this hands-on, generative workshop, participants will create new work across three experimental approaches—speculative memoir, multilingual poetry, and hybrid forms. Designed as a space for exploration rather than mastery, the workshop invites writers to take creative risks, work across boundaries, and imagine new literary possibilities together. Through guided exercises and creative constraints, writers will produce fresh pieces that break conventional forms and chart unknown...
info_outline
From the Frontlines of the Culture War: Advocates for Youth Share Their Stories
Bay Area Book Festival Podcast
Given California’s reputation as a haven of liberal thinking and the pinnacle of tolerance, many people would be surprised to hear about the stories of educators, librarians, and storytime performers who have been harassed and threatened for teaching honestly about race, gender, immigration, religion, and sexuality. District Teacher Librarian for the Oakland Unified School District Debbie Gibbons will moderate this timely conversation featuring the people at the frontlines of today’s escalating culture wars. Veteran California public school teacher Sue Granzella’s Pushed to the Edge:...
info_outline
Catastrophic Catalysis: Women Taking Risks for Humanity
Bay Area Book Festival Podcast
When trauma and unpredictable life changes demand difficult sacrifices, the inspiring authors and characters of this panel choose to take any risk necessary to preserve the tenderness and creativity of humanity, and the humanities. Inspired by journalists Christiane Amanpour and Sylvia Poggioli, Midnight, at the War is Devi Laskar’s novel about a foreign correspondent who leaves New York for the war-torn Middle East after learning she is pregnant, an assignment that forces her to grapple with the physical and emotional tolls of her pregnant body and a turbulent region. A renowned dancer...
info_outline
What Haunts Us Still: Surviving and Storytelling
Bay Area Book Festival Podcast
This chilling and visionary conversation brings together three groundbreaking voices in contemporary horror and speculative fiction who use storytelling to interrogate history, identity, and the legacies that refuse to stay buried. Through unsettling narratives and fearless imagination, they reveal how horror becomes a vital tool for reckoning, resistance, and truth-telling. Tananarive Due, award-winning author and scholar, is a leading force in Black horror and speculative fiction whose work draws on Black history, family, and lived experience to explore generational trauma, injustice, and...
info_outline
Illustrious Inventors: Picture Book Biographies (Read-Aloud)
Bay Area Book Festival Podcast
Have you ever wondered who created the microphone in our phones? Or who discovered the science of black holes? Join this read-aloud to hear about the stories of these inventors of color! Ainissa Ramirez will introduce the man who patented the foil-electret microphone in Spark: Jim West’s Electrifying Adventures in Creating the Microphone, inspiring readers of all ages to follow their curiosity and see what it ignites. Shruthi Rao, author of When Science Stood Still: How S. Chandrasekhar Predicted the Existence of Black Holes, will read about Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, a brilliant scientist...
info_outline
Heartware: Robots, Relationships, and the Future of Us
Bay Area Book Festival Podcast
What if the future of robotics isn’t apocalypse, but community? In this imaginative and heartfelt panel, three visionary writers explore whimsical, intimate robotic futures where artificial intelligence becomes companion, collaborator, and catalyst for change. Together, they ask: What does it mean to be human in an age of machines? And what might robots teach us about care, belonging, and family? In Automatic Noodle, acclaimed sci-fi author Annalee Newitz imagines a cozy near future where a crew of decommissioned robots reopen a ghost kitchen to serve food in a recovering San Francisco. As...
info_outline
Creative Futures: Making Room Together
Bay Area Book Festival Podcast
What kinds of futures unfurl when we stop acquiescing to what we’ve inherited and start building spaces with intention? In this forward-looking conversation, Shizue Seigel (Courting A Man Who Doesn’t Talk; Uncommon Ground: BIPOC Journeys to Creative Activism), Kimi Sugioka (Wile & Wing), Kelechi Ubozoh (We’ve Been Too Patient), and Andre Le Monte Wilson (Hauntings) gather to talk about how writers and artists of color are imagining and making creative spaces that feel livable and can grow with us. This event took place in Downtown Berkeley, at the Bay Area Book Festival, May 29-31...
info_outline
Dark Nights of the Soul: Mental Health in Translation
Bay Area Book Festival Podcast
The translated works of this poignant panel explore the depths of young adulthood, fraught with fragility and complexity, sincerity and secrets. Night Train by Xu Zechen, translated by Jeremy Tiang, is about an incoming PhD student who tries to swindle money from his father by making up a story about killing someone and needing to flee. But now that lie has taken on a life of its own and everyone—the university, the police, the sprawling campus community—is convinced he’s a murderer, and his life begins to spiral out of his control. In Moldovan writer Tatiana Țîbuleac’s The Summer My...
info_outline
Staying True to Our Futuristic Minds
Bay Area Book Festival Podcast
As technology plays an increasing role in every aspect of our lives, the novels of this timely panel grapple with the implications of a technological future and its impact on young people’s mental health. Kelly Yang illustrates the impact of social media in Finally Heard, a heartpounding novel about ten-year-old Lina’s quest to go viral and her struggle to break free from the allure of comparison and become her authentic self in this fast-paced world. Immersed in an AI-generated, virtual-reality environment, The Vale is Abigail Hing Wen’s cautionary tale about thirteen-year-old Bran’s...
info_outlineAs authoritarian assaults increasingly restrict our media, championing press freedom and critical media literacy is more important than ever. From The Censored Press editorial board member T.M. Scruggs is State of the Free Press 2026: Fiftieth Anniversary Edition, a collection that highlights the year’s most significant independent journalism—including original, investigative reports on ICE surveillance, Meta censorship, and police violence—and tracks emerging threats to press freedom. Political analyst and critical media literacy scholar Nolan Higdon will bring expertise about podcasting, digital culture, news media history and propaganda, and critical AI literacy, offering insights from the media spotlight. As an educator of the next generation of media actors, award-winning journalist and UC Berkeley journalism professor Lisa Armstrong will discuss what it means to steward a future of free and responsible press. Frances Dinkelspiel, award-winning author and journalist, will bring unique perspectives as a co-founder of Cityside, the nonprofit news organization behind Berkeleyside, Oaklandside, and Richmondside. Moderated by KALW Public Media Executive Producer Ben Trefny, this timely panel brings together distinguished voices from media to reflect on how we fund, create, and educate about media in an age when press freedom and democracy are under attack.
This event took place in Downtown Berkeley, at the Bay Area Book Festival, May 29-31 2026.
Support our work and help to keep the Bay Area Book Festival 96% free! https://givebutter.com/writingthefuture
Check out our upcoming events www.baybookfest.org
Follow us on instagram: https://www.instagram.com/baybookfest/