Conjuring & Conjugating: Siguanabes in Future Tense
Bay Area Book Festival Podcast
In Conjuring & Conjugating: Siguanabas in Future Tense, four community-engaged writers of the Central American Diaspora discuss Indigenous mythologies as vessels for embodiment and transformation. Navigating legacies of violence, they reclaim the right to name themselves—writing into futures beyond the erasure of the colonial gaze. Taking the figure of La Siguanaba as both provocation and portal, these poets ask what happens when we listen again. What wisdom was hidden inside the warnings? What truths were transformed into myth—and what futures might emerge when those truths are...
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Brevity: Souls of Short Stories
Bay Area Book Festival Podcast
Short stories are the swift vehicles of the written word that leave lasting impressions on both passengers and bystanders alike. This panel features writers who have experimented with the form in various ways to create unique short story collections that highlight broader issues. With genre-bending fiction, Jude Berman blends social impact fiction and activist fiction in Shot: A Dictionary of the Lost, a collection of short stories about gun violence, organized as a dictionary, with a story for each letter of the alphabet. Lisa Alvarez’s Some Final Beauty and Other Stories showcases women...
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Unsung Heroines: Visionary Women of the Bay Area
Bay Area Book Festival Podcast
In 2018, only 12% of San Francisco’s street names, statues, parks, and public art honored women, but not because they didn’t exist. How many notable women who deserve public recognition have been written out of the history of our region? Drawn from award-winning journalist Rae Alexandra’s KQED Arts & Culture series “Rebel Girls From Bay Area History,” Unsung Heroines: 35 Women Who Changed the Bay Area is a collection of 35 short profiles honoring the contributions of a diverse group of women from San Francisco, the East Bay, and the greater Bay Area, from the very first years of...
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Youth Building a Better Future
Bay Area Book Festival Podcast
Today’s kids are well aware of the many challenges that they face in the world they are inheriting, from climate change to police violence, crowded classrooms to healthcare. The organizers of the amazing Social Justice Children’s Book Fair are here to show everyone that a better world is possible, and it can be here today if we choose it! Poetically written and beautifully illustrated in Innosanto Nagara’s signature style, Oh, The Things We’re For! offers a vision of where we could go for today’s kids, who are ready to tackle big issues to build a better world they envision. One way...
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Taking Pride in Transformative Latin American Works
Bay Area Book Festival Podcast
From prose to verse to visual art, the powerful narratives of this panel take pride in the intersection of being queer, Latine, and unapologetically proud. Julián Delgado Lopera’s Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You depicts Bogotá’s underground queer scene, where a luminous travesti steps in as a mother figure to a listless widower’s teenage daughter, fearing that his grief and guilt-driven self-destruction may unleash a river of curses on them all. Roque Raquel Salas Rivera turns to epic poetry in Algarabía to describe the journey of Cenex, a trans being who retrospectively...
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A Time to Hide: Marion Seidemann Fredman and Elisa Kleven
Bay Area Book Festival Podcast
This powerful session celebrates two of Berkeley’s own creators sharing powerful stories through art and writing. Deeply poignant and relevant, A Time to Hide is Marion Seidemann Fredman and her family’s courageous story of surviving the Holocaust told through personal testimony, historical photographs, and evocative illustrations including those by Bay Area author and illustrator Elisa Kleven. Together, they will converse about Marion’s experiences as a child born to parents forced into hiding in a Dutch attic, and who is now sharing her family’s story with young readers. Moderated by...
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Post-Disaster Futures: Sci-Fi Visions of Survival and Renewal
Bay Area Book Festival Podcast
When the world ends but life persists, what remnants of humanity, hope, and connection remain? In this futuristic sci-fi conversation, authors T. K. Rex, Chuck Tingle, and Susanna Kwan imagine the strange new worlds that follow catastrophe, confronting ecological collapse, improbable survival, and the fragile bonds that hold us together. T. K. Rex’s The Wildcraft Drones charts a near-future shaped by the intertwined evolution of machines, ecosystems, and the people who depend on both. Through stories of AIs, dolphins, and rebel biologists amid environmental decay, Rex explores what...
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Abominable Squiggle Time!
Bay Area Book Festival Podcast
Join author-illustrator Steph Lau for a sparkly, cryptid and unicorn-tastic read-aloud of The Abominable Snow Dancer and live drawing demo! Steph will read from her picture book about a yeti who dreams of dancing, and then share how to create “squiggle” characters, using audience suggestions and volunteers from the crowd. 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! Check out our upcoming events Follow us on instagram:
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What the Magic Hides: Moral Truths and Mystery in YA Fantasy
Bay Area Book Festival Podcast
Join us for an engaging exploration of mystery and magic in young adult fiction, where the fantastical reveals deeply human truths. Emily Renk Hawthorne, Ama Ofosua Lieb, Lio Min, and S. Hati each craft imaginative worlds shaped by secrets, identity, and transformation. In Of Mountains and Seas, hidden histories and stolen magic ripple beneath the ocean’s surface. Goldenborn follows Akoma as she searches for the truth behind her father’s mysterious coma, weaving Ghanaian myth with moral reckoning. The L.O.V.E. Club blends music, queer youth culture, and magical realism while asking what...
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Walking to the Beat of Our Streets
Bay Area Book Festival Podcast
Activism can show up in spaces big and small—we just need to keep up the tempo! R. J. Owens shows us the power of taking steps toward meaningful change in his picture book Walk the Walk, which follows Dex’s day walking the walk with his Papa by joining the Montgomery Bus Boycott and standing up against segregation. In Searching for Mr. Johnson’s Song, music makes the air vibrate like a thousand protesters marching for equality in Ariel Vanece’s touching story about a boy who helps his elderly neighbor find the rest of the song that has been forgotten due to dementia. With warmth and...
info_outlineWhat happens when visionary worldbuilding meets movement building? In this rare and unmissable conversation, acclaimed novelist Nnedi Okorafor, whose Africanfuturist fiction reshapes the boundaries of speculative literature, sits down with legendary organizer Marshall Ganz, architect of modern grassroots leadership models. Guided by co-founder of Wakanda Dream Lab Calvin Williams, the conversation will travel across story and structure, imagination and power. Together, they will ask: How do the stories we tell determine the futures we fight for? How does organizing become a living narrative of hope and resistance? And how can collective imagination move us closer to liberation? This will be a gathering of minds that reminds us that crafting worlds and building movements are acts born of the same radical impulse: to dream together, and remake what has been made.
This event took place in Downtown Berkeley, at the Bay Area Book Festival, May 29-31 2026.
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