The Last Human Bear: Exclusive Early Book Launch with Greg Sarris
Bay Area Book Festival Podcast
Release Date: 07/02/2026
Behind the Scenes of Audiobook Production
Bay Area Book Festival Podcast
The sonic experts of this panel will pull back the curtains for listeners wondering what it takes to create an audiobook. Ray Archie, Founder of Notes to the Soul and Chief Audio Connoisseur of Brooklyn Sound Lab, has an extensive career in audio storytelling through audiobook narration, theatrical sound design, and musical innovation. Also with a background in music is Abigail Reno, an actor, audiobook narrator, and voiceover artist with roots in opera, choral conducting, and theater. She has recorded titles for Penguin Random House, Hachette, Macmillan, Disney, Spotify, and many more. Jen...
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Preserving Ancestral Knowledge as BIPOC Writers
Bay Area Book Festival Podcast
Our workshop will start with a panel discussion, comprised of BIPOC writers who are part of the Rooted & Written program, on how we integrate our histories into our work. This session will blend conversation and craft on how we listen to, record, and honor ancestral knowledge on the page, without flattening it for mainstream expectations. Then we’ll talk about writing. Using guided prompts, participants will draft ideas for new work that gathers memory, place, language, and family stories into poems, micro-essays, or short scenes. This event took place in Downtown Berkeley, at the Bay...
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Kaleidoscopic Convergence with 2025 NCBA Fiction Finalists
Bay Area Book Festival Podcast
It can take just one brief touchpoint to forever bend the directions of our diverging paths, as the 2025 NCBA Fiction Finalists reveal. In R.O. Kwon‘s Exhibit, young photographer Jin Han meets an alluring, injured world-class ballerina at a party in San Francisco, which unleashes a complex exploration of ambition, desire, and a familial curse spoken aloud. Sometimes, convergence occurs in the form of multiple lives meeting at a single path, creating reflections, distortions, and unexpected revelations. Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel features the lives of eight teenage girl boxers, each with...
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Indicator Lights: Fine Tuning the Past to Drive Your Story into the Future
Bay Area Book Festival Podcast
The past and the future are linked, nowhere more so than in story. In this session, we will play on the tightrope between past and present, exploring how nailing the details of the past in a story builds a foundation for future worlds, allowing you to believably take the reader anywhere. We will also investigate the empowering role of the narrator, who often speaks from the future of the story. Through four sets of dynamic, generative exercises, attendees will leave the hour with a bevy of new tricks/tips and insights for their writing tool belts. This event took place in Downtown Berkeley, at...
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Unfinished Atlas: Begining When the World has Ended
Bay Area Book Festival Podcast
Unfinished Atlas: Beginning When the World Has Ended, four poets gather at the shifting edge between collapse and creation. Deema Shehabi writes with luminous attention to exile, memory, and the fragile architectures of home, tracing how language carries both loss and possibility. Daniel Summerhill’s work carries the pulse of music, rhythmic and urgent. It explores justice, history, and the bright insistence of possibility. Cynthia Manick brings a sharp lyric intelligence to questions of culture, place, and survival in a rapidly changing world. Iain Haley Pollock’s poems move with wry...
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Out of the Darkness: Translators and Editors Shine Light on a New Treasure Trove of Swedish Literature
Bay Area Book Festival Podcast
Out of the Darkness is an exciting new anthology of classic Swedish literature which brings many stories to an English-reading audience for the very first time. Vendela Vida and David Katznelson, co-editors of the collection, and translators Victoria Häggblom and Amanda Doxtater will discuss the selection and translation process and highlight the work of these authors in particular: Hjalmar Söderberg, Karin Boye, Agnes von Krusenstjerna, August Strindberg and Selma Lagerlöf. The editors will elaborate on these writers’ relevance to Swedish culture and to literature today, and the...
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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...
info_outlineIn this triumphant and revelatory return of the award-winning novelist and Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria Greg Sarris, The Last Human Bear is an epic story about a Pomo woman who is haunted by an inescapable tradition that has been passed down from her stepmother. She has inherited the ability to shapeshift into a Human Bear who can menace and poison enemies. A mystery even to herself, she learns to pass between Native and white societies, tenaciously carving her own path as an independent woman as she comes of age in 1930s California. But as she explores love and desire, family inherited and chosen, and the secrets of the natural world, one question gnaws at her: Is she fated to do harm? This wry and richly lyrical book, inspired by the Native women elders who shaped Sarris’ youth, will be on special early sale with the Bay Area Book Festival following an incredible conversation between Greg Sarris and Susan Straight, author of Sacrament, celebrating independence, healing, and brilliant Native writing.
This event took place in Downtown Berkeley, at the Bay Area Book Festival, May 29-31 2026.
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