Landscape as Dreamscape: Environmental Stories
Bay Area Book Festival Podcast
Release Date: 07/24/2026
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...
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Who Did It? A Thriller Panel of Secrets and Suspicion
Bay Area Book Festival Podcast
In this high-stakes thriller panel, three acclaimed authors explore stories where violence shatters ordinary lives and the search for answers grows increasingly perilous. Each novel begins with a crime but what unfolds is a deeper reckoning with truth, justice, and the forces that shape suspicion. In Missing Sam, bestselling author Thrity Umrigar crafts a tense, twist-filled tale of a woman who vanishes during a morning run and the spouse left to navigate mounting scrutiny. As the investigation tightens, the novel probes racial bias, queer identity, and the quiet dangers simmering beneath...
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Protecting Nature’s Patterns
Bay Area Book Festival Podcast
From fractals to spirals to cycles, nature is beautifully arranged in organized ways that are highlighted in the inspiring picture books of this session. In the mountains of Meghalaya, India, a boy learns how to care for and weave the roots of the living tree bridges in Living Bridges: The Hidden World of India’s Woven Trees by Sandhya Acharya. But when he notices litter on the bridge and scars on the roots from people stealing sap, he must rally his community to protect the living tree he loves. Colleen Paeff writes about another empowering story in Firefly Song: Lynn Frierson Faust and the...
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Speculative Belonging: Crafting Queer-Centered Realities
Bay Area Book Festival Podcast
In this visionary speculative fiction panel, Charlie Jane Anders, Syr Hayarti Beker, and Annalee Newitz explore the craft and theory of queer worldbuilding imagining futures and fantastical realms where queer characters and communities are not exceptions, but the norm. Across their work, queerness is foundational to how magic systems function, how technology evolves, and how societies are structured. In Lessons in Magic, Charlie Jane Anders continues her tradition of expansive, emotionally rich storytelling, building transformative worlds shaped by fluid identity and chosen connection. In What...
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Flying High with Crows & Ravens
Bay Area Book Festival Podcast
Flap your wings and fly high with these lyrical and poignant picture books about the magnificent birds around us! Learn about the resilient and mysterious crows, who roost together by the thousands and teach us important lessons about cooperation and survival in I Am We: How Crows Come Together to Survive by Leslie Barnard Booth. Soaring alongside the crows is a special type of raven, a leucistic raven, who must rise above rejection to gain self-acceptance with the support of a child’s kind and resilient spirit in Kathryn Otoshi’s The White Raven. Warble, chirp, and chatter your way...
info_outlineFrom sequoias to salt lakes, deserts to deep connections, the natural world serves as inspiration for the writers of this panel, who place nature’s breathtaking landscapes not as a backdrop to, but at the center of their stories. In his 2025 Banff Mountain Book Competition Finalist graphic memoir, Eventually a Sequoia: Stories of Art, Adventure & the Wisdom of Giants, Jeremy Collins documents the people living in the endangered corners of the world whose small seeds produce enormous results. Switching the lens to the uncanny, shimmering ecosystems of salt lakes, whose rapid decline is a harbinger of rising sea levels, life-threatening dust storms, and environmental collapse, Caroline Tracey parallels their environmental journey to her personal story of finding queer love and building a home amidst ecological crises in her book Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History, which blends travel writing, memoir, and reportage in an inspiring call to fight for all that is fragile in our lives. Moderated by Rue Mapp, Founder and CEO of Outdoor Afro, the nation’s foremost non-profit organization inspiring Black leadership and connections in nature, this panel will provide a glimpse into the wondrous and nurturing beauty of our natural world worth protecting.
This event took place in Downtown Berkeley, at the Bay Area Book Festival, May 29-31 2026.
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