Bay Area Book Festival Podcast
Between audio books? Curious about the writers themselves? Listen to full-length sessions from the Bay Area Book Festival, where readers and writers meet each year in Berkeley, CA, to engage with their favorite authors, including Pulitzer Prize winners, chefs, and activists, to discuss writing, race, love, mystery, and more.
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Dark Nights of the Soul: Mental Health in Translation
07/14/2026
Dark Nights of the Soul: Mental Health in Translation
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 Mother Had Green Eyes, after his mother tells him she is dying, Aleksy returns to the small French village that he left at eighteen years old, where memories of his family’s grief following the death of his sister still remain. He spends three months with his mother, reliving the memory of the summer when everything changed and learning to finally lay down their weapons to make peace with each other and with themselves. Living on the precipice, the characters of this panel moderated by award winning author Rita Bullwinkel unravel the complicated, redemptive, and devastating consequences of past mistakes. Sponsored by the Center for the art of Translation 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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Staying True to Our Futuristic Minds
07/14/2026
Staying True to Our Futuristic Minds
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 technological world that grows by the power of imagination, and the chaos that ensues when it begins to have a mind of its own. Given all the dangers of technology, some parents may decide to send their teenagers off to Mexico for an unplugged summer, as Celi and Elio’s parents do in Stream. Aida Salazar’s heartwarming dual narrative imagines what happens in the middle of nowhere—without internet, electricity, or even running water—amidst the stark beauty and cultural richness of rural Mexico, with crushes blooming, when teenagers can finally shed their online selves to embrace nature, connect to culture, and cultivate authenticity. With a future of technology written on the horizon, Berkeley High School librarian Allyson Bogie and Berkeley High School senior Penelope will moderate this panel and provide a youth perspective to this thoughtful conversation about technology, mental health, and creating a sustainable digital future. 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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A Field of Stillness and Fire
07/13/2026
A Field of Stillness and Fire
The future is not a distant horizon—it is a pressure, a question, a making. In this featured reading, Robert Hass and Tongo Eisen-Martin bring their distinct poetics into shared air. Hass writes from a practice of attention—where the natural world, memory, and language gather to ask how we might live with care inside what is vanishing and what remains. Eisen-Martin’s work strikes at the conditions that structure the present, his lines charged with refusal, insurgency, and the demand for otherwise. Between them, a field emerges: stillness and upheaval, observation and fire. The poems do not resolve the future—they trouble it, press against it, insist on it. Here, poetry becomes a site of reckoning and reimagining, where what comes next is not given, but made. 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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How to Become an Audiobook Narrator
07/13/2026
How to Become an Audiobook Narrator
Join award-winning narrators in this workshop to explore the diversity of a voice acting career! Learn from Elisabeth Lagelée, a multilingual Audie Award-winning voice actor and improviser based in San Francisco, who records from her professional home studio and specializes in fantasy, romance, and historical fiction. With experience in audiobook narration, production and teaching, Society of Voice Arts finalist and Earphones Award-winning Ann Richardson will guide attendees through the process of putting their work into audio via various platforms. This informative workshop, moderated by author Pamela Kelly, is welcome to all who are curious about voice acting! 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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Future Myths: Blood and Chosen Kin
07/10/2026
Future Myths: Blood and Chosen Kin
In Future Myths: Blood and Chosen Kin three poets explore the shifting terrain of kinship: the families we inherit, the ones we lose, and the ones we build along the way. If blood once defined belonging, these writers ask what else might hold us together as we imagine the futures still forming. Pretti Vanghni writes with a mythic sensibility, weaving ancestry, cultural memory, and spiritual imagination into poems that feel both ancient and newly born. Achy Obejas brings her luminous clarity to the intertwined questions of exile, language, and queer belonging, reminding us that chosen kinship has long been a survival practice. Ally Ang’s work moves through intimacy and rupture, tracing how care and solidarity can grow in the spaces where traditional structures fall away. Together, these poets reimagine kinship as something living and unfinished. Blood may tell one story. Chosen family tells another, one written in acts of care, resistance, and possibility. 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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In Terms of Freedom: Women’s Rights, Bodily Autonomy, and the Future of Ethical Care
07/10/2026
In Terms of Freedom: Women’s Rights, Bodily Autonomy, and the Future of Ethical Care
As women’s rights are increasingly violated in the US, the historical narratives and personal accounts of this crucial panel discussion will remind us of the work we’ve already done and inspire us to continue pursuing a world where women are truly free. Just Pills: The Extraordinary Story of A Revolution in Abortion Care documents journalist Rebecca Kelliher’s research into the little-known history of mifepristone and misoprostol, better known as the abortion pills, which are safe, cheap, and clinic-less means of ending a pregnancy that are already changing the fight for abortion access as we understand it. Prior to the approval of abortion pills in the 1990s and 2000s, however, women’s options were severely limited. In her historical novel Where the Girls Were,Kate Schatz writes about a pregnant teenager’s struggle with agency after being sent to a home for unwed mothers in 1960s San Francisco. Shame, faith, and morality all shape a woman’s choice to abort or carry to term, and Judy Juanita reflects on self-induced abortion and California’s Therapeutic Abortion Act of 1967 through the poetry, fiction, essays, and creative nonfiction in Abortion (or Woman As Threefold Murderess) which reveal that choosing to abort is not simply a political or moral issue of right and wrong, but one tied to safety, survival, and the meaning of life itself. Moreover, abortion care is ethical care, grounded in competence, compassion, sensitivity, as exemplified by Shelley Sella, a board-certified OB-GYN and the first woman to openly practice third-trimester abortion care in the US. In her book Beyond Limits: Stories of Third Trimester Abortion Care, Dr. Sella challenges preconceived notions of who gets abortions and why, inviting readers into a typical week at her clinic to demystify third-trimester abortion, which is still often stigmatized and misunderstood within both the anti-abortion and pro-choice movements. Carole Joffe, professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive sciences and author of After Dobbs: How the Supreme Court Ended Roe But Not Abortion, will moderate this panel honoring the women affected by abortion and pregnancy, the hard-working individuals who have kept abortion afloat in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s destruction, and the continued help urgently needed if we want to sustain our right to abortion care. 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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Exploring the Ups and Downs of Creating Early Chapter Book Series
07/09/2026
Exploring the Ups and Downs of Creating Early Chapter Book Series
What is it like to work on early chapter book series? The award-winning writers and illustrator on this panel are here to tell us more! Donna Barba Higuera will introduce Don’t Eat the Birthday Boy!, the second book in her Unlikely Aventuras of Ramón and El Cucuy series, which takes place at Ramón’s monster-filled birthday party. The author of the thirteenth book in The Kids in Mrs. Z’s Class series, Mike Jung introduces Theo Chang, who must find a way to befriend his family’s newly adopted cat before they give up and take him back to the shelter in Theo Chang Is Not a Cat. Twirling in with another feline friend who wreaks havoc, The Princess in Black and its illustrator LeUyen Pham are back with The Princess in Black and the Kitty Catastrophe to share what it’s like to illustrate a series that has been in publication for over ten years. The fun never stops with the early chapter book series in this marvelous panel, moderated by Supervising Librarian Librarian Shani B! 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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Hope is a Time Traveler: Globalist Pasts & Potentials
07/09/2026
Hope is a Time Traveler: Globalist Pasts & Potentials
In the midst of white nationalism, global capitalism, and authoritarian regimes that drive individualism and isolation, a look to our past and envisioned futures reveals the prevailing strength of creativity and rebellion across time. By surveying a world that has changed dramatically since 1960 in her book The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change, historian and activist Rebecca Solnit unveils the sheer breadth and scale of social, political, scientific, and cultural changes that have shaped a more interconnected, relational world which embraces antiracism, feminism, a more expansive understanding of gender, environmental thinking, scientific breakthroughs, and Indigenous and non-Western ideas. Because transformation is obscured within a longer arc of history, its scale is seldom recognized, but change is inevitable, brought about by dismantling an old civilization and building a new one, whose newness is often the return of the old ways and wisdoms. Poet, performer, and director Saul Williams charts his own creative visions for change in Martyr Loser King, his graphic novel about a global cyberattack rebellion in a small East African country where the Black population and the land are exploited for the mining of the precious ore coltan. Simultaneously a cautionary tale and hopeful vision for the future, this cyberpunk fable raises incisive questions about capitalism, colonialism, and the future of technology. Moderated by writer, producer, and activist Christie George, who is working at the intersection of media, technology, and social change, this headlining conversation features the creative minds who are mapping and shaping the trajectory of our futures despite the forces seeking to turn back the clock on history. Introductory live music performance by Origin Stories (Bushwick Book Club Oakland) 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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When the Past Comes Calling: Crime Fiction Across America’s Fault Lines
07/08/2026
When the Past Comes Calling: Crime Fiction Across America’s Fault Lines
Crime fiction becomes a lens on buried history, fractured families, and the uneasy relationship between past and present in this electrifying conversation featuring Naomi Hirahara, Susie Hara, Faye Snowden, Élan Les Vies, and Shobha Rao. Though their settings range from early 20th-century California to post-1906 San Francisco, from the contemporary South to a fogbound Northern California cove in the 1980s, these authors share a fascination with what lingers: generational trauma, cultural displacement, family secrets, and the long shadow of violence. Their novels probe how history imprints itself on communities and on the individuals who attempt reinvention in places shaped by exclusion, secrecy, and survival. In Crown City, Hirahara uncovers anti-Japanese violence and artistic intrigue in early California, illuminating overlooked chapters of regional history within a classic investigative mystery. Hara’s Earthquake Shack introduces Sadie García Miller, a half-Mexican, half-Jewish investigator pulled into a mystery involving a vanished 1906 earthquake cottage and her own family’s criminal past. Set in San Francisco’s Mission District, Hara’s noir blends intergenerational conflict, buried histories, high-stakes danger and the moral gray areas of family loyalty. In A Killing Breath, Snowden continues her gripping Southern gothic series featuring homicide detective Raven Burns, the daughter of a notorious serial killer. As Raven hunts a new predator, she must confront the terrifying possibility that her father’s darkness lives on within her. Her work has been called “intense,” “and a pulse-pounding contribution to a genre lacking in Black women authors”. In Indian Country, Rao’s novel about the ramifications of colonialism westward expansion, a young couple moves from India to Montana, where the husband becomes a scapegoat when his colleague is found drowned. This death is one in a long history of people of color paying the price for the white man’s arrogance and expansionism. In The Lemon Twist, Les Vies follows a search for truth sparked by a cryptic clue tied to a long-ago disappearance. Through fractured memory, cassette recordings, and coastal isolation, the novel explores identity, shame, and the dangerous undertow of unresolved pasts. Across their work, these writers examine how communities respond to displacement, how families transmit both resilience and harm, and how investigators navigate systems that marginalize or erase. Together, they will discuss historical noir, Southern gothic suspense, California crime fiction, and the craft of writing mysteries that are as socially resonant as they are gripping. The conversation will be moderated by Randal Brandt, Head of Cataloging and Curator of the California Detective Fiction Collection at the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley and creator of Golden Gate Mysteries, an annotated bibliography of crime fiction set in the San Francisco Bay Area. 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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Invocation of Poetry Stage + Carrying the Land: Bodies and Belonging
07/08/2026
Invocation of Poetry Stage + Carrying the Land: Bodies and Belonging
Invocation of the Poetry stage by Nick Johnson The future is not a clean horizon. In Carrying the Land: Bodies and Belonging, five poets consider how land lives within us and how we are shaped by the terrains we cross, inherit, and survive. If the future is to be imagined differently, it must begin with what we are already carrying. Abi Pollokoff writes with a fierce tenderness toward landscape and longing, tracing how intimacy with place can be both sanctuary and fracture. Kenneth Wong’s work moves through family history and cultural memory, illuminating how inherited stories become tools for navigating what comes next. Daniel Moysaenko’s poems dwell in displacement and reinvention, where language itself becomes a provisional homeland. Wendy M. Thompson grounds her work in community and witness, exploring how bodies marked by history still insist on joy, survival, and transformation. Moderated by Maw Shein Win whose own poetry dissolves the boundary between self and ecosystem, and reality and the magical. This reading considers the body as archive, as borderland, as blueprint. These poets do not offer utopia. They offer something more durable: language rooted enough to hold grief, bright enough to grow possibility. 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 is That Beautiful House: Crafting Engaging Settings and Playful Prose
07/03/2026
What is That Beautiful House: Crafting Engaging Settings and Playful Prose
In this workshop, we will focus on setting development which plays a crucial role in situating your reader as well as invigorating and enriching your prose. Participants will leave with a better understanding of the setting’s impact on their writing through reading examples, conversation, and generative writing prompts. Exercises and readings will focus on Bay Area locales. This session is designed to help writers of all levels explore how setting can be a powerful element in their storytelling. 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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Unleashing the Super Hero Within
07/03/2026
Unleashing the Super Hero Within
The Center for ArtEsteem (ArtEsteem) presents “Unleashing the Super Hero Within,” a panel exploring Executive Director Amana Harris’s curriculum Self As Super Hero: Handbook on Creating the Life-Size Self-Portrait.ArtEsteem students and teachers will engage in dialogue about today’s youth, their creative needs, and the Self As Super Hero curriculum as a critical catalyst of self-reflection, family and cultural research, societal assessment, and artistic development. ArtEsteem is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, founded in 1989 to provide opportunities for personal wellness and creative expression in the Bay Area. Its core programs include academic day, after school, and summer arts education for K-12 students, community engagement through the traveling ArtMobile, public art projects, and professional development for educators. The Self As Super Hero curriculum is a foundational aspect of ArtEsteem’s work, centering the student artist as they reinvent themselves to be the Super Hero they want to see in their communities. Students identify issues, both personal and in the world, and develop super powers based on their talents, the five senses, and objects of importance that can directly solve the problems they have identified. The 12 Principles of Attitudinal Healing are at core of this curriculum. Attitudinal Healing is a method for healing that helps individuals transform fears into experiences of self reflection for inner healing, and ArtEsteem encourages students to apply the Principles within their daily lives and artistic practice. 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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Media Literacy In and Out of the Classroom
07/02/2026
Media Literacy In and Out of the Classroom
In this digital age, young people are not only eager to learn about and discuss the realities of media ownership, production, and distribution, they also deserve to understand the differential power structures in how media influences our culture. Professor of media studies and founding member of the Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas, Nolan Higdon brings expertise in podcasting, digital culture, propaganda, and news media history to this important conversation. His book The Media And Me: A Guide To Critical Media Literacy for Young People explores critical inquiry skills to provide young people with the tools and perspectives to become empowered and autonomous media users. As a Fulbright Scholar teaching critical information literacy and media bias workshops to high school students and teachers in Norway, Berkeley City College librarian Heather Dodge offers insight directly from the classrooms about how media literacy education is being implemented to help young people form a multidimensional comprehension of what they read and watch. Berkeley High School librarian Meredith Irby and Washington Elementary School librarian Jackie Overlid bring firsthand perspectives about what media literacy looks like in the public schools. Moderated by Jessica Lee, Coordinator for Library Services and Instructional Technology lead for the Berkeley Unified School District, this illuminating panel will discuss what works well and what gaps we need to fill in order to help our youth evolve from passive consumers of media to engaged critics and creators. 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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The Last Human Bear: Exclusive Early Book Launch with Greg Sarris
07/02/2026
The Last Human Bear: Exclusive Early Book Launch with Greg Sarris
In 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. 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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The Ins and Outs of MFA programs with SJSU
07/01/2026
The Ins and Outs of MFA programs with SJSU
Join the Creative Writing professors of San Jose State University for a combined panel and workshop where the professors will discuss the ins and outs of MFA programs and lead attendees in a series of writing exercises for prose writers and poets. SJSU MFA program coordinator Nick Taylor and faculty members Keenan Norris, J. Michael Martinez and Brook McClurg have guided numerous aspiring writers through graduation and on to publication and they look forward to sharing tools of their trade with the public. Whether you’re an aspiring MFA student, a long-time writer, or simply an interested reader, consider yourself invited. 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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Publishing the Future
07/01/2026
Publishing the Future
To write an inclusive future, we must publish diverse voices who represent our collective interests and stories. The publishers and imprints represented in this headliner panel will discuss the implications of the current political climate on the future of publishing and put forward creative solutions to the lack of opportunities for publishing underrepresented stories. Tiny Reparations Press, founded by standup comedian, bestselling author, producer, and actress Phoebe Robinson, is a highly curated imprint dedicated to fiction and nonfiction that pushes the conversation forward. HeartDrum, an acclaimed imprint of HarperChildren’s featuring stories that emphasize the present and future of Native peoples and the strength of young Indigenous heroes, will be represented by its author-curator and award-winning writer Cynthia Leitich Smith. Turning the page to publishers, Palestinian American author and book worker Hannah Moushabeck runs Interlink Publishing alongside her family, the only Palestinian-owned independent publishing house in the United States offering global perspectives to readers through works of literature-in-translation, history, activism, politics, art, cultural guides, award-winning cookbooks, and illustrated children’s books. Through publishing talented writers whose works have been overlooked by large-scale publishers, co-founder Kate Gale of Red Hen Press fosters diversity, promotes literacy in local schools, and supports the Greater Los Angeles Area and international communities with arts-based events and literary advocacy. Moderated by acting Co-CEO of the intersectional, feminist press Aunt Lute, María Mínguez Arias, this inspiring panel is a celebration of the innovative and diverse members of the publishing industry dedicated to creatively curating and publishing the voices of our future. Introductory live music performance by Tristan Marcelle of Bushwick Book Club Oakland 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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Best of California
06/30/2026
Best of California
What makes Californian literature shine? Writer Kathleen Alcott suggests that the diversity of California’s landscape has gifted a unique sense of time and change to its inhabitants, who are “used to the colors out the window turning over entirely, and to stop seeing trees and to start seeing water” within a few hours’ drive. In California Rewritten, editor, author, and host of Alta‘s California Book Club John Freeman captures the evolution of the Golden State’s literary life. He traces our literary history from early myths to the arrivals and migrations chronicled by works including The Distance Between Us, Reyna Grande’s memoir about her experiences as an undocumented child immigrant from Mexico, and America is Not the Heart, Elaine Castillo’s novel about a queer war veteran’s journey from the Philippines to the insular immigrant community in Milpitas. Following building cities, exploding fantasias, and digital dystopias, Freeman then directs readers to the ruptures, the fraying connections to reality that can follow the traumatic loss of a family member, as portrayed in Venita Blackburn’s Dead in Long Beach, California. Moderated by editorial director of Alta Journal,Blaise Zerega, this panel will explore the featured works individually and as part of the road map to Californian literature that can help us uncover our history, confront pressing issues that face our society, and imagine our shared future. 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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Shells, Lions, and Pomegranate Trees: Picture Books Approaching Difficult Topics
06/30/2026
Shells, Lions, and Pomegranate Trees: Picture Books Approaching Difficult Topics
In times of danger and despair, kid-friendly stories and symbols can help families approach heavy topics, such as the ones in this panel. Touching on the difficult experiences of Japanese-Americans during the Japanese Incarceration in Hawai’i during World War II, Sharon Fujimoto-Johnson’sShell Song tells ofthe true story of her grandfather’s detainment in an island prison, where he collected, labelled, and carefully saved tiny seashells that were later passed down to his children and grandchildren. In Lion’s Water,Sheila Hackbarth depicts the story of a Ugandan girl who must find the courage to protect herself and her brother after escaping the bad men who want to take control of their village. Another tender story that deals with hardships in an age-appropriate way, Yasi and Mina’s Pomegranate Tree by Nikoo Yahyazadeh is about two friends living in Tehran during the war with Iraq who get separated when one of them has to move to the United States. Oriented toward adults and older kids, this panel moderated byauthor, illustrator, and activist Innosanto Nagara will highlight the role of stories in helping children navigate difficult topics to find resilience and strength when they need it most. 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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Getting Unstuck with Ramona Ausubel
06/29/2026
Getting Unstuck with Ramona Ausubel
Being a writer means coming up against self-doubt. But what if it doesn’t have to be so scary? What if the blank page felt more like an invitation than a cliff? Does it sometimes seem like your novel is trying to kill you? Have you considered divorcing a story? Me too. In this gathering we will work through a few exercises designed to bring joy and a sense of possibility and invention so that you and your writing will once again be besties (or at least unlikely to murder each other). Based on my new book UNSTUCK: 101 Doorways Leading from the Blank Page to the Last Page (Tin House, 4/14/26) 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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Dreams Can Be Deceiving: Asian American Identities
06/29/2026
Dreams Can Be Deceiving: Asian American Identities
Where is the boundary between a dream and a lie? The award-winning authors of this panel write about the elusive and deceptive dreams—of assimilation, of youth, of success— that impact their Asian American communities. In Lisa Lee’s American Han, the Kim family dutifully embodies the model minority myth in 1980s San Francisco, until their son goes missing, and they are forced to confront the facade of the American Dream as their lives unravel in a country that isn’t all it promised it would be. For Jin Chang from Vanessa Hua’s Coyoteland, moving his family to the privileged community of El Nido after years of scraping by is a great achievement, but he decides to bend the rules for one final deceitful scheme to make it big in real estate. As fire season escalates and coyote attacks plague the town, the characters become embroiled in scandals and secrets that unflinchingly reveal our current moment. Definitions for success vary greatly, and Kelly Yang explores the ways that society shapes women’s ideals in The Take, a fast-paced novel about a young writer and an older producer who undergo an age-reversal treatment. What starts as a professional transaction of exchanging blood quickly becomes a complex psychological dance, leaving both women questioning what they’re willing to sacrifice to rewrite their stories of success. Where Are You Really From also features complex and flawed AAPI characters, from a mail order bride from Taiwan who is packed up in a cardboard box and sent via express shipping to California, to two teenage girls who meticulously plan how to kill and cook their downstairs neighbor. This surreal multi-genre collection of stories by Elaine Hsieh Chou confronts the ways storytelling enables our capacity for self-deception and cruelty. In search of the truth behind the headlines is Emmy-winning journalist and author of Amplify! My Fight for Asian America Dion Lim, who will draw on her experience reporting on AAPI issues to moderate this panel that honors the depth and diversity of Asian American identities. 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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Academic Free Speech
06/26/2026
Academic Free Speech
What is it like to stand up for our beliefs as members of universities in today’s social and political climate? UC Davis free speech and equity law scholar Brian Soucek argues that institutional neutrality is a myth in The Opinionated University, which takes a deep dive into prominent campus controversies that demonstrate how those pushing for neutrality are only preventing universities from standing up for their values. Independent history researcher Aleida García documents inspiring instances of on-the-ground union organizing and power building in Out of the Lab, Into the Street: An Oral History of the 2022 UAW Strike at the University of California, a nuanced account of the largest strike in the history of American higher education. As the leader of several impactful organizations such as American Muslims for Palestine, the Northern California Islamic Council, and the Dollar for Deen Charity, UC Berkeley and Zaytuna College professor of Islamic law and theology Hatem Bazian exemplifies standing up for one’s beliefs and being outspoken in a university environment. Join this powerful panel, moderated by Michael Mark Cohen, that educates and urges community members to keep collective power alive as we fight for a future of free speech in our academic institutions. 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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Bright Futures Ahead for Native Youth Lit
06/25/2026
Bright Futures Ahead for Native Youth Lit
Providing stellar examples of excellence in youth literature, the acclaimed authors of this panel pave the way for Native youth readers to see their own cultures reflected in stories that are written by authors with similar backgrounds. In her picture book I Love Salmon and Lampreys, Brook M. Thompson draws from her experiences growing up in the Yurok and Karuk Tribes to tell an inspiring story about a river, a successful Native-led movement for environmental justice, and the making of a scientist. Ojibwe and Lakota author Byron Graves’ young adult novel Medicine Wheels tells the unforgettable story of a gifted young Ojibwe learning to ride in his father’s footsteps while practicing for a skateboarding championship. Printz Award-winning Legendary Fry Bread Drive-In, edited by Cynthia Leitich-Smith, features the voices of both new and acclaimed Indigenous writers in a collection of interconnected stories about laughter, love, Native pride, and the world’s best frybread. The future of youth literature is brightly paved by the remarkable authors of this panel moderated by Muriel Ammon, and there is no doubt that they will continue to enhance and expand the worldviews of young readers. 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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Taking the Long Roadtrip Home
06/22/2026
Taking the Long Roadtrip Home
From a Tennessee farm to California’s Central Coast, the action-packed road trips of this panel navigate the complicated, winding paths of familial connection with heart, humor, and sincerity. Kevin Wilson’s Run for the Hills takes off with an unexpected road trip across America when Madeleine’s long-lost half brother asks her to leave home to join him on a crazy road trip to track down every single one of their half siblings. Irena Smith veers toward the West Coast in Troika: Three Generations, Three Days, and a Very American Road Trip, her lyrical memoir about a Gen X narrator’s three-day road trip with her mother and daughter, which traverses the landscapes of identity and family history and stretches from the horrors of the second world war and an escape from Soviet Russia to adolescence and motherhood in the suburbs of Silicon Valley. At times chaotic, at times tedious, and always eventful, the family road trips of this panel, moderated by Julie Coryell, literary publicist. 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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Artful Solutions Middle Grade and YA Graphic Novels
06/22/2026
Artful Solutions Middle Grade and YA Graphic Novels
Drawing from real-life situations that kids may face, the graphic novels of this panel combine art and words to tell meaningful stories. In Marshmallow & Jordan,Alina Chau depicts a young basketball player’s experience after an accident leaves her paralyzed from the waist down, whose encounter with a mysterious elephant helps her discover a brand new sport. It can be hard to feel different from our friends, but Maia Kobabe and Swati “Lucky” Srikumar’s Opting Out, a middle grade graphic novel about a kid who just isn’t interested in any of that boy/girl stuff or the way their body is changing, shows us how we can find our own options and create our own stories. For teenagers Franny and Sam in As I Dream of You,illustrated by LeUyen Pham, the reality of love feels completely different from the tales of heartbreak and loss they have come to understand, but their quest to stay together soon takes a supernatural twist after they see their relationship as something that could possibly conquer death. In the autobiographical Armaveni: A Graphic Novel of the Armenian Genocide, Nadine Takvorian chronicles her quest to uncover her family’s history during the Armenian genocide through interwoven historical, contemporary, and fantastical sequences. Perfect for middle and high schoolers, educators, and parents, this panel moderated by librarian Elaine Tai will showcase the rich diversity of the graphic novel genre. 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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Preserving Press Freedom
06/19/2026
Preserving Press Freedom
As 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! Check out our upcoming events Follow us on instagram:
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Black Feminist Futurescaping
06/19/2026
Black Feminist Futurescaping
“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (Audre Lorde), but the tools that have been used for dismantling in the past might just be the ones we use to build the future. For Octavia Butler, science fiction stories were her tools for speculating the devolution of the American empire and simultaneously offered cautionary tales about our propensity for violence and sanguine manifestations that alter our current paradigms and envision Black women at the center of the world. In her cultural biography, Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler, Black feminist Afrofuturist writer, scholar, and cultural critic Susana M. Morris places Butler’s story within the historical and social contexts that influenced the ideas central to her celebrated writing. Similarly, in Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, researcher Alexis Pauline Gumbs asks us to look beyond the surface of another iconic writer and symbol of Black feminism. Audre Lorde is well-known for her quotable essays, but Gumbs’ groundbreaking research into the full depths of Lorde’s manuscript archives reveal her deep engagement with the planetary dynamics of geology, meteorology, and biology. In a society that rejected her Black feminist lesbian warrior poet existence, these ecological images provided the literal guides for self-defense, for survival, and for writing the future. Moderated by Isis Asare of Sistah Scifi, the first Black-owned bookstore in the nation dedicated to science fiction, this panel will examine the environments that influenced the two visionary Black feminist writers and the wisdom their works provide for dismantling unjust realities as we create our own futures. Introductory live music performance by selena feliciano (Bushwick Book Club Oakland). 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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From Colleagues to Courtship Indigenous Romance
06/18/2026
From Colleagues to Courtship Indigenous Romance
Sometimes, being forced to work together on a project might not be so bad… especially when it leads to falling in love. At the Crooked Rock Urban Indian Center in Pamela Sanderson’s Heartbeat Braves, Rayanne Larson’s special project is unexpectedly handed over to the underachieving nephew of the Center’s new leader, and she is determined to keep her distance until a crisis forces the two of them closer together. In Native Love Jams by Tashia Hart, Winnow is hired to cook for the first Indigenous Food Days in a rural Minnesota village, where she and her unwelcoming host Niigaanii must pull thorns from their past to harvest their own love story. Dani Trujillo’s When Stars Have Teethtakes place in the San Francisco Urban Indian Center, where employee Buffy Yellowbird agrees on an associates-with-benefits arrangement with an ultra-suave immigration lawyer who leaves her longing for more. Emerging from a past abundant with problematic Indigenous tropes, the romance genre is greatly enriched by the novels of this panel, which showcase genre fiction created by authors who identify with the cultures represented. Moderated by the content creator behind publishing imprint Boozhoo Books Naomi Darling, this lovely panel celebrates Indigenous romance writing and the sparks that arise in partnership. 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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Building Worlds, Building Power
06/18/2026
Building Worlds, Building Power
What 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. 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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HILO PRESENTS THE MIGHTY
06/17/2026
HILO PRESENTS THE MIGHTY
Cartoonist Judd Winick’s presentation surrounding his latest title, HILO PRESENTS: THE MIGHTY, involves a 17 question Q&A with himself as the creator. From answering questions about his artistic process and the process behind creating a HILO book, to sharing innumerable photos of his two cats (Troy and Abed), Judd’s session will cover not only his unique career in the graphic novels/comics space but will also answer burning questions a lot of kids may be already thinking of in the audience! 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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Shadows of Liberty: Immigrant Detention, Incarceration, and the Demand for Dignity in the USA
06/17/2026
Shadows of Liberty: Immigrant Detention, Incarceration, and the Demand for Dignity in the USA
The Trump administration is terrorizing our communities with mass deportations, militarized raids, and brutal detainment, tearing families apart and unlawfully withholding immigrants in inhumane conditions. As historian Ana Raquel Minian points out, this is only the latest chapter in a saga in which immigrants to the United States have been held without recourse to their constitutional rights. This imperative panel will trace back to the 1800s with Minian’s In the Shadow of Liberty: The Invisible History of Immigrant Detention in the United States, which braids together the vivid stories of four migrants seeking to escape the turmoil of their homeland for the promise of America: a Chinese refugee, a European war bride, a Cuban exile, and a Central American asylum seeker. Personal accounts give this history a human face, as with The Poet and the Silk Girl: A Memoir of Love, Imprisonment, and Protest,Satsuki Ina’s memoir documenting her parents’ forcible removal from their home, their incarceration in wartime American concentration camps, and the generational struggle of Japanese Americans who fought for the restoration of their rights and clung to their full humanity in the face of adversity. As she traces the legacies of trauma, she connects her family’s ordeal to modern-day mass incarceration at the U.S.-Mexico border, which is what Daniel A. Olivas bases his modern retelling of “Waiting for Godot” on. Through a darkly comic absurdist lens, Waiting for Godínez: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts features the forever-waiting character Jesús, who is kidnapped by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents each night to be deported and thrown into a cage that is left unlocked. Though these “black sites” of rightlessness exist out of view from the average American, their reach extends into our lives, all the way to the gradual unraveling of the right to bail and the presumption of innocence. Veronica Granillo brings a lawyer’s perspective from her experience working on affirmative and defensive asylum cases, U Visas, residency, and naturalization as the Senior Staff Attorney at East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, a community organization that provides services to support low-income immigrants and people fleeing violence and persecution. Moderated by Piper Kerman, justice reform activist and author of Orange is the New Black, the narratives of this panel allow us to see how the changing political climate surrounding immigration has played out in individual lives, imploring us to reconsider this country’s policies in light of the fact that we are all human and deserve respect, dignity, and democracy as we make our way in this confusing and often indifferent world. 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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