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.

Mindful Democracy 06/15/2026

Mindful Democracy Drawing on the expertise of mindfulness educators, frontline organizers, and America’s greatest literary voices, this panel provides guidance for navigating political burnout and civic despair. On Mindful Democracy: A Declaration of Interdependence to Mend a Fractured World is professor Jeremy David Engels’ compact guide offering 27 powerful teachings of interdependence and how to show up for democracy with compassion, clarity, and courage. In this age of disaster, community-shaped strategies are essential for practically navigating the challenges posed by overlapping catastrophes, and Kailea Rose Loften and Kate Rose Weiner present engaging prompts, concise checklists, and heartfelt advice for building and sustaining durable mutual aid networks in Compassion in Crisis: Building Disaster-Resilient Communities. Liza J. Rankow combines the compassion of a seasoned spiritual guide and the insightful analysis of a longtime grassroots activist in Soul Medicine for a Fractured World, which offers questions for reflection as well as an array of spiritual and healing practices to guide readers on an integrative path forward through healing and transformation, rooted in our kinship with one another, the Earth, and all of life. Diving deeply into a dharma of liberation, Rima Vesely-Flad examines the writings of Audre Lorde and James Baldwin through key Buddhist principles, revealing that liberation depends not only on organizing and mass movements, but also the generative power of inner well-being, authenticity, art, and embodiment. Whether you’re a seasoned activist or a tender-hearted citizen seeking a new path forward, this nourishing panel moderated by Rev. Dereca Blackmon of the East Bay Church of Religious Science is an invitation into the lifelong work of caring for one another in pursuit of our collective liberation. 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: /episode/index/show/baybookfest/id/41602490

Library Joy with Mychal Threets! 06/15/2026

Short Cuts: Bay Area Book Festival Week is Here! 05/27/2026

Short Cuts: Bridgette Yang of Youth Speaks - Workshops and Open Mic at the Festival! 05/18/2026

Short Cuts: Rob Liu-Trujillo: YouthLit at BABF 2026 04/28/2026

Short Cuts: Tamika Thompson - The Curse of Hester Gardens 04/14/2026

Short Cuts: The 2026 Festival Schedule is LIVE! 03/31/2026

Short Cuts - Bushwick Book Club Oakland: opening for all headliners of 2026 03/10/2026

Short Cuts: Boutique Book Retreats - A Romance Renaissance at BABF! 02/24/2026

Short Cuts: MK Chavez - Poetry Stages 02/17/2026

Short Cuts: Terria Smith - I Love You So Many 01/20/2026

Short Cuts: Jeremy Engels - On Mindful Democracy 01/06/2026

Short Cuts: Renee Swindle - Francine's Spectacular Crash and Burn 12/16/2025

Short Cuts: Introducing the 2026 Festival & new BABF podcast Hosts 12/02/2025

Short Cuts: Nico Lang 09/08/2025

Narrating the Mother 08/21/2025

So Many Stars: A Celebration of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color 08/20/2025

A Memoir for Remembrance 08/20/2025

Wound is the Portal: Healing into the Future and Incantation for Future: Closing Headliner & Portal Closing 08/19/2025

Wound is the Portal: Healing into the Future and Incantation for Future: Closing Headliner & Portal Closing This poetry portal explores the wound not as an end, but as a powerful beginning. Join us for a journey where language becomes a site of transformation—where grief, memory, and survival are not just revisited, but reimagined. Mimi Tempestt breaks open conventions with a voice that insists on reclamation and the sacredness of Black queer futurity. Her work spirals through personal and collective histories, creating a radical space for becoming. Salvadoran poet Marian Urquilla mines personal and political terrain, forging poems that speak to displacement, resilience, and empowerment. With precision and heart, her language gives shape to survival. James Cagney, PEN Oakland award-winner and recipient of the Academy of American Poets' James Laughlin Award, delivers poems that honor vulnerability and rage in equal measure. His work reverberates with ancestral echoes and present-day urgency. Together, these poets wield poetry as a technology of resilience and a tool for new world-building. In their hands, the wound becomes a map—leading us toward a future where we do more than survive. We thrive. We bloom. As the poetry stage draws to a close, we will gather for one final invocation—a moment to honor what has been conjured, created, and carried forward. Incantation for Future is both a celebration and a spell for what comes next. Legendary writer and cultural icon joins us as our closing headliner, offering a rare reading that reaches across generations, geographies, and genres. Her work, rooted in the mythic, the historical, and the personal, has long opened portals for those navigating identity, exile, and transformation. In this culminating moment, Maxine Hong Kingston offers not just a reading, but a blessing—an incantation for futures rooted in justice, storytelling, and radical interconnectedness. Her presence reminds us that language shapes the world, that memory is a map, and that poetry is a path toward liberation. Together, we will close the portal not with finality, but with intention—carrying the words, visions, and reverberations of the festival into the world beyond. Let this be our collective offering to the future. /episode/index/show/baybookfest/id/37581685