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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Out of the Blue, I Found You
08/17/2026
Out of the Blue, I Found You
The funny and heartfelt stories of this panel honor the chosen family who show up at the most unexpected, but perhaps most necessary, moments in our lives. Woodworking by Emily St. James follows a trans high school teacher from a small town in South Dakota who befriends the only other trans woman she knows: her seventeen-year-old student, the high school’s resident political dissident and Only Trans Girl. As their unlikely friendship evolves, it comes under the scrutiny of their community, and both women are forced to confront what happens if they choose to hide their true selves. Renee Swindle’s Francine’s Spectacular Crash and Burn features another unexpected encounter between a young executive assistant and aspiring photographer, whose life is upended after the sudden death of her agoraphobic mother, and the ten-year-old who keeps showing up at her doorstep after she rescues him from a group of bullies. Meeting the boy’s foster mother, who turns out to be her fiery high school crush, leads Francine to make a consecutive string of bad choices, and she is left wondering how to become the kind of person her young friend can depend on. The tumultuous journeys of self-discovery in this humorous yet moving panel, moderated by award-winning Sri Lankan American writer and educator Nayomi Munaweera, portray the power of chance, intergenerational queer friendships, and found family. 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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Behind the Scenes of Audiobook Production
08/14/2026
Behind the Scenes of Audiobook Production
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 Aldrich will offer insights from all parts of the production process as a freelance audiobook narrator, proofer, and prepper who is credited on over 150 titles in solo, dual, duet, and multicast audiobooks. Join us in this discussion, moderated by award-winning narrator Ann Richardson, to shine a spotlight on the backstage processes that help infuse stories with life and lyricism. 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 Ancestral Knowledge as BIPOC Writers
08/14/2026
Preserving Ancestral Knowledge as BIPOC Writers
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 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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Kaleidoscopic Convergence with 2025 NCBA Fiction Finalists
08/13/2026
Kaleidoscopic Convergence with 2025 NCBA Fiction Finalists
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 their own sacrifices and reasons for competing, in their fight for the prize. Nina Schuyler’s short story collection, In This Ravishing World, bridges nine stories of dreamers, escapists, activists, and artists who reckon with the climate crisis, urging all inhabitants of Nature to resist and fight to preserve its exquisite beauty in the face of destruction. The future is uncertain, but so is the past— the speculative stories in How We Know Our Time Travelers by Anita Felicelli reimagine time traveling as an everyday occurrence, given the fragility and unreliability of our memories that warp our understanding of the future. What, then, is the value of preservation? For the two crow sisters in Greg Sarris’ The Forgetters, who recall stories in the classic style of Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok creation stories from dawn to dusk, these shared histories hold the key for voyagers to repair the rifts in their own lives and the world. Moderated by author, editor, and critic Jane Ciabattari, this panel will peer closer into those translucent moments that hold the power to change the course of our past, present, and 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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Indicator Lights: Fine Tuning the Past to Drive Your Story into the Future
08/13/2026
Indicator Lights: Fine Tuning the Past to Drive Your Story into the Future
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 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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Unfinished Atlas: Begining When the World has Ended
08/12/2026
Unfinished Atlas: Begining When the World has Ended
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 precision through landscapes of labor, ecology, and human ambition, probing how we inhabit the structures we’ve set in motion. Emceeing the conversation, Lourdes Figueroa brings a deep engagement with literature, and a fascination with how memory and stories move through communities and change the future. Together, these poets sketch an atlas still in progress. One that is attentive to rupture, but equally committed to imagining what might grow in its wake. 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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Out of the Darkness: Translators and Editors Shine Light on a New Treasure Trove of Swedish Literature
08/12/2026
Out of the Darkness: Translators and Editors Shine Light on a New Treasure Trove of Swedish Literature
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 translators will focus on the joys and challenges of translating work from another era. The discussion will be moderated by Linda Haverty Rugg, professor of Scandinavian Studies at UC Berkeley. 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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Conjuring & Conjugating: Siguanabes in Future Tense
08/11/2026
Conjuring & Conjugating: Siguanabes in Future Tense
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 spoken aloud once more? Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta explores identity, lineage, and resistance through a poetics attentive to the long reach of colonial histories, MK Chavez’s writes at the crossroads of myth, ecology, and diaspora, exploring how ancestral figures continue to haunt and guide the present, and Neida Chavez Solórzano writes with luminous attention to migration, history, and the enduring presence of land and spirit. Leticia Hernandez Linares brings a community-rooted voice to questions of memory, storytelling, and cultural survival and will share work and lead this panel that explores the myth not as relic, but as a tense we are still learning to speak. To conjure is to call something back into the world. To conjugate is to shift its time. 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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Brevity: Souls of Short Stories
08/11/2026
Brevity: Souls of Short Stories
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 and Chicanx characters from the vibrant streets of Southern California to the arid Nevada Nuclear Sites in thematically linked stories exploring self-discovery, rebellion, and solidarity. Set in the dive bars, bathhouses, parks, workplaces, music venues, beaches, and college campuses of 2010s Seattle, Crawl: Stories by Max Delsohn portrays the pleasures and pains of sex, romance, and gender expression in a city and a time that has branded itself a radical queer utopia but proves much more complicated in reality. In Daddy Issues: Stories, a collection of moving and complex stories of queer Asian American experiences in Los Angeles, Eric Wat offers different contemplations on solitude and the vulnerability required for connection. Shifting from the present day to the near future, from China to America and beyond, the stories in M Lin’s The Memory Museum offer profound insight into the ambivalence of migration, the perverse ways race and class can operate, and what it means to be Chinese today. Join the talented authors of this panel, moderated by Latine poet, performer, and producer Marcos “Coco” James, to explore the limitless possibilities of the brief yet impactful short story. 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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Unsung Heroines: Visionary Women of the Bay Area
08/10/2026
Unsung Heroines: Visionary Women of the Bay Area
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 the founding of San Francisco to the present day. Together, their stories constitute a new telling of the history of Northern California from the vantage point of women who made a difference. Joining Alexandra to discuss the process of uncovering and writing about these stories is the visionary Jewelle Gomez, activist and author of the double Lambda Award-winning novel, The Gilda Stories. She has served on literature panels for the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, and the California Arts Council, and is currently Playwright in Residence at New Conservatory Theatre Center. This triumphant conversation will permanently alter readers’ perspective with the realization of just how many untold stories have been lost to time, encouraging them to scan their own environment for traces of women whose stories deserve to be recovered and told. Moderated by author of Where the Girls Were and Rad American Women A-Z Kate Schatz this panel will be, as Gomez declares, “a real celebration of these daring human rights activists who cross boundaries of time, ethnicity, and class and invite us all to join in.” In collaboration with Litquake 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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Youth Building a Better Future
08/10/2026
Youth Building a Better Future
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 we can fight for our future and make an impact on our community is by voting, but as the kids in Calling All Future Voters! find out, voting isn’t easy for everyone. Blending narrative and educational content in her co-written book, Laura Atkins highlights our country’s ongoing struggle for a more inclusive democracy and encourages readers to understand their rights and responsibilities toward their community. Joining the fight for a better future is author, illustrator, and organizer Robert Liu-Trujillo, who will moderate this enriching panel about how all of us can build towards a better 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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Taking Pride in Transformative Latin American Works
08/07/2026
Taking Pride in Transformative Latin American Works
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 narrates his life while navigating the stories told on his behalf, inscribing an origin narrative for trans people in the face of their erasure from both colonial and anti-colonial literary cannons. When Language Broke Open features Afro-Indigenous poet and artist Alan Pelaez Lopez’s collection of poetry, prose, and visual art from forty-five queer and trans Black writers of Latin American descent, centering the multifaceted realities of the LGBTQ community by illustrating Blackness as a geopolitical experience that is always changing. Join us to celebrate our talented queer Latine writers in this transformative panel, moderated by Uruguayan writer, professor, and first openly nonbinary person to receive the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature Caro De Robertis. 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 Time to Hide: Marion Seidemann Fredman and Elisa Kleven
08/07/2026
A Time to Hide: Marion Seidemann Fredman and Elisa Kleven
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 author and activist Rachel Sarah, this illuminating read-aloud and discussion will honor memory, teach history, and help ensure the next generation understands and remembers this powerful legacy of survival. 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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Post-Disaster Futures: Sci-Fi Visions of Survival and Renewal
08/06/2026
Post-Disaster Futures: Sci-Fi Visions of Survival and Renewal
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 intelligence means when nature itself is learning to adapt. Chuck Tingle’s Lucky Day shifts the lens to probability run amok, where a world altered by freak chance teeters between chaos and fate. His signature blend of absurdity and heart becomes a meditation on what it means to rebuild meaning and love in the aftermath of statistical disaster. In Awake in the Floating City, Susanna Kwan renders a tender apocalypse in the drowned remains of a futuristic San Francisco, where an artist and an aging woman forge a powerful connection against the inevitable tide. Moderated by Lara Messersmith-Glavin, author of Ruiner and Spirit Things, this panel dives into the new mythologies born after disaster, where the ruins of the past give rise to glittering, uncanny futures. 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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Abominable Squiggle Time!
08/06/2026
Abominable Squiggle Time!
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
08/05/2026
What the Magic Hides: Moral Truths and Mystery in YA Fantasy
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 really happened to a missing classmate. And in Morbid Curiosities, a teen uncovers unsettling clues, investigates the academy that isn’t what it seems, and ultimately must decide how far she’s willing to go for the truth. Moderated by playwright and novelist Michelle Ruiz Keil, author of Summer in the City of Roses, this panel explores how YA authors use mystery and magic to uncover powerful truths about belonging, loss, and courage. 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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Walking to the Beat of Our Streets
08/05/2026
Walking to the Beat of Our Streets
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 gentle authenticity, this read-aloud and discussion moderated by author, illustrator and Social Justice Book Fair co-organizer Rob Liu-Trujillo remind us about kindness and neighborliness, inspiring a new generation of activists willing to keep on walking to fight for our communities. 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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Who Did It? A Thriller Panel of Secrets and Suspicion
08/04/2026
Who Did It? A Thriller Panel of Secrets and Suspicion
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 suburban life in today’s political climate. Dead Note by Victor Manibo opens with a murder marked by a chilling signature: the same song sung at two separate killings years apart. What begins as an open-and-shut case spirals into an investigation through Manila’s criminal underworld, where corruption, memory, and obsession intertwine. In The Reckoning, crime writer Kelli Stanley delivers an atmospheric thriller in which long-buried secrets resurface and past actions demand accountability. As hidden histories come to light, the line between guilt and innocence grows increasingly blurred. Moderated by Nicholas Louis Baham III, California State University professor and author of The People’s Detective, this electrifying panel will explore how contemporary thrillers confront social tensions, moral ambiguity, and the enduring power of the whodunit. From suburban streets to international underworlds, these novels remind us that solving the crime is only the beginning. 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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Protecting Nature’s Patterns
08/04/2026
Protecting Nature’s Patterns
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 Great Smoky Mountain Discovery, a nonfiction picture book about how one woman proved to skeptical scientists that the fireflies of the Great Smoky Mountains put on dazzling synchronized light shows each night! Join this environmentally focused read-aloud and discussion, moderated by author Meera Sriram, that encourages young kids to take wonder in the environment and action to sustain it. 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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Speculative Belonging: Crafting Queer-Centered Realities
08/03/2026
Speculative Belonging: Crafting Queer-Centered Realities
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 a Fish Looks Like, Syr Hayarti Beker reimagines fairy tale and climate narrative through mutated, lyrical forms that center queer embodiment and ecological intimacy. In Automatic Noodle, Annalee Newitz envisions near-future solidarity between humans and robots, crafting communities that challenge capitalism while foregrounding queer belonging. Moderated by Kristina M. Canales, a queer Puerto Rican author and community builder with the LGBTQIA+ Lit Collective, this conversation will dive into craft, theory, and possibility. How do writers construct queer-norm worlds without replicating oppressive structures? What narrative tools allow authors to center fluidity, chosen family, and collective liberation? And how can speculative fiction create blueprints for futures rooted in care, resilience, and radical imagination? Join us for a dynamic discussion about building worlds where queerness shapes the rules of magic, technology, and society itself. 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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Flying High with Crows & Ravens
08/03/2026
Flying High with Crows & Ravens
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 through this meaningful session, moderated by Tomiiko Baker, which will feature read-alouds and a discussion between the authors! 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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Hidden Agendas: Cults, Corruption and Conspiracy in the Modern Thriller
07/31/2026
Hidden Agendas: Cults, Corruption and Conspiracy in the Modern Thriller
Secrets fester in isolated communities. Corporations conceal monstrous truths. Grief curdles into vengeance. In this high-stakes thriller panel, Sarah Gailey, Jendia Gammon, Luke Goebel, and Paddy Hirsch explore conspiracy as both engine and mirror, reflecting our deepest anxieties about belonging, power, and truth. In Make Me Better, Gailey crafts an eerily seductive psychological thriller set on a remote island promising healing, transformation, and the end of suffering. As an exclusive festival draws seekers desperate for connection, the novel interrogates cult psychology, toxic self-improvement culture, and the terrifying allure of surrendering autonomy in exchange for belonging. Goebel, known for his boundary-pushing fiction and screenwriting, brings a raw, literary intensity to the thriller form in Kill Dick. In this dark and satirical collection of short stories, obsession, violence, and fractured identities blur the line between perpetrator and victim while exposing the stories we tell ourselves to survive complicity and guilt. In PRIMED, Hirsch delivers a transatlantic revenge thriller that begins with a decades-old bombing and a single photograph. As a grieving father hunts the man he believes responsible, the chase stretches from Northern Ireland to Los Angeles, unraveling into espionage, political shadows, and the devastating costs of living for vengeance. Across their work, these authors probe the architecture of conspiracy: closed communities that promise salvation, corporations that distort truth, governments that obscure accountability, and individuals whose private grief fuels public violence. Moderated by podcast host of Twisted Passages and Dark Obsessions author Marie Sutro, join us for a conversation discussing writing paranoia in an era of misinformation, sustaining suspense while deepening character psychology, and why the thriller remains one of the most urgent genres for confronting systems of power, and ourselves. 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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Legendary Frybread Drive-In Featuring Printz Award-Winning Cynthia Leitich Smith
07/31/2026
Legendary Frybread Drive-In Featuring Printz Award-Winning Cynthia Leitich Smith
Celebrate laughter, love, Native pride, and the world’s best frybread with the phenomenal Cynthia Leitich Smith, critically-acclaimed Mvskoke author and curator of Heartdrum, a Native-focused imprint at HarperCollins publishing. She has written several bestselling books, including Jingle Dancer, Eternal, and Hearts Unbroken, which won the American Indian Youth Literature Award. Her latest book, Legendary Frybread Drive-In: Intertribal Stories, features stories from Indigenous writers connected by the big green-and-gold sign of Sandy June’s Legendary Frybread Drive-In, and it won the Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature and the American Indian Youth Literature Award! In this incredible session, Cynthia Leitich Smith will be joined by moderator Laura Atkins—children’s book author, editor, and co-organizer of the Social Justice Children’s Book Fair and YouthLit at the Bay Area Book Festival—to discuss her renowned stories, her advocacy for Native writing, and the inspiration behind her latest legendary book. 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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Inherited Hauntings: Horror at Home
07/30/2026
Inherited Hauntings: Horror at Home
The monsters we fear most often live behind closed doors. In this chilling and deeply human conversation, Eirinie Carson, Victor Manibo, and Tamika Thompson reveal how horror seeps into family ties, domestic spaces, and generational legacies, where the home becomes both refuge and ruin. Eirinie Carson’s Bloodfire, Baby reimagines the maternal gothic through the eyes of a new mother unraveling in isolation, haunted by postpartum dread and a centuries-old specter that mirrors her buried fears. In The Villa, Once Beloved, Victor Manibo conjures a decaying ancestral estate in the Philippines, where grief, folklore, and a fractured family collide and the curse of inheritance refuses to stay buried. Tamika Thompson’s The Curse of Hester Gardens brings the haunted house to public housing, reworking the genre into a fierce meditation on systemic violence and maternal sacrifice, where every hallway hums with ghosts, both social and supernatural. Moderated by Allison Mick, whose debut novel Humboldt Cutblends eco-horror with ancestral reckoning, this panel examines how horror exposes what families hide, asking what it means to protect those we love when the true terror lives within the walls we’ve built. 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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Dreaming for the Stars: Black Joy from Present to Future (Panel and Read-Aloud)
07/30/2026
Dreaming for the Stars: Black Joy from Present to Future (Panel and Read-Aloud)
Celebrate joyful and uplifting Black stories at this interactive panel and read-aloud! Alice Faye Duncan will introduce The Dream Builder’s Blueprint: Dr. King’s Message to Young People, a found poem based on Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Street Sweeper” speech that highlights his principles of excellence, activism, and compassion in a way that kids can understand. Capturing the dreams that parents have for their children, As You Are: A Hope For Black Sons by Kimberley A. Gordon Biddle warmlyreminds every Black boy that he is loved, powerful, and enough just as he is, even if the world may not always see him the same way. Looking toward the future, Natasha Tarpley imagines the endless possibilities for Black and Brown children in The Me I Choose to Be, an uplifting ode to the power of potential and self-love, featuring fabulous afro-futuristic photography! This empowering session, moderated by screenwriter, poet, and educator Shia Shabazz Smith, will combine read-alouds and discussions for families that inspire kids to believe in themselves and dream big! 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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Swords, Seas, and Returning Home: Epic Quests and Cultural Magic in YA Fantasy
07/29/2026
Swords, Seas, and Returning Home: Epic Quests and Cultural Magic in YA Fantasy
Magic, masks, and seadragons collide in this YA fantasy panel about young heroes who must face the past to claim their futures, drawing power from the cultures that shaped them. Sandra Proudman, Makiia Lucier, and Samantha Chong craft lush, high-stakes adventures where family, legacy, and identity are as potent as spells. In Salvación, Mexican American author Sandra Proudman reimagines El Zorro through a Latinx heroine who defends her Alta California town’s mystical sal negra and her family from encroaching violence, blending swashbuckling romance with Mexican history and resistance. Makiia Lucier, who grew up on the Pacific island of Guam, channels island life and oceanic mythology in Dragonfruit, following exiled Hanalei as she studies seadragons and seizes a single, impossible chance to return home and right a terrible wrong. Malaysian writer S. Chong’s Prodigal Tiger sends an exiled witch from a magical academy in New York back to Penang, where Malaysian folklore, Peranakan heritage, and vengeful ghosts force her to confront what it means to belong in the diaspora. Moderated by bookstagrammer and literary influencer Dahlia De La Vega of @ofpagesandprint, who champions YA, fantasy, romance, and historical fiction, this conversation dives into how culture, community, and home shape the new fantasies and futures young readers can now see themselves in. 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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Mysterious Monsters and Ghostly Encounters (Read-Aloud)
07/29/2026
Mysterious Monsters and Ghostly Encounters (Read-Aloud)
What’s scarier than ghosts or monsters? Bringing nothing for show-and-tell! Rachel Wilson will show you how to befriend and build the perfect ghost trap in To Catch a Ghost, but when the moment finally arrives, will you be able to catch a friend? Best friends Valentina, Jasmine, Andy, and Xander also face something menacing in The Wild Ones by Megan and Jorge Lacera, and they must turn to the mythical monsters from their respective cultures to help them save the only home they’ve ever known. This adventurous read-aloud, emceed by the intrepid Cinnamongirl, will be full of mysterious monsters, ghostly encounters, and unexpected twists! 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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Grim Kingdoms & Reckless Magic: Dark Fantasy in Revolt
07/28/2026
Grim Kingdoms & Reckless Magic: Dark Fantasy in Revolt
In this epic dark fantasy panel, three rising stars of the genre: Andrea Stewart, Madeleine Nakamura, and Evan Leikam plunge readers into worlds where power corrupts, gods wage war, and survival demands impossible choices. From grimdark assassins to divine battlefields to queer magic under siege, these stories ask: what does it cost to defy a king, or a god? Moderated by Flight of the Fallen fantasy author Hana Lee, the conversation will explore morally complex heroes, ruthless magic, and the shadowed spaces where crowns are claimed and shattered. In Anji Kills a King, Evan Leikam delivers a brutal, high-velocity debut in which a servant assassinates a king and becomes the target of legendary, magic-wielding mercenaries. As the hunt intensifies, alliances shift and a kingdom’s future hangs in the balance. Angel Eye by Madeleine Nakamura returns to a world of inquisitors, forbidden magic, and psychological peril. A string of murders ignites suspicion and witch hunts, forcing a traumatized scholar of magic to confront both external threats and his own unraveling mind. In The War Beyond, bestselling author Andrea Stewart escalates a divine conflict as sisters stand on opposing sides of a war between gods. Faith, loyalty, and destiny collide in a sweeping tale of rebellion and sacrifice. 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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Friends, Not Food! (Read-Aloud)
07/28/2026
Friends, Not Food! (Read-Aloud)
Laugh out loud with these humorous, unexpected picture books that make us question how we treat different species: who are our friends, and who do we eat? Stephanie Lucianovic’s Zombie and Brain Are Friends follows Zeb, a young zombie from a family of brain farmers who suddenly comes across the tiniest, pinkest, squishiest brain he ever did see! Will Zeb successfully convince his parents that his brainy bestie is better off as a member of the family than family dinner? Eight-year-old Beatrice of New York City’s Chinatown feels the same way about Lillie, a tic-tac-toe-playing chicken living in a dark arcade. Based on the true story of Lillie, Tic-Tac-Toe Chicken by Kimberly Tso follows Beatrice’s clever plan to give Lillie a better environment to live in. Emceed by Cinnamongirls Claire and Devin, this empowering panel showcases the natural empathy that drives us to stand up for all living beings. 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 Sideline to Spotlight: YA Romance
07/27/2026
From Sideline to Spotlight: YA Romance
There’s nothing like the arts to uncover secrets of the past and kindle buried feelings, as the romantic YA novels of this panel reveal. In Delali Adjoa’s The Free Verse Society, two teens desperate to keep their pasts hidden find fresh starts through their high school poetry club, where the power of the written word tears down the walls they’ve built around their secrets, and their hearts. Taking place at an exclusive writers’ retreat, Love on Paper by Danielle Parker features two ambitious teenage writers from rival families of the publishing world, who must fight through writer’s block, step out of their parents’ shadows, and find the courage to create their own love stories for a chance at publication. For the high school exes in Eva Des Lauriers’ I’m Gonna Get You Back, returning to their small town is their only way for one of them to get into their dream film school and the other to maintain a college scholarship, but any time people return to the mountain, drama follows…especially when an anonymous social media account starts airing everyone’s dirty laundry. Join this tender and heartfelt panel, moderated by Lauren and Tiina of Boutique Book Retreats, to explore the power of love, arts, and second chances in drawing people together. 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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