Bay Area Book Festival Podcast

Our workshop will start with a panel discussion, comprised of BIPOC writers who are part of the Rooted & Written program, on how we integrate our histories into our work. This session will blend conversation and craft on how we listen to, record, and honor ancestral knowledge on the page, without flattening it for mainstream expectations. Then we'll talk about writing. Using guided prompts, partic...

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 for...

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. Th...

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 brigh...

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 Söder...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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-...

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 . T...

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...

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, M...

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 s...

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 p...

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 v...

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 o...

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 structur...

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...

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 i...

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 t...

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 myt...

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...

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. Takin...

The colorful picture books of this read-aloud explore the changing names and languages we use depending on our environment, which in turn affect the meaning, history, and heritage that those words carry. In Wanjiku, Child of Mine by Ciiku Ndung'u Case , a young Gikuyu girl moves from the Kenya countryside to attend a boarding school in Nairobi, where people call her Catherine, and children are exp...