Bay Area Book Festival Podcast

In this enlightening and truly comforting discussion, four remarkable experts show how to take a clear-eyed, compassionate approach to mortality. These authors shed light on how medical providers and patients alike can reshape the mentality of fear around the process of dying and create an experience that can be transformative and extremely meaningful. This conversation features journalist Shoshan...

Carol Anderson is one of our nation's leading voices on racial justice. In One Person, No Vote, she zeros in on the fallout from the 2013 Supreme Court ruling that gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Anderson will be in conversation with Congresswoman Barbara Lee, one of the most well-regarded and outspoken members of the U.S. House of Representatives. Generously supported by the Federated India...

Best-selling novelist R.O. Kwon's New York Times essay about grief in times of uncertainty was the inspiration for this conversation. In an emotionally profound exchange, she is joined by Pulitzer Prize winners Anthony Doerr, whose novel All the Light We Cannot See illuminates the ways people try to be good to one another; and Viet Thanh Nguyen, whose The Sympathizer captures the ambivalence and h...

The past few years have been infused with political engagement from a diverse electorate. For every victory, however, there's an equally coordinated attempt to disenfranchise these citizens. Bestselling authors Steve Phillips and David Daley will teach us how to unrig the rules to ensure everyone's vote is counted. Moderated by Rebecca Nagle (Cherokee). Generously supported by the Federated Indian...

Listen to these two leading ladies of suspense as they crack the case of how to write spine-tingling, sophisticated thrillers. Meg Gardiner specializes in heroines with big brains, from FBI agents to forensic psychiatrists to firecracker. And Rachel Howzell Hall, author of the Detective Elouise Norton series, has created an unforgettable protagonist. Moderated by Edgar Award winner Laurie King.

How much can we rely on our courts as the last line of defense in our right to vote? Experts lead us through the role of the courts in ensuring access to absentee ballots and early voting, and show us how citizens can shape the judiciary. Featuring Richard Hasen, Alan Hirsch, and ACLU of Northern California director Abdi Soltani. Moderated by Lala Wu. Generously supported by the Federated Indians...

Eimear McBride's career is an underdog's dream: she spent six months writing her debut novel, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, and nine years trying to sell it, only to take the literary scene by storm when it was finally published in 2013 to an avalanche of acclaim, awards, and rapturous comparisons to James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Now, McBride joins Brooke Warner in celebration of her eagerly aw...

The election will be disrupted by COVID-19. There's a secure solution: voting by mail, which would protect public health and our democracy's integrity. What are the pathways to making vote-by-mail widely available? Jesse Wegman, author of Let the People Pick the President, is joined by Amber McReynolds, coauthor of When Women Vote. Moderated by Ian Haney Lopez. Supported by the Federated Indians o...

We're thrilled to welcome novelist Chelsea Bieker in conversation with Brooke Warner. Bieker's literary debut Godshot is a hymn to the salvation found in hard-won personal rebirth. Stricken with drought, the community of Peaches, California clings to a cult leader for salvation, and 14-year-old Lacey is left to reap a revelatory harvest of her own. Godshot has won Bieker comparisons to Margaret At...

Homelessness, income inequality, mass incarceration, wage stagnation, housing shortages: Experts on the front lines will discuss what we need to do to create a fairer future. Zach Norris, Executive Director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, makes a strong case for the importance of collective accountability with We Keep Us Safe. He's joined by New York Times reporter Conor Doughtery. We a...

In this transcendent conversation, Pulitzer Prize winner Jericho Brown and National Book Award winner Nikky Finney—two of the most prominent poets in America today—share their own responses to the murders of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd, address the protests against police brutality and white supremacy, and describe the revolutionary power of poetry to capture human experience. They offer us the...

Parents all over the world are facing a dilemma: what do we tell children about threatening truths, from COVID to climate change? Christine Carter, Ph. D. draws on her own parenting experiences, as well as scientific research, to give advice for living and parenting with greater joy and meaning. In her recent book, Ready or Not, Madeline Levine seems to have anticipated the struggles of families d...

These novelist-teachers from the University of San Francisco MFA in Writing program dig into the challenges of writing characters haunted by their pasts. They share the narrative tools they use to push their characters to the very edge and keep the reader turning the page. Sponsored by the University of San Francisco MFA in Writing program.

These historical novels transport us to worlds full of surprising connections that cross divisions of class, race and more. These authors explore power dynamics and tricky relationships from 1930s colonial Malaysia, to pre-Civil War Ohio, to the streets of Paris and the vineyards of Midi in the Victorian era.

These writers are as fierce as their female crime fighters. Their protagonists confront corrupt cops, solve mysterious deaths while juggling personal woes, quash terrorism and try to stay alive while doling out justice. With support from the Norway House Foundation, NORLA, the Consulate General of Sweden in San Francisco, SWEA San Francisco and the Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation.

One New York Times reviewer called journalist David Wallace Wells' "The Uninhabitable Earth" "the most terrifying book I have ever read." It also is one of the most important. Both literary and science-based, the book is a chilling account of the ticking clock looming over humanity as climate change threatens to render the earth unfit for human life.

One of the "Angola 3," Albert Woodfox endured four decades of solitary confinement for a crime he did not commit. In our closing keynote session, Woodfox will be interviewed by Mother Jones reporter Shane Bauer, author of "American Prison" and himself a survivor of solitary confinement.

Tayari Jones can "touch us soul to soul with her words," said Oprah, who dubbed Jones' newest novel a Book Club pick for 2018. In her work, Jones takes the scars of the American South, including traumas around wrongful incarceration, and rubs them raw. She is interviewed by Brooke Warner of She Writes Press. Sponsored by She Writes Press; also with the support of Women Lit members.

To write race and ethnicity well, we need the right tools and the right reading list. Join four writer-teachers of color as they unpack the questions of identity that drive their writing, mark the pitfalls of self-exotification and weigh the rewards of penning richer, riskier work.

These masterful storytellers tackle the mysterious, the wild,the terrifying and the magical in their speculative fiction. With enthralling work that defies convention, they are creating a cultural shift in the literary landscape. Presented by the UC Berkeley English Department and the Peripheral Futures Working Group; also with the support of Women Lit members.

Let's talk about power: who has it, how it flows and how it shapes the stories we write in overt and hidden ways. Novelists from the San Francisco State University MFA program investigate how power shows up in their work and in their own writing practices. Sponsored by the San Francisco State University MFA Program.

New biomedical technologies — from prenatal testing to gene editing techniques — raise questions about how far we should go in retooling the human genome. Two leading thinkers, George Estreich ("Fables and Futures: Biotechnology, Disability, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves,") and Jamie Metzl ("Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity") explore these new frontiers — and thei...

Franny Choi ("Soft Science"), Tommy Pico ("Junk"), Brenda Shaughnessy ("The Octopus Museum") and Sam Sax ("Bury It") bring us genre-bending work as playful as it is subversive. Bursting with questions and contradictions that resist hegemony at every turn, these poets are queering the canon one poem at a time.

Join David Blight, 2019 Pulitzer Prize winner, American history scholar and author of the new, definitive biography "Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom," a Top Ten Book of 2018 by the New York Times. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Otis R. Taylor Jr. interviews Blight and helps uncover this towering figure that Blight calls "thoroughly and beautifully human."

Known for promoting new talent alongside established voices, The Paris Review publishes fiction, nonfiction, poetry, graphic literature, interviews and more in its bound quarterly issues and online Paris Review Daily. We're joined by its new editor in a roundtable led by the magazine's West Coast editor along with contributors. Co-presented with The Paris Review.