Bay Area Book Festival Podcast

As both a means of empowerment and a magnet for policing, Black dance music has transformed not only Oakland's nightlife, but also its streets, parks, and neighborhoods. From the mobilization of funk music and boogaloo dance during Black Power to the policing of the Hyphy movement in the 2000s, Black dance music is not merely a soundtrack to or record of urban resistance, argues geographer, DJ, an...

From sequoias to salt lakes, deserts to deep connections, the natural world serves as inspiration for the writers of this panel, who place nature's breathtaking landscapes not as a backdrop to, but at the center of their stories. In his 2025 Banff Mountain Book Competition Finalist graphic memoir, Eventually a Sequoia: Stories of Art, Adventure & the Wisdom of Giants, Jeremy Collins documents the...

From coils and long locs to waves and braids, caring for hair can bring families together! Although going to the salon can feel overwhelming with so many options to choose from, the little girl in Salon Saturday by Janelle Harper learns to see her own kind of beautiful during her first trip to the salon with the guidance of her Grandma, Momma, and Sissy. Tasha from Wash Day Love by Tanisia Moore u...

If you are a new writer looking for tips on how to live a writer's life in service to your community, this is the panel for you. Join three working poets and organizers doing exciting things in the fields of music, publishing, activism, arts education, and beyond for a discussion on ways new authors can apply their craft in impactful ways once they've chosen the writer's life. Walk away inspired a...

Breakfast? NO! Sharing? NO! Clean diaper? NO! How do kids with big feelings tell adults what they want? The Baby Who Only Said No! by Sandra Salsbury is a hilarious picture book that will have parents and older siblings laughing along together as they try to get their own ferocious little one to say anything but NO! Eunice Moyle 's My Box of Feelings , a bright and colorful collection of six origi...

Maker, Mentor, Muse is an online teaching platform founded in 2022 by Dawn Angelicca Barcelona, Mary Volmer, and Maw Shein Win. Hailing from three distinct backgrounds, generations, and spiritual traditions we believe community is essential to building a satisfying and sustainable literary life and that true success requires balancing all three artistic roles: maker, mentor, muse. In this free one...

Featuring critically-acclaimed authors who frequently experience censorship of their books, this rousing panel will highlight the escalation of book bans around the country and how we can fight back against them. While promoting The Day the Books Disappeared , National Leader of Authors Against Book Bans Joanna Ho was forced to leave a school after refusing to comply with the school's demands forb...

How do we write futures that don't yet exist? How do we map territories we're still dreaming and discovering? In this hands-on, generative workshop, participants will create new work across three experimental approaches—speculative memoir, multilingual poetry, and hybrid forms. Designed as a space for exploration rather than mastery, the workshop invites writers to take creative risks, work across...

Given California's reputation as a haven of liberal thinking and the pinnacle of tolerance, many people would be surprised to hear about the stories of educators, librarians, and storytime performers who have been harassed and threatened for teaching honestly about race, gender, immigration, religion, and sexuality. District Teacher Librarian for the Oakland Unified School District Debbie Gibbons...

When trauma and unpredictable life changes demand difficult sacrifices, the inspiring authors and characters of this panel choose to take any risk necessary to preserve the tenderness and creativity of humanity, and the humanities. Inspired by journalists Christiane Amanpour and Sylvia Poggioli, Midnight, at the War is Devi Laskar 's novel about a foreign correspondent who leaves New York for the...

Have you ever wondered who created the microphone in our phones? Or who discovered the science of black holes? Join this read-aloud to hear about the stories of these inventors of color! Ainissa Ramirez will introduce the man who patented the foil-electret microphone in Spark: Jim West's Electrifying Adventures in Creating the Microphone , inspiring readers of all ages to follow their curiosity an...

This chilling and visionary conversation brings together three groundbreaking voices in contemporary horror and speculative fiction who use storytelling to interrogate history, identity, and the legacies that refuse to stay buried. Through unsettling narratives and fearless imagination, they reveal how horror becomes a vital tool for reckoning, resistance, and truth-telling. Tananarive Due , award...

What if the future of robotics isn't apocalypse, but community? In this imaginative and heartfelt panel, three visionary writers explore whimsical, intimate robotic futures where artificial intelligence becomes companion, collaborator, and catalyst for change. Together, they ask: What does it mean to be human in an age of machines? And what might robots teach us about care, belonging, and family?...

What kinds of futures unfurl when we stop acquiescing to what we've inherited and start building spaces with intention? In this forward-looking conversation, Shizue Seigel ( Courting A Man Who Doesn't Talk; Uncommon Ground: BIPOC Journeys to Creative Activism ), Kimi Sugioka ( Wile & Wing ), Kelechi Ubozoh ( We've Been Too Patient ), and Andre Le Monte Wilson ( Hauntings ) gather to talk about how...

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...

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...

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...

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 Voic...

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 imagin...

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 histo...

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 ser...

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 Rebe...

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...

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 a...

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 designe...