Litquake 2026

Cathy Park Hong’s New York Times bestselling book of creative nonfiction, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, was published in Spring 2020 Minor Feelings was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography, and earned her recogni... Read More →

Claudia Rankine is the author of nine books, including Just Us: An American Conversation, Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric; three plays including HELP, which premiered in March 2020 (The Shed, NYC), and The White Card, which premiered in... Read More →

Thirteen-year-old Lina Norris-Raman is an 8th grader at Edna Brewer Middle School. Lina has been writing since she was 7 years old. Poetry is her refuge from the universe. At times, she feels like poetry isn't just something she does, but something she’s made of. It shapes how she thinks, how she feels, how she ex... Read More →

Isaiah Kahn, the 2026 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate, is a sixteen-year-old writer at Oakland School for the Arts. Poetry is his main focus, and what gives him the most confidence. It allows him to not get stuck on small things, at least not by accident—if he ever does, maybe it’s poetic... Read More →

Seventeen-year-old Isabel Shen, 2026 Oakland Vice Youth Poet Laureate, is a junior at Head Royce. She is an Oakland poet, oral history advocate, and the daughter of a Hong Kong immigrant. Through her poetry, she aims to amplify the voices of Oakland’s rich and diverse immigrant community and to change the way thei... Read More →