Litquake 2026

James Sullivan is a longtime arts reporter for the Boston Globe, formerly with the San Francisco Chronicle. He is the author of several books, including Which Side Are You On?: 20th Century American History in 100 Protest Songs, and host of the monthly concert series Which Side: A Protest Music Teach-Out. He is the program director for the Newburyport Documentary Film Festival, teaches journalism at Emerson College, and co-founded Lit Crawl Boston... Read More →

Ben Fong-Torres was an editor and writer at Rolling Stone (and a real-life character in Almost Famous). While at the magazine, from 1969 into the '80s, he was a Sunday DJ on KSAN-FM. An Oakland native, he has published ten books, including his memoirs, The Rice Room: Growing Up C... Read More →

Marianne Partridge is the Editor in Chief and cofounder of the Santa Barbara Independent, which published its first issue on Thanksgiving Day in 1986. The Independent publishes 30,000 print issues weekly, and our online publication is daily, with 300,000 monthly readers. Before m... Read More →

Charles L. Ponce de Leon is a cultural historian based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has taught at Princeton University, Purchase College, and Cal State Long Beach. A specialist in the history of mass media and the commercial culture industries, he has written books on the history of celebrity, television... Read More →

Peter Richardson has written critically acclaimed books about Rolling Stone magazine, Hunter S. Thompson, the Grateful Dead, Ramparts magazine, and radical author and editor Carey McWilliams. His essays have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, Los Angeles Times, San Francis... Read More →