Litquake 2026: Full Schedule

12:00pm PDT

San Francisco Moby-Dick Marathon 2026

Saturday September 12, 2026 12:00pm - Sunday September 13, 2026 12:00pm PDT

FREE

Co-presented with the San Francisco Maritime National Park Association and the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park

This nonstop, cover-to-cover reading transforms the San Francisco Maritime Museum into the setting for one of the city's most beloved literary traditions! Steeped in maritime history, theatrical creativity, and community participation, the Moby-Dick Marathon brings Melville's monumental novel to life in a way that is lively, accessible, and, dare we say, fun. Literary thrill-seekers gather annually to celebrate this complicated, provocative, much-beloved-and-sometimes-dreaded epic of nautical life! Volunteer readers of all backgrounds, from special guest performers to members of the public, lend their voices to the story chapter by chapter. This year's MD24 blends San Francisco's creative spirit with live performance, visual art, spectacle, and surprise, creating an unforgettable celebration of one of America's greatest novels. Come for a chapter, stay for the night, or experience the full 24 hours inside the spectacularly restored Art Deco landmark that is the Maritime Museum!

Saturday September 12, 2026 12:00pm - Sunday September 13, 2026 12:00pm PDT
San Francisco Maritime Museum 900 Beach St, San Francisco

Fiction, FREE

City San Francisco

6:00pm PDT

ZYZZYVA Movie Night: Songs of Earth

Thursday September 17, 2026 6:00pm - 8:00pm PDT

Roxie Theater

Buy Tickets/RSVP

$16

Co-presented with ZYZZYVA and the Roxie

For this installment of ZYZZYVA Movie Night, Rebecca Solnit introduces Songs of Earth, a poetic, unspeakably beautiful film by director Margreth Olin, executive produced by Liv Ullman and Wim Wenders. On the screen, the great scale of majestic fjord rural landscape, which Olin’s father sets to love deeply through all seasons, is interwoven with the minute scale of human history—the tale of impoverished, rugged farmers in the region and the couple’s own marriage. Following the screening, Solnit will appear in conversation with Ingrid Roja Contreras on her latest book, The Beginning Comes After the End, where the author plays with timescale in similar ways. In this sequel to her enduring bestseller Hope in the Dark, Solnit writes into the macro-scale of the last 65 years of social progress, and what this progress means now. Co-hosted by ZYZZYVA editor Oscar Villalon. Doors open at 5:30pm for book sales/signing.

Moderators

Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her memoir The Man Who Could Move Clouds was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. It won a California Book Award. Her debut novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree was a National Bestseller, and a recipient of a California Book Award. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Believer, and Zyzzyva, among others. She lives in California... Read More →

Speakers

Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than 25 books, including Orwell’s Roses, Hope in the Dark, Men Explain Things to Me, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. A longtime climate and human rights activist, she serves on the boards of Oil Change International and Third Act. Solnit has won numerous awards, including Yale’s Windham Campbell Literature Prize and the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction... Read More →

Thursday September 17, 2026 6:00pm - 8:00pm PDT
Roxie Theater 3117 16th St, San Francisco

Film Screening

City San Francisco

7:00pm PDT

R.F. Kuang: Taipei Story (SOLD OUT)

Wednesday September 23, 2026 7:00pm - 9:30pm PDT

Calvary Presbyterian

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This event has been sold out—thanks, everyone for your overwhelming interest and excitement!

$48 with book / $62 household with book / $15 student (non-bundled)

Co-presented with Green Apple Books

Join us for an evening with award-winning author R.F. Kuang for the release of her latest novel, Taipei Story. Kuang’s most personal novel to date relates the story of Lily, a first-year college student whose summer trip to Taipei, intended to connect her with her roots, is disastrous in some ways but transformative in so many more. Doors at 6:00pm.

Moderators

Maggie Tokuda-Hall

Maggie Tokuda-Hall is not a scientist, but she does have a lot of questions. She grew up going to the Lawrence Hall of Science, the La Brea Tar Pits, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, the Steinhart Aquarium, and the Los Angeles and Oakland Zoos. Once, when she was 12, she even got to vi... Read More →

Speakers

R.F. Kuang

Rebecca F. Kuang is the #1 New York Times and #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of the Poppy War trilogy, Babel: An Arcane History, Yellowface, and Katabasis. Her work has won the Nebula, Locus, Crawford, and British Book Awards. A Marshall Scholar, she has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford. She is now pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale, where... Read More →

Wednesday September 23, 2026 7:00pm - 9:30pm PDT
Calvary Presbyterian 2515 Fillmore Ave, San Francisco

Fiction

City San Francisco

12:00pm PDT

Warfield Commons Opening Party (JOIN THE WAITLIST)

Sunday September 27, 2026 12:00pm - 5:00pm PDT

Warfield Commons

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FREE—this event is at capacity, but you can join the wait list at the link above

Celebrate the opening of Warfield Commons—a reimagined multi-story hub for arts, media, culture, and civic engagement designed to activate community and amplify the stories of the Bay Area and beyond. Enjoy cultural performances, a showcase of local food vendors, exclusive tours led by Warfield Commons tenants (including yours truly!), and family-friendly activities.

Sunday September 27, 2026 12:00pm - 5:00pm PDT
Warfield Commons 988 Market St, San Francisco

Party, FREE

City San Francisco

11:00am PDT

Hands in the Soil, Legs on the Pole: Queerness in the Material Realm

Sunday October 4, 2026 11:00am - 12:00pm PDT

Great Lawn, Yerba Buena Gardens

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FREE, $10-$15 suggested donation

Sponsored by Yerba Buena Gardens Festival & Yerba Buena Partnership
Media sponsorship by 48 Hills
A part of the Litquake Out Loud series

How is a tree like a stripper pole? Where do the poetics of physicality and ecology overlap? As digital spaces collapse into slop and surveillance, how can queer communities in the material world dig and twerk toward pleasure and liberation? Here, QTBIPOC writers Brandon Logans, Kevin Madrigal Galindo, May-Li Khoe, and Nnenna Loveth explore the sensuality, tenderness, and resilience of both body and earth. These landworkers, dancers, and poets discuss how queerness informs and supports their relationship to tangible space, natural environs, and embodied movement. Curated by Mukethe Kawinzi.

Speakers

May-Li Khoe

May-Li Khoe (they/she) is a queer interdisciplinary artist, designer, and writer, born in the Netherlands to Chinese-Indonesian immigrant parents and raised in Vancouver, Canada. In the past, she invented new ways for people and computers to interact, many of which you probably use... Read More →

Mukethe Kawinzi

Mukethe Kawinzi is a trans shepherd and land steward working at the intersection of the pastoral, modern negritude, queer identity, and contemporary rural life. He has farmed in sustainable and organic agriculture for six years, with a focus on small ruminants, artisanal cheesemaking, non-violent livest... Read More →

Brandon Logans

Brandon Logans is a poet from Oakland, California. His debut collection published by Black Lawrence Press, Phosphene, was a finalist for the 94th California Book Award. He might describe himself as a rectangular sheet of honey 30” x 62”, 6” above any surface... Read More →

Nnenna Loveth

Nnenna Loveth (they/she) is an Igbo lesbian poet, dancer, and facilitator who tells stories of liberated Black matriarchal futures. They are utilizing the relationship between dance and poetry to explore themes of Black sapphic intimacies, mother-daughter connections, Odinala, and healing from... Read More →

Kevin Madrigal Galindo

Kevin Madrigal Galindo (he/they) is a queer chicano hijo de su chingada madre from South San Francisco by way of Zapopan, Jalisco. He works as a chef teaching kitchen basics and nutrition through ancestral, plant based recipes in the Mission. Kevin hopes to stop the amerikkkan war machine and build a bett... Read More →

Sunday October 4, 2026 11:00am - 12:00pm PDT
Great Lawn, Yerba Buena Gardens 700 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA

Litquake Out Loud, FREE

City San Francisco

11:00am PDT

Small Press Book Fair

Sunday October 4, 2026 11:00am - 4:00pm PDT

Great Lawn, Yerba Buena Gardens

Buy Tickets/RSVP

FREE, $10-$15 suggested donation

Sponsored by Yerba Buena Gardens Festival & Yerba Buena Partnership
Featuring 2026 festival sponsors Alta Journal and Center for the Art of Translation/Two Lines Press

Join a curated spread of our favorite small presses and literary magazines for Litquake’s Small Press Book Fair in Yerba Buena Gardens! Browse the best in local literature set to a day of poetry readings from Litquake Out Loud.

Participating vendors:

Alta Journal
Banana Pitch Press
Campfire Press
Center for Sex and Culture
Cita Press
City Lights
DoppelHouse Press
Double Negative Press
Feather Press
Foglifter Journal and Press
The Green Arcade / Ithuriel's Spear
Heresy Press
Heyday Books
Last Gasp Press
Locus Magazine
Two Lines Press
Mumblers Press
North Atlantic Books
Panamerica
PAWA
PM Press
Reed Magazine
Scrambler Books
Sixteen Rivers Press
Society for the Promotion of Speculative Fiction
Unsolicited Press
Weavers Press
ZYZZYVA

Sunday October 4, 2026 11:00am - 4:00pm PDT
Great Lawn, Yerba Buena Gardens 700 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA

Litquake Out Loud, FREE

City San Francisco

12:30pm PDT

Fluent in Rebirth: Trans and Non-Binary Incantations

Sunday October 4, 2026 12:30pm - 1:30pm PDT

Great Lawn, Yerba Buena Gardens

Buy Tickets/RSVP

FREE, $10-$15 suggested donation

Sponsored by Yerba Buena Gardens Festival & Yerba Buena Partnership
Media sponsorship by 48 Hills
A part of the Litquake Out Loud series

If you’re looking for architects to dream up a new world, why not start with the folks who have already built one? As trans and gender non-confirming people, we are skilled at identifying what is meant to stifle and cage us, as well as envisioning what else is possible when we rage towards liberation. Trans people teach us what it means to transform the physical conditions of our world and show us what’s possible when our imaginations are freest and at their most feral. These Bay Area trans and non-binary artists will share work resisting erasure and conjuring prayers for the world we’re collectively building. Featuring Isa Borgeson, Mason J, Trinh Lê, and Reggie Edmonds-Vazquez. Curated by Zara Jamshed.

Speakers

Reggie Edmonds-Vásquez

Reggie Edmonds-Vásquez (they/them) is a poet, educator, and cultural curator from Richmond, CA. Their work explores Black, queer, and gender-diverse identities and has earned recognition from Nomadic Press, Afro Urban Society, and the Museum of the African Diaspora. A two-time Berkeley... Read More →

Zara Jamshed

Zara Jamshed (they/them) is a queer, trans, disabled Pakistani and Indian American poet from New York City living in the East Bay. They are the winner of the Penrose Poetry Prize for LGBTQIA+ writers and have work published in The Arrow, Foglifter, Kiwi Collective Magazine, and others. Zara has had their work supported by Anaphora Arts, Asian American Writers Workshop, Harvard University, Kearny Street Workshop, The Muslim Alliance of Sexual and Gender Diversity (MASGD), Open Mouth Literary, Periplus Collective, Queer Ancestors Project, Still Here... Read More →

Trinh Lê

Trinh Lê is a Pushcart-nominated poet of Vietnamese origin. They received the 2025 Black Mountain College Award from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and were a finalist for the 2024 Brett Elizabeth Jenkins Poetry Prize. As a community archivist at the Bay Area Lesbian Arch... Read More →

Mason J.

Mason J. is a Lambda Literary Awarded San Francisco-born Afro-Indigenous Two-Spirit artist, historian, educator, Sephardic rootworker and community archivist exploring memory, ritual, and cultural recovery. Their work weaves public record with holistic care, nightlife, harm reduction, and... Read More →

Isa Borgeson

Isa Borgeson (they/she) is a queer, mixed race, filipino american poet and community organizer from Oakland. In 2020, Isa was named a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow by the Poetry Foundation. They have also received fellowships from Lambda Literary, Voices of Our Nation Art Fou... Read More →

Sunday October 4, 2026 12:30pm - 1:30pm PDT
Great Lawn, Yerba Buena Gardens 700 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA

Litquake Out Loud, FREE

City San Francisco

7:30pm PDT

An Evening with Ayad Akhtar

Tuesday October 6, 2026 7:30pm - 9:00pm PDT

Sydney Goldstein Theater

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$53 with code LITQUAKE5

Co-presented with City Arts & Lectures

A mysterious accident along a country road sparks an awakening and an investigation in Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and acclaimed novelist Ayad Akhtar’s most daring work yet—a visionary novel of spiritual transformation in an age of fracture—"bordering at times on the ineffable" (Mary Gaitskill).

When a hit-and-run shatters more than his body, a writer is caught between revelation and madness as an uncanny pull toward a brilliant campus colleague ensnares him in a scandal that threatens to destroy them both. What begins as a provocative portrait of academic and cultural warfare deepens into erotic entanglement, the exposure of a family secret, and the mystery surrounding the narrator’s accident—both the violence and its aftermath. In conversation with Karen Russell. Doors at 7:00pm.

Moderators

Karen Russell

Karen Russell is the author of six books of fiction, including the NYT bestsellers Vampires in the Lemon Grove and Swamplandia!, one of the NYT’s ten best books of the year and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her latest novel, The Antidote, was the winner of the 2026 Pacific Northwest Book Awards and a finalist for the 2025 National Book Award and the 2026 National Book Critics Circle Award. She is the grateful recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the NYPL’s Young Lions Award, the Bard Fiction... Read More →

Speakers

Ayad Akhtar

Ayad Akhtar is a novelist and playwright. His work has been published and performed in over two dozen languages. He is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for Fiction, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.Akhtar... Read More →

Tuesday October 6, 2026 7:30pm - 9:00pm PDT
Sydney Goldstein Theater 275 Hayes St, San Francisco

Fiction

City San Francisco

7:00pm PDT

Litquake's Opening Night Bash: Booksellers Ball

Thursday October 8, 2026 7:00pm - 10:00pm PDT

524 Union

Buy Tickets/RSVP

$50 / $75 to sponsor a bookseller or librarian
All sales help support the rest of Litquake's (75% free!) festival programming!

Co-presented with Book Passage, Black Bird Books, Bookshop West Portal, City Lights, Dog Eared Books, Et al., Fabulosa Books, Green Apple Books, Noe Valley Books, Pegasus Books, Sistah Scifi, Telegraph Hill Books, The Booksmith, The Love Potion Library, Medicine for Nightmares, and Womb House Books

Beverages sponsored by Griffo Distillery & Saintsbury Winery

Kick off the 2026 festival at the Booksellers Ball, our big opening night bash! Here, the Litquake community will come together to fête San Francisco’s independent bookstores at the former home of the legendary Paper Doll, an underground LGBTQ supper club active 1941-1969.

Join us for catered event with abundant libations and a special literature-themed drag performance from Carlota Di Carlo. With festive grooves from BFF.FM DJ Lead Teddy and an open bar from beverage sponsors Griffo Distillery and Saintsbury Winery, we invite you to kick up your heels with local literati and celebrate another year of Litquake!

Thursday October 8, 2026 7:00pm - 10:00pm PDT
524 Union 524 Union St, San Francisco

Party

Age Limit 21+
City San Francisco

7:00pm PDT

Hernan Diaz: Ply

Friday October 9, 2026 7:00pm - 8:30pm PDT

BATS Improv Theatre

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$15 gen admission / $40 with signed book

Centuries from now, at the dawn of a historical epoch filled with both uncertainty and promise, an orphan is adrift in a city on the brink of a great transformation...After rewriting America’s past with his two previous novels, Pulitzer Prize winner Hernan Diaz defies expectations with his third and turns to the future with a novel that examines the place of technology in the American imagination. Combining Dickensian odyssey, family drama, and scientific thriller, Ply poignantly charts the tenuous boundaries of selfhood and the distance that inevitably stands between us and those we love. In conversation with Pulitzer Prize–winning science writer and friend Ed Yong. Doors at 6:30pm.

Moderators

Ed Yong

Ed Yong is the author of two prize-winning New York Times bestsellers, An Immense World and I Contain Multitudes. He won a Pulitzer Prize among other awards for his coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic. He has been a TED speaker, a Best American Science and Nature editor, and a Gugg... Read More →

Speakers

Hernan Diaz

Hernan Diaz is the Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of four books published in thirty-seven languages. He is the recipient of the John Updike award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, given to “a writer whose contributions to American liter... Read More →

Friday October 9, 2026 7:00pm - 8:30pm PDT
BATS Improv Theatre

Fiction

City San Francisco

11:00am PDT

From Punchlines to Gut Punches: Weaponizing Wit With Humor and Satire

Saturday October 10, 2026 11:00am - 12:00pm PDT

447 Minna

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Pay-what-you-can for guaranteed seat; FREE to walk-ups (space depending)

Sponsored by Yerba Buena Partnership

Humor is one of a writer’s best tools, and an oft-underutilized one at that. More than just a hook to get their attention, a well-timed joke can break down a reader’s defenses faster than almost anything else on the page. Want to sharpen your wit-wielding skills? Join Claire Oshetsky, Rebecca Handler, Scott Meyer, and Malik Robinson as they unpack their secrets of how humor can raise the stakes, heighten the drama, and make both tragic and comedic moments hit twice as hard. Moderated by Yuliya Patsay.

Moderators

Yuliya Patsay

Yuliya (it rhymes with Goo-lia) Patsay is a writer and performer navigating American life with Soviet programming (oy to the vey!). She is the author of the memoir Until the Last Pickle and creator of the Substack 'Buckle Up Bubelah'. When she’s avoiding writing (ahem), you can find her telling true-ish stories to live audiences or producing sketch comedy her babushka finds hilarious (and a little concerning... Read More →

Speakers

Malik Robinson

Malik Robinson is morally outraged. He's written sketch comedy for Killing My Lobster, improvised short form games with All Out Comedy Theater and performed stand up in various showcases. Posterior chain stretches occupy much of his free time.

Claire Oshetsky

Claire Oshetsky is the author of the novels EVIL GENIUS (February 2026) POOR DEER (January 2024) and CHOUETTE (November 2021), all from Ecco. Claire lives in Santa Cruz, California.

Rebecca Handler

Rebecca Handler’s debut novel, Edie Richter is Not Alone, received a Kirkus Starred Review and was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Her short stories have been published and awarded in several anthologies. Her second novel, In the Round, will be publishe... Read More →

Scott Meyer

Scott Meyer is the co-owner and director of Endgames Improv in The Mission District, shaping the theater's creative vision since 2013. Trained at Endgames, iO Chicago, Second City, and UCB, he has spent 13 years performing in the long-running improv show "Your F'd Up Relationship" and recent... Read More →

Saturday October 10, 2026 11:00am - 12:00pm PDT
447 Minna 447 Minna St, San Francisco

Writers Weekend, Pay What You Can

City San Francisco

12:30pm PDT

Beyond the Isms: Crafting Stories that Spark Real-World Activism

Saturday October 10, 2026 12:30pm - 1:30pm PDT

447 Minna

Buy Tickets/RSVP

Pay-what-you-can for guaranteed seat; FREE to walk-ups (space depending)

Sponsored by Yerba Buena Partnership

When the world's on fire, storytelling can act as first-responder to community hearts and minds, inspiring real-world activism that drives social change. From our expert authors, you’ll learn how to shine a light on things that matter and craft narratives that build genuine empathy, explore cultural and social responsibility, and maybe, just maybe, motivate readers to act. Join panelists Jilanne Hoffmann, Khan Wong, Safia Elhillo, and Savala Nolan for tips spanning genres across poetry, longform essays, children’s books, and speculative fiction. Moderated by Jane Ganahl.

Moderators

Jane Ganahl

Jane Ganahl was the co-founder, with Jack Boulware, of Litquake. She is also a writer, teacher, and animal activist. As a Hearst newspaper journalist with the Examiner and Chronicle for 25 years, she covered the arts, and wrote the “Single Minded” column, which led to her mem... Read More →

Speakers

Savala Nolan

Savala Nolan is a celebrated essayist, speaker, and teacher. Her newest book, Good Woman: A Reckoning, was named a Most Anticipated Feminist Book of 2026 by Ms. Magazine. Her first book, Don’t Let It Get You Down: Essays on Race, Gender and the Body, was shortlisted for the 2... Read More →

Jilanne Hoffmann

Jilanne Hoffmann’s middle grade historical-contemporary novel in verse and prose, HeartLand, blends a coming-of-age story and family and friendship dynamics with environmental activism. It received a starred review from School Library Journal and glowing reviews from Booklist, ... Read More →

Khan Wong

Khan Wong has a past as a poet, cellist, arts funder and internationally known hula hooper. His debut novel, The Circus Infinite, was longlisted for the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Best Novel category, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. His second no... Read More →

Safia Elhillo

Sudanese by way of Washington, D.C., Safia Elhillo is the author of Girls That Never Die, The January Children, Home Is Not a Country, and Bright Red Fruit, and co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem and Stanford University, and her awards include a California Book Award, the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, and an Arab American Book Award. She has been a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the... Read More →

Saturday October 10, 2026 12:30pm - 1:30pm PDT
447 Minna 447 Minna St, San Francisco

Writers Weekend, Pay What You Can

City San Francisco

2:00pm PDT

Lick, Smack, Slurp: Writing the Desires We Only Confess to the Page

Saturday October 10, 2026 2:00pm - 3:00pm PDT

447 Minna

Buy Tickets/RSVP

Pay-what-you-can for guaranteed seat; FREE to walk-ups (space depending)

Sponsored by Yerba Buena Partnership

We’ve all heard about “show, don’t tell” but how, exactly, does a writer show the most evocative details possible? Let's lean into the heat, the ache, the sensory overload. In this panel, Jennifer Barone, Sandra Jackson-Opoku, and Tomas Moniz will show you how to write about our most unspoken longings (the sensual, the emotional, and the taboo) and they're not afraid to go there! Moderated by Tijanna Eaton.

Moderators

Tijanna O. Eaton

Tijanna O. Eaton (Tə-zha-na; she/her) is a Black butch writer whose work appears in Panorama Journal, Honey Literary, Noyo Review, slips slips, and Yellow Arrow Vignette. She is a nonfiction judge for the 2025 Money for Women contest, is a 2024 Soros Justice Fellow, was the nonfiction judge for the 2024 Best of the Net contest, was a 2023 Rooted & Written Fellow, and received the 2021 Unicorn Authors Club Alumni award. Tijanna is a sanctuary coa... Read More →

Speakers

Tomas Moniz

Tomas Moniz is a Latinx writer living in East Oakland, CA. His debut novel, Big Familia, was a finalist for the 2020 PEN/Hemingway and the LAMBDA. His second novel, All Friends Are Necessary, won the 2024 California Golden Poppy Award. His new novel, The King of Aloe Vera, will be published September 2026 from Algonquin Books. He teaches at Berkeley City College, the Antioch MFA program and St. Mary’s College. He has stuff on the internet but loves penpals: PO Box 3555, Berkeley CA 94703. He promises to write back... Read More →

Jennifer Barone

Jennifer Barone is an Italian-American poet and artist. She is the author of four poetry collections, including Sirenland about the Bay of Naples, Italy, the siren mythology and stories of the sea, and Saporoso: Poems of Italian Food & Love, Feather Press. A two-time winner of th... Read More →

Sandra Jackson-Opoku

Sandra Jackson-Opoku is the author of three award-winning novels. The River Where Blood is Born won the American Library Association Black Caucus Award. Hot Johnny and the Women Who Loved Him was an Essence Magazine Bestseller in Hardcover Fiction. Savvy Summers and the Sweet Pot... Read More →

Saturday October 10, 2026 2:00pm - 3:00pm PDT
447 Minna 447 Minna St, San Francisco

Writers Weekend, Pay What You Can

City San Francisco

5:00pm PDT

¡Poetry on la Veinticuatro! Poets in the Window

Saturday October 10, 2026 5:00pm - 6:00pm PDT

Medicine for Nightmares

Buy Tickets/RSVP

FREE, $10-$15 suggested donation

A reading series that puts poets in the front window of the bookstore to read their poems to the chingadera, locura, and beauty that is 24th Street. Featuring Mukethe Kawinzi, Cathy Arellano, Barbara Jane Reyes, and San Francisco’s current Poet Laureate Genny Lim.

Speakers

Mukethe Kawinzi

Barbara Jane Reyes

Barbara Jane Reyes is the author of Poeta en San Francisco, Diwata, Invocation to Daughters, Letters to a Young Brown Girl, and others. Her eighth book, Daughtersong Diaspore, is forthcoming in 2027.

Cathy Arellano

Cathy Arellano is just another Chicana poet from San Francisco’s Mission District writing about growing up Brown and coming out Queer. Salvation on Mission Street shows the people and place she carries in her heart and I Love My Women, Sometimes They Love Me is broken-hearted lesbian... Read More →

Genny Lim

Genny Lim is the 9th San Francisco Poet Laureate and former San Francisco Jazz Poet Laureate. She was a former SF Arts Commissioner and the recipient of two lifetime achievement awards from Berkeley, California and Pen Oakland Writers, as well as the Spirit of Angel Island Award from... Read More →

Saturday October 10, 2026 5:00pm - 6:00pm PDT
Medicine for Nightmares 3036 24th St, San Francisco

Poetry, FREE

City San Francisco

6:00pm PDT

Literary Speakeasy Presents: Dragging Celebrity Autobiographies

Saturday October 10, 2026 6:00pm - 8:00pm PDT

The Stud

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$20 adv / $25 door

Co-presented with The Stud

Literary Speakeasy returns to Litquake for another hysterical evening of Bay Area drag superstars putting on their reading glasses to celebrate the most scandalous, most outrageous, and most ridiculous celebrity memoirs and autobiographies! From Real Housewives to Hollywood legends, no book or celebrity is off limits for Fagatha Christie, Lisa Frankenstein, Vanilla Meringue, Piranha Psychotronica, BeBe Sweetbriar, and Laundra Thyme. Come join your hosts James J. Siegel and Elsa Touche for an evening of laughs, queer camp, and prizes! Doors at 5:30pm.

Speakers

Fagatha Christie

Tighe Flatley is the creative force behind Fagatha Christie, the literary drag queen, who hosts the Bay Area’s popular Fagatha Christie's Book Club drag show and book matchmaking event. He’s an internationally published, award-winning writer whose fiction has appeared in The MacGuffin... Read More →

Laundra Tyme

Lisa Frankenstein

Vanilla Meringue

Vanilla Meringue is the bubbly and bodacious alter-ego of make-up artist, Vanilla King. She is proud to be a trans woman and a drag queen. Vanilla can be spotted performing around the Bay Area in stage shows like Harry Poofter, Dragcula, and Jurassic Park! You can find her @vanillameringue... Read More →

Elsa Touche

Beloved San Francisco drag queen Elsa Touche is a former winner of the Ms. California Gold Pageant and was voted San Francisco's "favorite drag queen" by the readers of the San Francisco Weekly newspaper in 2020. She is a host of the legendary Monster Show, the Castro District's longest-running... Read More →

Piranha Psychotronica

Piranha Psychotronica is a San Francisco-based transfeminine genderqueer filmmaker, film programmer, theater artist, writer, and performer. She is best known for creating and producing the stage show series “Select Thine Own Journey” (called a “must-see” by SF Gate) and f... Read More →

BeBe Sweetbriar

San Francisco-based drag star, also known as “Mother Dust” and “The Drag Queen of Jurassic Park” because of her 20 years of drag performance, BeBe Sweetbriar has graced every notable stage in the Bay Area and many stages around the world including Hong Kong, China and Panama City, Panama. BeBe is 2016 Drag Entertainer of the Year & NITEY Awards Most Notable Drag Queen, and 2007 Miss Gay SF & 2013 SF Pride Community Grand Marshal. BeBe i... Read More →

James J. Siegel

James J. Siegel is a San Francisco-based poet and arts organizer. For the past 11 years, he has been the
host and curator of the monthly Literary Speakeasy show at Martuni’s piano bar, which brings together
Bay Area authors, poets, and songwriters for an evening of words and mart... Read More →

Saturday October 10, 2026 6:00pm - 8:00pm PDT
The Stud 1123 Folsom St, San Francisco

Performance

Age Limit 21+
City San Francisco

6:15pm PDT

¡Poetry on la Veinticuatro! Pan Dulce Poets

Saturday October 10, 2026 6:15pm - 7:15pm PDT

La Reyna Bakery

Buy Tickets/RSVP

FREE, $10-$15 suggested donation

We will make our way down 24th, to a 49-year-old Mission institution, La Reyna Bakery, for the Pan Dulce Poets, a beloved Mission series started in May of 2015 by Ricardo Tavarez. Here, poets read surrounded by pan dulce and used a converted paleta cart as a podium while Louie passed out cafecito y chocolate caliente to everyone. Featuring Ellie Lopez, Pan Dulce Poets founder Ricardo Tavarez, Michelle Ibarra, and former San Francisco Poet Laureate Alejandro Murguía.

Speakers

Michelle Ibarra

Michelle Ibarra is a Xicana poet with roots in both San Francisco’s Mission District and South City. Her poetic practice is heavily influenced by the 1970s Xicanx art movement, Rasquachismo, her working class upbringing, and her hatred for the governing state. Through her work... Read More →

Ricardo Tavarez

Ricardo Tavarez is a Bay Area poet, educator, digital creator, and documentarian who teaches high school in Hayward and was a long-time host of the Pan Dulce Poets reading series in the Mission District at La Reyna Bakery. Member of La Brigada, an arts collective that organizes the... Read More →

Ellie Lopez

Ellie Lopez is a prolific writer from the Central Valley that intends to use her platform to honor her hometown and roots. She is one of the rare few that has achieved great things in her writing career—yet, she recognizes why such triumph has blossomed—home, the 209. In this... Read More →

Alejandro Murguía

Alejandro Murguía is a two-time winner of the American Book Award. his most recent publications include, Stray Poems, City Lights Books, and The Other Barrio: New and Selected Stories, Arte Publico, 2025. he co-edited The Word Turned Butterfly, contemporary Mayan Poetry.

Saturday October 10, 2026 6:15pm - 7:15pm PDT
La Reyna Bakery 3114 24th St, San Francisco

Poetry

City San Francisco

7:00pm PDT

Min Jin Lee: American Hagwon

Saturday October 10, 2026 7:00pm - 8:30pm PDT

Calvary Presbyterian

Buy Tickets/RSVP

$15 gen admission / $45 with signed book

Co-presented with Kearny Street Workshop

The National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Pachinko returns with a breathtaking contemporary epic. In American Hagwon, Min Jin Lee has crafted an unforgettable, panoramic novel where the smallest of gestures can have enormous repercussions. Once comfortably middle class in Korea, John and Helen Koh and their three children—Bo, DH, and Mido—find their lives upended, first by a shocking betrayal by John’s oldest friend, then by the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Desperately striving to regain their footing, they leave Seoul for Sydney and eventually settle in Southern California—where new vistas of opportunity open up for the children as their parents, strangers in a strange land, must adjust to a new life in which their experience and education mean little. In conversation with Andrew Sean Greer. Doors at 6:00pm.

Moderators

Andrew Sean Greer

Andrew Sean Greer is the author of eight works of fiction, including the bestsellers Less and its companion Less Is Lost. He lives in San Francisco and Venice, Italy. His latest novel is Villa Coco.

Speakers

Min Jin Lee

Min Jin Lee is the author of the novels American Hagwon, Free Food for Millionaires, and Pachinko, a finalist for the National Book Award, runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and a New York Times “100 Best Books of the Century.” She serves as the New York State Author Laureate from 2025 through 2027. She is the 2024 recipient of The Fitzgerald Prize for Literary Excellence. Lee has received the Manhae Grand Prize for Literature, the Bucheon Diaspora Literary Award, a... Read More →

Saturday October 10, 2026 7:00pm - 8:30pm PDT
Calvary Presbyterian 2515 Fillmore Ave, San Francisco

Fiction

City San Francisco

7:00pm PDT

Poetry World Series: Litquake Edition

Saturday October 10, 2026 7:00pm - 9:00pm PDT

Make-Out Room

Buy Tickets/RSVP

$15 adv / $20 door
21+

Two teams of award-winning poets, including Bhion Achimba, Rhoni Blankenhorn, Safia Elhillo, Prageeta Sharma, Angel Dominguez, and Ben Gucciardi, take turns batting at topics pitched to them by the audience. Fastballs, curveballs, knuckleballs: these poets won’t know what’s coming next! Hilarity and brilliance both guaranteed. Daniel Handler will be tonight’s emcee, and eminently qualified umpires—Randall Mann and Katie Peterson—will score each batter’s reading. The winning team takes the series title. Don’t forget to bring a topic to stump the poets with! Book sales/signing follow the final inning. Doors at 6:30pm.

Moderators

Daniel Handler

Daniel Handler is the author of seven novels, including Why We Broke Up, All The Dirty Parts and Bottle Grove, and most recently a memoir, And Then? And Then? What Else? As Lemony Snicket, he is the author of far too many books for children, including Poison for Breakfast, the four-volume All The Wrong Questions and the thirteen-volume A Series of Unfortunate Events, which has been adapted for screen and television. He lives in San Francisco with the illustrator Lisa Brown, to whom he is married... Read More →

Speakers

Bhion Achimba

Bhion Achimba grew up in rural southeastern Nigeria and is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. A graduate of Brown University's MFA program, they were named the 2023 Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow by the Poetry Foundation and have been published in the... Read More →

Rhoni Blankenhorn

Rhoni Blankenhorn’s poems have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry Daily, The Slowdown, AAWW’s The Margins, and elsewhere. Her work has received support from Bread Loaf, Saltonstall, Sewanee, and Storyknife. Rhoni’s debut, Rooms for Dead and the Not Yet, was published by Trio House Press in 2025... Read More →

Safia Elhillo

Prageeta Sharma

Prageeta Sharma is the author of six collections of poetry; her most recent collection is Onement Won, out from Wave Books. She is the founder of the conference Thinking Its Presence: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Race, Creative Writing, and Artistic and Aesthetic Practices, a recent recipient of the 2025 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, and is currently the Henry G. Lee... Read More →

Angel Dominguez

Angel Dominguez is a Latinx poet and artist of Yucatec Maya descent, born in Hollywood and raised in Van Nuys, CA by their immigrant family. They now live amongst the Santa Cruz Mountains in Bonny Doon, CA. They’re the author of Don’t Tell My Mother If They Kill Me (Nightboat... Read More →

Katie Peterson

Katie Peterson is the author of six collections of poetry, including Fog and Smoke (2024) and Life in a Field (2021). She teaches English at UC Davis. She is a middle child.

Randall Mann

Randall Mann is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Deal: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2023). His new collection, Memory Puzzle, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in 2027. He lives in San Francisco.

Ben Gucciardi

Originally from San Francisco, Ben Gucciardi is the author of Arguments (Persea Books, 2026), winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award, and West Portal (University of Utah Press, 2021). His recent poems appear in American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry Unbound,... Read More →

Saturday October 10, 2026 7:00pm - 9:00pm PDT
Make-Out Room 3225 22nd St, San Francisco

Poetry

Age Limit 21+
City San Francisco

7:30pm PDT

¡Poetry on la Veinticuatro! La Lunada

Saturday October 10, 2026 7:30pm - 8:30pm PDT

Galeria de la Raza

Buy Tickets/RSVP

FREE, $10-$15 suggested donation

Finally we will end the crawl at the mama of all Mission reading series, La Lunada! Originally started in 1998 in a Mexican restaurant in San Jose, La Lunada relocated to Calle 24 in 2004 at the original location of Galeria de la Raza on the esquina of 24th and Bryant. Since then the Lunada has been where countless poets from the neighborhood and beyond have gathered and celebrated the power of poesía. Featuring Kevin Madrigal Galindo, Rebeca Abidaíl Flores, and Know Expressions.

Speakers

Kevin Madrigal Galindo

Rebeca Abidaíl Flores

Rebeca Abidaíl Flores is a Mexican and Salvadoran artist from Fresno, CA. She connects working class labor to joy. In her artistic practice, she creates objects rooted in labor like paletas, mangüeras, and camisas to reimagine them as interactive pieces of play. Her creative fellowships... Read More →

Saturday October 10, 2026 7:30pm - 8:30pm PDT
Galeria de la Raza 2779 Folsom St, San Francisco

Poetry, FREE

City San Francisco

12:30pm PDT

The Unconventional Author: Side Doors and Secret Passages to Publication

Sunday October 11, 2026 12:30pm - 1:30pm PDT

447 Minna

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Pay-what-you-can for guaranteed seat; FREE to walk-ups (space depending)

Sponsored by Yerba Buena Partnership

Querying agents and waiting on slush piles isn't the only way to get published. For many writers it's not even the best one. In this panel, successful indie authors Tara Dorabji, Marianne Lonsdale, Regina Louise, and Wendy Johnson pull back the curtain on surprising, alternative paths such as contest contracts, hybrid publishers, and DIY presses to get stories published and promoted. Moderated by indie author Matthew Félix.

Moderators

Matthew Félix

Matthew Félix is the author of four books, a certified life coach, and a speaker. Publishers Weekly called his debut novel, A Voice Beyond Reason, “(a) highly crafted gem.” Matthew ghost-writes, edits, publishes, and markets books for other authors, and his work has been recognized with a Solas Awards Grand Prize for Story of the Year and Gold for Memoir in the Northern California Publishers & Authors Awards. Matthew combines... Read More →

Speakers

Marianne Lonsdale

Marianne Lonsdale’s debut novel, When The Road Curves, was published by Sibylline Press in 2026. She writes fiction, personal essays and poetry. Her work has been published in several print anthologies and various online journals including The New York Times, The Bluebird Word... Read More →

Wendy Johnson

Wendy Johnson is a physician, community activist and writer whose career includes stints scaling up HIV treatment in Mozambique, overseeing an urban public health department in Cleveland, and directing a community clinic in Santa Fe. She currently practices family and addiction medicine in Northern... Read More →

Tara Dorabji

Tara Dorabji is the award-winning author of the novel, Call Her Freedom, Simon and Schuster’s Books Like Us Grand Prize Winner. Tara’s documentary film series on human rights defenders in Kashmir won awards at over a dozen film festivals throughout Asia and the USA. Her publi... Read More →

Regina Louise

Regina Louise, MFA, is an emotional intelligence coach who uses poetry as praxis, a mindfulness meditation teacher, and a senior Hoffman Process teacher. She is best known as the author of the memoirs Somebody’s Someone and Someone Has Led This Child to Believe—the inspiratio... Read More →

Sunday October 11, 2026 12:30pm - 1:30pm PDT
447 Minna 447 Minna St, San Francisco

Writers Weekend, Pay What You Can

City San Francisco

1:00pm PDT

The Savage Mind: An American Legacy with David Treuer

Sunday October 11, 2026 1:00pm - 2:30pm PDT

Grace Cathedral

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FREE, $10-$15 suggested donation

Co-presented with Grace Cathedral’s The Forum

“Unlike anything I have read…this book will make a mark.” —Percival Everett, Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–winning author. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the January 6 insurrection, as America seemed to be falling apart, New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist David Treuer decided to hold himself and his family together the only way he knew how: he sat down to write a letter. Ranging from Treuer’s upbringing on the Leech Lake reservation in Minnesota to the experiences of his parents, a Jewish Holocaust refugee and the first American Indigenous woman judge, The Savage Mind reveals the terrifying essence of our nation: frontier violence, which has defined our country, our culture, and our very selves. In conversation with Grace Cathedral’s The Very Rev. Malcolm Clemens Young. The Forum is a series of stimulating conversations about faith and ethics in relation to the important issues of our day. Doors at 12:30pm.

Moderators

Malcolm Clemens Young

The Very Rev. Dr. Malcolm Clemens Young is the dean of Grace Cathedral. He is the author of The Spiritual Journal of Henry David Thoreau, The Invisible Hand in Wilderness: Economics, Ecology, and God, and The Savage Mind, and is a regular contributor on religion to the Huffin... Read More →

Speakers

David Treuer

David Treuer is Ojibwe from Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. His work has appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Atlantic Monthly, and Harper's. He divides his time between his home on the Leech Lake Reservation and Los Angeles, where... Read More →

Sunday October 11, 2026 1:00pm - 2:30pm PDT
Grace Cathedral 1100 California St, San Francisco

Nonfiction, FREE

City San Francisco

2:00pm PDT

After The Launch: Raising Your Book to Survive and Thrive

Sunday October 11, 2026 2:00pm - 3:00pm PDT

447 Minna

Buy Tickets/RSVP

Pay-what-you-can for guaranteed seat; FREE to walk-ups (space depending)

Sponsored by Yerba Buena Partnership

The launch party is over, the champagne is flat—now what? Getting your book out into the world is only the beginning. In this session, editor/publisher Julia Park Tracey will moderate a conversation between jack-of-all-genres Ariel Gore, bookseller Jasmine Valandani, and memoirist Mary Alice Stephens about what comes after the launch: how to keep your book visible, cultivate both new and lifelong readers, and keep things moving without burning yourself out.

Moderators

Julia Park Tracey

Julia Park Tracey is an award-winning journalist, editor, and author; she was Poet Laureate of Alameda, CA, 2014-2017. Her work has appeared in Huffington Post, Salon, Narratively, Redbook, Oakland Magazine, sfgate.com, and The Sun. Julia is an alumna of the Community of Writers... Read More →

Speakers

Ariel Gore

Ariel Gore is a Lambda and American Alternative Press award-winning editor and author of more than a dozen books. She teaches at literarykitchen.org

Jasmine Valandani

Jasmine Valandani has been an independent bookseller for over a decade, working as a buyer of adult and children’s books at Village Books in Bellingham, Washington, and presently managing the children’s section at Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park since 2021. Her passions include picture books, pl... Read More →

Mary Alice Stephens

Mary Alice Stephens is a captivating storyteller whose best-selling memoir, Uncorked: A Memoir of Letting Go and Starting Over, reveals her raw, humorous, and profoundly inspiring journey from alcohol-fueled chaos to a life of clarity, connection, and self-acceptance. This #1 Amazon new release in alcoholism recovery and midlife self-help earned the 2026 PenCraft Award for Motivational Nonfiction and the 2026 Interna... Read More →

Sunday October 11, 2026 2:00pm - 3:00pm PDT
447 Minna 447 Minna St, San Francisco

Writers Weekend, Pay What You Can

City San Francisco

3:00pm PDT

Natalie Baszile: Friends and Family

Sunday October 11, 2026 3:00pm - 4:00pm PDT

SFPL Main Branch, Koret Auditorium

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FREE, $10-$15 suggested donation

Co-presented with SFPL

From the author of Queen Sugar comes a piercing examination of friendship and loyalty set in a tight-knit enclave in the Bay Area as two best friends find themselves at odds over their beliefs on race, identity, and allyship, especially when it comes to their teenage children. Babs and Nora have spent a decade’s worth of morning walks sharing family secrets, local drama, and advice—everything from tips on lingerie choices to Babs’s suggestions to Nora, a white woman, on how to raise Nathan, her adopted Black son. But their worlds are turned upside down when the cops are called on their kids, leading to a traumatic police encounter for Nathan. Torn between respecting Nora’s boundaries and embodying the values so important to her own family, Babs will make a choice that will shape their lives forever. In conversation with filmmaker and Jingletown Films’ founder Cheryl Dunye. Doors at 2:30pm.

Moderators

Cheryl Dunye

Cheryl Dunye is a Liberian-American filmmaker, director, and producer based in Oakland whose work explores Black queer identity, history, and cultural memory. Her narratives are peppered with deconstructive elements such as characters addressing the camera and making ironic references to the... Read More →

Speakers

Natalie Baszile

Natalie Baszile is a writer and filmmaker. Her new novel is Friends and Family. Her previous novel, Queen Sugar, was adapted for seven television seasons by Ava DuVernay and co-produced by Oprah Winfrey. Her non-fiction work includes We Are Each Other's Harvest: Celebrating African... Read More →

Sunday October 11, 2026 3:00pm - 4:00pm PDT
SFPL Main Branch, Koret Auditorium 100 Larkin St, San Francisco

Fiction, FREE

City San Francisco

7:30pm PDT

Out on the Table: Writers on Food with Garrett Schlichte

Sunday October 11, 2026 7:30pm - 9:00pm PDT

Nosh Box

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Pay-what-you-can for guaranteed seat; FREE to walk-ups (space depending)

Sponsored by Gazetteer SF
Co-presented with Kitchen Table Reading Series

Celebrating the upcoming release of Garrett Schlichte's debut collection of essays, Dinner Party Stories, the Kitchen Table reading series and curator Micheal Foulk bring Schlichte together with chef Gaby Maeda and writer Jennifer Barone to discuss food, writing, identity, and the secrets to living life as deliciously as possible. Hosted at Stephen Wade's delectable SOMA eatery, The Nosh Box. Doors at 7:00pm.

Moderators

Micheal Foulk

Micheal Foulk is a non-binary queer comedian, writer, and construct thriving in Oakland, California. They are the curator and host of the film screening series Queer Film Theory 101 produced in collaboration with Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas with screenings across the country. Michea... Read More →

Speakers

Jennifer Barone

Garrett Schlichte

Garrett Schlichte is an award-winning columnist, writer, and chef living in San Francisco. Garrett's work has appeared online and in print in The Washington Post, The New York Times, THEM, Jezebel, Slate, and other outlets. Garrett has worked in restaurants across the Bay Area fo... Read More →

Gaby Maeda

Gaby Maeda is a Hawai'i born-and-raised chef in the Bay Area. She moved to San Francisco in 2008 to attend culinary school at California Culinary Academy. That led to an externship, which turned into a five-year stint at Restaurant Gary Danko where she worked every station and gained the fun... Read More →

Sunday October 11, 2026 7:30pm - 9:00pm PDT
Nosh Box 1116 Folsom St, San Francisco

Food, Pay What You Can

City San Francisco

6:00pm PDT

Invitation | Abandonment: A Collective Poem in Assembly

Tuesday October 13, 2026 6:00pm - 7:30pm PDT

Et al.

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FREE, $10–15 suggested donation

Rooted in practices of care, vulnerability, and experimentation, this event asks: how do we dwell in the spaces between spaces? And what must we invite or abandon there to return more connected, understanding, and whole? Featuring readings from poets aracelis girmay, Ladan Khoddam-Khorasani, Gabriel Cortez, and Dora Prieto. Come listen, come help write a collaborative closing poem drawn from the room. Doors at 6:30pm.

Speakers

Ladan Khoddam-Khorasani لادن خدام خراسانی

Ladan Khoddam-Khorasani (she/they) is a poet, educator and public health practitioner. She is interested in how we will use poetry and language to take care of one another.

لادن خدام خراسانی

Gabriel Cortez

Gabriel Cortez is a poet, educator, and organizer based in the Bay. His work has appeared in Poem-A-Day by The Academy of American Poets, The New York Times, The Rumpus, The Breakbeat Poets Anthology Volume 4, and elsewhere. A VONA, Poetry Incubator, and #BARS workshop alum, he has received awards from the Rainin Foundation, the Gerbode Foundation, National Performance Network, the University of California, Palette Poetry, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Gabriel is pursuing his MFA... Read More →

Dora Prieto

Dora Prieto is a Colombian-Canadian poet. She is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from University of British Columbia, where she served as Poetry Editor of PRISM international. Her work explores migration, embodiment... Read More →

aracelis girmay

aracelis girmay is a poet, editor, and teacher. Her poems and essays have been published widely and can be found in e-flux, The Paris Review online, and The Poetry Review. Collaborations include an experiment in performance with musicians Ashleigh Gordon and Brittany J. Green as well... Read More →

Tuesday October 13, 2026 6:00pm - 7:30pm PDT
Et al. 2831a Mission St, San Francisco

Poetry, FREE

City San Francisco

6:30pm PDT

Tilar J. Mazzeo: The Sea Captain’s Wife

Tuesday October 13, 2026 6:30pm - 8:00pm PDT

Mechanics’ Institute

Buy Tickets/RSVP

$5 MI members / $15 gen public

Co-presented with Mechanics' Institute

New York Times bestseller Tilar J. Mazzeo brings us The Sea Captain's Wife, the true story of the first female captain of a merchant ship and her treacherous navigation of Antarctica's deadly waters. In 1856, at just nineteen years old, Mary Ann Patten led her crew through Drake's Passage as her husband, the former captain, lay deathly ill and the first mate agitated for mutiny. Set against the backdrop of the California Gold Rush and taking us to the brink of Antarctica, The Sea Captain's Wife draws on new archival research from nineteenth-century women’s maritime journals and on Mazzeo’s own expedition to the Southern Ocean and Antarctica in search of Mary Ann’s route. Doors at 6:00pm.

Speakers

Dr. Tilar J. Mazzeo

Dr. Tilar J. Mazzeo is the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and San Francisco Chronicle bestselling author of numerous award-winning works of narrative nonfiction, including history and biography titles. Formerly the Clara C. Piper Associate Professor of English at Colby College and Professeur Associée in the Department of World Literatures at the University of Montreal... Read More →

Tuesday October 13, 2026 6:30pm - 8:00pm PDT
Mechanics’ Institute 57 Post St, San Francisco

Nonfiction

City San Francisco

7:00pm PDT

NBCC Presents: The Author/Critic Dilemma

Tuesday October 13, 2026 7:00pm - 8:30pm PDT

Page Street Co-Writing

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FREE, $10–15 suggested donation

Media sponsorship by Publishers Weekly
Co-presented with National Book Critics Circle & Cita Press

Writers who wear multiple hats, as Virginia Woolf did, will share what they’ve learned from the writer and literary critic extraordinaire as authors/poets/critics today. Their wide-ranging conversation will touch on everything from ethical considerations to the vulnerabilities of being deep in the creative writing process when your strong critical voice rears its ugly head. With May-lee Chai, Jane Ciabattari, Jonathan Leal, Greg Sarris, and moderator Iris Jamahl Dunkle, as well as special guest Jessi Haley, editor of Cita Press, publisher of Luminous Halo: Selected Writings by Virginia Woolf. Doors at 6:30pm.

Moderators

Iris Jamahl Dunkle

Iris Jamahl Dunkle is a poet, biographer, and scholar whose work challenges the male-centric narratives of the American West amplifying the often-overlooked voices of women. Her books include USA Today bestselling Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb (University of Calif... Read More →

Speakers

Jane Ciabattari

Jane Ciabattari is a critic, journalist, and author of Stealing the Fire, an Iowa Short Fiction finalist selected for the Dzanc rEprint series. Her short stories have been awarded three Pushcart Prize special mentions, an East Hampton Shorts award for originality, widely published and anthologized. A former president of the National Book Critics Circle... Read More →

Jonathan Leal

Jonathan Leal is Associate Professor of English and Affiliated Faculty in the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California. Born and raised in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, Leal’s transdisciplinary work spans books, editorial projects, albums, and interdisciplinary... Read More →

May-lee Chai

May-lee Chai is an educator, critic, and author of twelve books of fiction, nonfiction, and translation, including her new book of essays, My Hungry Ghosts: Essays and Incantations, and the short story collections, Useful Phrases for Immigrants, recipient of an American Book Awar... Read More →

Greg Sarris

Greg Sarris is the author of Grand Avenue, an award-winning collection of short stories, which he adapted for an HBO miniseries of the same name and co-executive produced with Robert Redford. His second novel, Watermelon Nights, was adapted for a play by the Santa Rosa Community... Read More →

Jessi Haley

Jessi Haley is the editorial director for feminist open access publishing project Cita Press. She has edited several new editions of work by essential women writers of the past, including writers who have been long neglected. She is the author of the monthly newsletter Cita Press Bulletin, which... Read More →

Tuesday October 13, 2026 7:00pm - 8:30pm PDT
Page Street Co-Writing 297 Page St, San Francisco

Nonfiction, FREE

City San Francisco

7:00pm PDT

Which Side? A Protest Music Teach-Out

Tuesday October 13, 2026 7:00pm - 9:00pm PDT

KQED Commons

Buy Tickets/RSVP

$30 advance/$35 at door

Co-presented with KQED Live

Every movement has a soundtrack. Hear how protest songs become anthems that inspire resistance, build solidarity, and propel social change with a special San Francisco edition of Which Side?: A Protest Music Teach-Out. Acclaimed artists Diana Gameros, The Sam Chase, and Marcus Shelby join host James Sullivan to perform and unpack classic and original protest songs and celebrate the Bay Area's rich tradition of resistance, activism, and galvanizing music. Doors at 6:00pm.

Moderators

James Sullivan

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 →

Speakers

The Sam Chase

Both lively and energetic, soulful and thoughtful, The Sam Chase’s songs range from the gruff late-night punk rock drinking songs of his former life, to songs the probe the edges of our purpose on this planet and what may lie beyond. It is unapologetic while also inclusive in how Sam’s lyrics tap into the thoughts we all share yet sometimes... Read More →

Marcus Shelby

Marcus Anthony Shelby is a composer, bassist, bandleader, and educator who currently lives in San Francisco,
California. His work focuses on the history, present, and future of African American lives, social movements, and music education. In 1990, Marcus Shelby received the Charles Mingus Scholarship to attend Cal Arts and study composition with James Newton and bass with Charlie Haden... Read More →

Diana Gameros

Diana Gameros is a singer, guitarist, pianist, and composer, a lead teaching artist with the Lullaby Project, and a core member of the Immigrant Orchestra. Born and raised in Juárez, México, she immigrated to the United States as a teenager, carrying with her a deep love for music... Read More →

Tuesday October 13, 2026 7:00pm - 9:00pm PDT
KQED Commons 2601 Mariposa ST, San Francisco, CA

Music

City San Francisco

7:30pm PDT

While you were novel-ing, I studied the blade: A Celebration of the Short Story

Tuesday October 13, 2026 7:30pm - 9:00pm PDT

American Bookbinders Museum

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Pay-what-you-can for guaranteed seat; FREE to walk-ups (space depending)

Co-presented with American Bookbinders Museum

A notoriously precise and difficult form, the short story occupies an odd place in arts & letters in 2026. Left mostly by the wayside by the publishing industry at large, the story still holds a prominent place in our biggest magazines and workshop culture. Local purveyors of the craft Rucy Cui, Cristina Fríes, and William Lohier read from their celebrated work and discuss the form's place in today's publishing/reading culture. Moderated by Litquake Artistic Director Graham Todd. Doors at 7:00pm.

Moderators

Graham Todd

Graham Todd is a fiction writer and the Artistic Director of Litquake, San Francisco's Literary Festival. He studied literature and religion at Stanford and received his MFA from Bowling Green. His writing has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Southampton Review, Notre Dame Review, Epiphany... Read More →

Speakers

Rucy Cui

Rucy Cui is a writer from San Jose, California, who has also called Texas, Wyoming, and the south of France home. Her stories appear in The Georgia Review and other publications, where they’ve been recognized with the Barry Hannah Prize and the Bennington Fiction Prize. Her nonfiction appears in Lonely Planet. A 2024–26 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she has received support from Hedgebrook, Monson Arts, Ucross Fo... Read More →

Cristina Fríes

Cristina Fríes is a Colombian-American fiction writer based in San Francisco, CA. Her work engages with the literary “unreal,” including magical realism, surrealism, fabulism, horror, and the gothic, often exploring women’s experiences and feminist themes. She has written a... Read More →

William Lohier

William Lohier is a PhD Student at Berkeley from Brooklyn, New York. His short story collection, Black Star Line, is forthcoming from Simon and Schuster in March 2027.

Tuesday October 13, 2026 7:30pm - 9:00pm PDT
American Bookbinders Museum 355 Clementina St, San Francisco

Fiction, Pay What You Can

City San Francisco

6:30pm PDT

Writing The Body: Sports and Identity

Wednesday October 14, 2026 6:30pm - 8:00pm PDT

The Treeline, Sports Basement Bryant

Buy Tickets/RSVP

FREE, $10-15 suggested donation

Former track star and pro-MMA fighter Jenny Liou and outdoor adventure sports veteran Yi Shun Lai–both writers as well as athletes– dig deep into the process of writing about identities and bodies shaped by their dedication to sport. Who are you, when you can no longer compete, or when competing is no longer enough? Are some extremes irrecoverable once they’ve been reached? How might one heal, or insist on being more than just a winner? What does it mean to compete in white and male-dominated sports as Asian American athletes, and how do issues of race and gender play into dominant cultural narratives around individual athletic achievement? In conversation with author and former pro-wrestler Michael Copperman. Doors at 6:00pm.

Moderators

Michael Copperman

Michael Copperman is an assistant professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric and Cultures at Michigan State University. His work has appeared in The Oxford-American, Guernica, The Sun, Creative Nonfiction, Boston Review, Salon, Gulf Coast, Triquarterly, Kenyon Review and Co... Read More →

Speakers

Jenny Liou

Jenny Liou is a jiu jitsu black belt, retired MMA fighter, an English professor, the dean of Business and Social Science at Pierce College, and the author of the poetry collection Muscle Memory (Kaya Press 2022).

Yi Shun Lai

Yi Shun Lai is the author of A Suffragist’s Guide to the Antarctic, a young adult historical adventure. Her writing has appeared in Brevity, Shondaland, and more; and she teaches in the MFA program at Bay Path University and at Claremont McKenna College. She is also the author... Read More →

Wednesday October 14, 2026 6:30pm - 8:00pm PDT
The Treeline, Sports Basement Bryant 1590 Bryant St, San Francisco

Nonfiction, FREE

City San Francisco

7:00pm PDT

West Coast Beat: The SF Roots of Rolling Stone

Wednesday October 14, 2026 7:00pm - 8:30pm PDT

Buy Tickets/RSVP

$15 (includes museum admission)

Sponsored by Reed Schmidt
Co-presented with Counterculture Museum

Today’s shiny exteriors and inscrutable billboards can’t entirely obliterate San Francisco’s defining role in literature, activism, visual arts, and, yes, music. That storied history includes the 1967 founding of Rolling Stone. As both Peter Richardson and Charles Ponce de Leon relate in recent books, for a decade (before decamping for NYC), the magazine was at the vanguard of West Coast counterculture, launching dozens of journalists’ careers and setting new standards for writing about music and culture. Where better, then, to reunite folks with first-hand knowledge of those SF roots, including Ben Fong-Torres and Marianne Partridge, than at the new Counterculture Museum? Music journalist James Sullivan will take us back in time, as together we compile a scrapbook of the music, writing, and memories that defined the magazine—and the moment. Doors at 6:30pm.

Moderators

James Sullivan

Speakers

Ben Fong-Torres

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 →

Marinanne Partridge

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

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

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 →

Wednesday October 14, 2026 7:00pm - 8:30pm PDT

Nonfiction

City San Francisco

7:30pm PDT

Jon Ronson: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men

Wednesday October 14, 2026 7:30pm - 9:00pm PDT

JCCSF Kanbar Hall

Buy Tickets/RSVP

$20 gen admission / $42 with book

Media sponsorship by 48 Hills
Co-presented with JCCSF

From the bestselling author of The Psychopath Test and So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed comes The Castle, a darkly comic trip to the furthest reaches of the masculinity crisis. His only child is lured to a mysterious castle in the forests of New England late one night, sending Jon Ronson on an extraordinary adventure into a dark world of unmoored men desperately searching for purpose and control. What exactly is “Princessing”? Why did a lawn care influencer dress as a baby in front of billions of online viewers? And, more pressingly, why are two recently released murderers on their way to pay Jon a visit? Find out at Jon’s one-man show drawing on his trademark brand of humor, psychological insight, and unrivaled prescience. Doors at 7:00pm.

Speakers

Jon Ronson

Jon Ronson is an internationally-bestselling author, journalist, and filmmaker whose books have been translated into over thirty languages. His titles include THE CASTLE: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men, So You've Been Publicly Shamed, The Psychopath Test, and Them: Adv... Read More →

Wednesday October 14, 2026 7:30pm - 9:00pm PDT
JCCSF Kanbar Hall 3200 California St, San Francisco

Nonfiction

City San Francisco

7:30pm PDT

Trading Pages: A Poetry/Fiction Exchange

Wednesday October 14, 2026 7:30pm - 9:00pm PDT

Make-Out Room

Buy Tickets/RSVP

$12 adv / $15 door

Yin and yang? Or oil and water? Join us for this special, hopefully amicable exchange between fiction writers and poets…and no, they are not the unwitting subjects of an elaborate bet. This summer, Zach Williams traded pages with Judy Halebsky, Vanessa Hua with Dean Rader, and Kate Folk with Cintia Santana. Join us as these writers come together to read and respond in appreciation and celebration of each other’s narrative arcs and line breaks. Moderated by Litquake Artistic Director Graham Todd. Doors at 6:30pm.

Moderators

Graham Todd

Speakers

Kate Folk

Kate Folk is the author of the novel Sky Daddy, which received the California Book Awards’ Silver Medal in Fiction and has been longlisted for The Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize, The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and The VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Her story collection... Read More →

Judy Halebsky

Judy Halebsky is the author of three poetry collections, including Sky=Empty which won the New Issues Prize. At Dominican University of California, she directs the MFA program and teaches courses in poetry and live storytelling. A fan of urban hikes, walking as transportation, and... Read More →

Cintia Santana

Cintia Santana is a poet, translator, and interdisciplinary artist. Her debut poetry collection, The Disordered Alphabet (Four Way Books, 2023) received the 43rd Annual Northern California Book Award in Poetry, the 2024 IPPY Bronze Medal, the 2023 North American Book Award's Silver... Read More →

Dean Rader

Dean Rader is a San Francisco-based poet, essayist, translator and critic. He has authored or co-authored 14 books. His debut collection of poems, Works & Days, won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize. His 2014 collection Landscape Portrait Figure Form was named by The Barnes & Noble... Read More →

Vanessa Hua

Vanessa Hua is a nationally bestselling author of Coyoteland, A River of Stars and Forbidden City, and story collection Deceit and Other Possibilities, a New York Times Editors’ Pick. A National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, she has also received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, a California Arts Council Fellowship, and a Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing, as well as... Read More →

Zach Williams

Zach Williams' debut short story collection, Beautiful Days, was a New Yorker Best Book of 2024, a finalist for the 2025 California Book Award for First Fiction, and longlisted for the 2025 PEN / Robert W. Bingham Prize. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, ... Read More →

Wednesday October 14, 2026 7:30pm - 9:00pm PDT
Make-Out Room 3225 22nd St, San Francisco

Performance

Age Limit 21+
City San Francisco

6:00pm PDT

for colored girls who considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf 50th Anniversary

Thursday October 15, 2026 6:00pm - 7:30pm PDT

Decentered Arts

Buy Tickets/RSVP

FREE, $10-$15 suggested donation

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Broadway debut of Ntozake Shange’s famed choropoem for colored girls who considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. First performed at the women’s bar Bacchanal right here in Albany before becoming the second play by a Black woman to run on Broadway, for colored girls is a series of poetic monologues accompanied by dance movements and music. To honor Shange’s legacy, join amalee b., Briana Grogan, Jaine, Mukethe Kawinzi, Erica Lewis, Carl Nickolas, and Wendy M. Thompson. Curated by London Pinkney as they weave the work together. Doors at 5:30pm.

Speakers

Briana Grogan

Briana Grogan (she/they) is a Black queer femme poet from Southern California. She received her MFA in Poetry from Mills College and was a 2025 Lambda Literary Fellow and Rosemary’s House Fellow, as well as a 2023 grant recipient of the San Francisco Arts Commission. Their poetry... Read More →

Jaine

Jaine is an Afro feminine futurist completing her final year of her MFA program at San Francisco State, as an Editor in Chief for 14 Hills: the SFSU Review. Her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry seek to explore ghosts, the outer universe, and the strange-complicated existence of love... Read More →

London Pinkney

London Pinkney is a writer and the editor-in-chief of The Ana. She is currently working on her debut essay collection that explores the history & culture of Black Californians.

Mukethe Kawinzi

Wendy M. Thompson

Wendy M. Thompson is a poet, writer, and scholar who hails from Oakland, California. Her debut poetry collection Black California Gold maps out life in the Bay Area during the 1980s and 1990s and was a finalist for the 2025 Martin Cruz Smith Award: Emerging Diverse Voices prize... Read More →

amalee b.

amalee b. (they/she) works across experimental writing, painting, installation, and the curatorial. Currently, they facilitate a monthly poetry workshop inspired by the Black Radical Tradition at The Sanctuary in Oakland. Amalee’s practice is motivated by the principle that we should... Read More →

Thursday October 15, 2026 6:00pm - 7:30pm PDT
Decentered Arts 1175 Folsom St, San Francisco

Performance, FREE

City San Francisco

6:30pm PDT

Ukraïne: Recipes and Stories from Kyiv to the Black Sea

Thursday October 15, 2026 6:30pm - 8:00pm PDT

Omnivore Books on Food

Buy Tickets/RSVP

FREE

Co-presented with Omnivore Books on Food

Experience the joy and resilience of Ukrainian cuisine in a visually rich, travelogue-style cookbook filled with 100 traditional and modern recipes highlighting the comforting dishes, distinctive flavors, and time-honored techniques that make this food so extraordinary. Ukrainian chef Anna Voloshyna traveled across the diverse regions of her homeland―from the mountains to coastline, cities to grasslands, forests to wine country―collecting recipes, stories, and friendships to answer the question: What is Ukrainian cuisine? Joining Voloshyna on this appetizing and fascinating journey is Resy’s editor-in-chief, Paolo Lucchesi.

Moderators

Paolo Lucchesi

Speakers

Anna Voloshyna

Anna Voloshyna, chef, food stylist, and writer, was born and raised in Southern Ukraine and later immigrated to Oakland with her husband. She teaches cooking classes in the Bay Area and hosts pop-up dinners focusing on Ukrainian food. Her first cookbook, Budmo!, featuring family... Read More →

Thursday October 15, 2026 6:30pm - 8:00pm PDT
Omnivore Books on Food 3885a Cesar Chavez St, San Francisco, CA 94131

Food, FREE

City San Francisco

6:30pm PDT

Freedom: Essays with Zinzi Clemmons

Thursday October 15, 2026 6:30pm - 8:00pm PDT

Mechanics’ Institute

Buy Tickets/RSVP

$5 MI members / $15 gen public

Co-presented with Museum of the African Diaspora & Mechanics’ Institute

Join Zinzi Clemmons in conversation with Faith Adiele on Clemmons's latest essay collection, Freedom, a deft mix of memoir, family history, criticism, and reportage, drawing on a vast range of material from Joan Didion to James Baldwin, political analysis and history to Clemmons’s own experiences across the globe. In elegiac prose, Clemmons trains her discerning eye on American institutions and mythologies, probing the bounds of liberation and autonomy to interrogate our most enduring quest—the relentless pursuit of freedom for all. Doors at 6:00pm.

Moderators

Faith Adiele

I'm the author of Meeting Faith, an award-winning account of ordaining as Thailand’s first Black Buddhist nun that is widely taught, is the subject of multiple studies, and regularly appears on essential travel listicles. I am also author of four hybrid chapbooks/memoirs about my Nigerian/Nordic/American heritage... Read More →

Speakers

Zinzi Clemmons

Zinzi Clemmons' novel What We Lose was a finalist for the NBCC John Leonard First Book Prize and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. A National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree, she was raised in Philadelphia by a South African mother and an American father. A cofounder of the literary journal Apogee, she lives... Read More →

Thursday October 15, 2026 6:30pm - 8:00pm PDT
Mechanics’ Institute 57 Post St, San Francisco

Nonfiction

City San Francisco

7:00pm PDT

A 22nd-Century Conservation Ethos for California

Thursday October 15, 2026 7:00pm - 8:30pm PDT

KALW

Buy Tickets/RSVP

FREE, $10-$15 suggested donation

Sponsored by Heyday Books
Co-presented with KALW

California’s landscapes have long been shaped by deep relationships between people and place. But that relationship has changed dramatically over time, especially with the rise of European American settlement and the erasure of Traditional Ecological Knowledge. Panelists Obi Kaufmann, creator of the California Field Atlas series; Laura Cunningham, award-winning author of A State of Change; and earth scientist and professional mountain biker Dillon Osleger examine how modern society has grown increasingly estranged from the natural world. Together, they imagine a new conservation ethos—one rooted in restoration, resilience, and reciprocity—and ask what it would take for Californians to leave the state healthier, more biodiverse, and more ecologically whole at the end of the 21st century than at its beginning. Moderated by Leslie Carol Roberts. Doors at 6:30pm.

Moderators

Leslie Carol Roberts

Leslie Carol Roberts is a writer, full professor, and interdisciplinary educator passionate about storytelling, community design, and the power of creativity to address urgent global challenges. She is President of the Northern California Fulbright Association board and has designed and taught graduate... Read More →

Speakers

Dillon Osleger

Dillon Osleger is a geoscientist, professional trail builder, public lands policy analyst, and author of Trail Work (Heyday Books, 2026). Dillon's work focuses on the invisible infrastructure of the American West, from snow science to trail restoration to reforestation. A leading voice in public lands advocacy, his projects have highlighted the intersectional nature of trails, climate, history... Read More →

Laura Cunningham

Laura Cunningham is a life-long artist-naturalist raised in the East Bay, author of A State of Change: Forgotten Landscapes of California (Heyday: 2010), an in-depth exploration of the historical ecology of California. Using field sketches, oil paintings, and explorations around the state, she imagines a past of abundant wildlife shaped by fire, floods, and tribal agency... Read More →

Obi Kaufmann

Obi Kaufmann is an award-winning author of six best-selling books. Most famously, his 2017 book The California Field Atlas, recontextualized popular ideas about ecology, biodiversity, and geography. His subsequent books—The State of Water: Understanding California’s Most Prec... Read More →

Thursday October 15, 2026 7:00pm - 8:30pm PDT
KALW 220 Montgomery St, Suite 100, San Francisco, CA 94104

Nonfiction, FREE

City San Francisco

7:00pm PDT

Decentered Arts presents Poolside Poets

Thursday October 15, 2026 7:00pm - 9:30pm PDT

St. Joseph’s Art Society

Buy Tickets/RSVP

$30

Immerse yourself in a dreamy night of poetry, music, and dance by the pool at the breathtaking historic venue founded by Ken Fulk. Dress to impress (disco theme!), and remember to wear your dancing shoes. Performances by poets Bridget Clancy, Shane King Zackery, Jaír Griffin, Denise Masiel, spinelli, James Morehead, Maya Anne , and Papi Grande, alongside an epic musician, dancers, fashion, community, and more! Hosted by Rhea Joseph & Liz Cahill. Doors at 6:30pm.

Speakers

Bridget Clancy

Bridget is a half full bottle of Fireball whiskey

Shane King Zackery

Shane King Zackery is a queer black poet, filmmaker, and technologist who has lived in the Bay for over 10 years. They like to sit in the river and talk in circles about being human. Occasionally, they write something down about the nature of time, space, and love.

Jair Griffin

Jair Griffin is a well-rounded artist native to Atlanta, Georgia. He attended Kennesaw State University, majoring in music and minoring in philosophy. When he wasn't practicing his cello, he was exploring all of his other passions, such as photography, painting, and even jewelry-making... Read More →

Denise Masiel

Denise Masiel is a Caribbean-American storyteller from Texas. She is an essayist and poet dedicated to the art of capturing feelings of warmth, passion, and visceral emotions in her work. Her poetry has been published in The Ana and Mujer Manifesto, and she is an active spoken word... Read More →

Spinelli

Spinelli is a queer witch who has been writing poetry her whole life. When she was 7, she devoted an entire journal to creative writing about cats. In college, she wrote and performed a one-woman show about cat ladies. Her poems today may or may not be about pussy.

James Morehead

James Morehead is Poet Laureate Emeritus of Dublin, California, host of the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast, and has published several poetry collections including "The Plague Doctor". “tethered” was transformed into an award-winning animated short film, “Twilight in the Sculpture... Read More →

Maya Anne

I am a multi-media artist that began my poetry practice in honor of my grandfather who was also a poet. My first poems were out about relationship and the quiet lessons I learned about life being in his presence. I now write with the lens of an educator, painter, sewist and woman... Read More →

Papi Grande

Papi Grande (He/Him/Prince) is an Oakland raised spoken word artist, educator, and published author known for his dynamic stage presence and emotional resonant storytelling. His work explores identity, community, and personal evolution creating powerful connections with audiences... Read More →

Thursday October 15, 2026 7:00pm - 9:30pm PDT
St. Joseph’s Art Society 1401 Howard St, San Francisco

Poetry

City San Francisco

7:30pm PDT

Sweet and Lowdown: Poets at the Bar

Thursday October 15, 2026 7:30pm - 9:00pm PDT

Make-Out Room

Buy Tickets/RSVP

$12 adv / $15 door

This celebration of poetry collates a half-dozen poets’ stylings, live on our darkest, dankest stage. Featuring multi-hyphenate award winners Nancy Miller Gomez, Prairie Moon Dalton, Ibe Liebenberg, Leigh Lucas, and Preeti Vangani for a lurid evening of ebullient verse. Hosted by Litquake Artistic Director Graham Todd. Doors at 6:30 PM.

Moderators

Graham Todd

Speakers

Prairie Moon Dalton

Prairie Moon Dalton is a Southern Appalachian poet born and raised in Western North Carolina. She is a 2025–2027 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. Her work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, TriQuarterly, Cagibi, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA at North Carolina State University... Read More →

Leigh Lucas

Leigh Lucas is the author of Splashed Things (Boa Editions, 2026), selected by Maya C. Popa for the A. Poulin Jr. Prize. Her chapbook Landsickness (Tupelo Press, 2024) was selected by Chen Chen for the 2023 Sunken Garden Poetry Chapbook Award. Leigh’s writing can be found in Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Poetry Society of America, Electric Lit, and elsewhere. She holds a BA from Stanford and an MFA from Warren Wilson... Read More →

Nancy Miller Gomez

Nancy Miller Gomez (she/her) is the author of Inconsolable Objects (YesYes Books) winner of the 2025 Patterson Poetry Prize, and Punishment (Rattle Chapbook Series). An Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, ... Read More →

Preeti Vangani

Preeti Vangani is a poet & writer from Bombay based in San Francisco. She is the author of the poetry collections, Mother Tongue Apologize (2019), and Fifty Mothers, (River River Books, 2026). Her work has appeared in AGNI, The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, and Prairie Schooner, among other places. Her debut short story won the 2021 Pen/Dau Emerging Writers Prize. Vangani has been a resident at UCross, Djerassi and Ragdale. She has received artist grants from San Francisco Arts Commission and YBCA, and is a 2026-27 Steinbeck fellow. She holds an MFA in... Read More →

Ibe Liebenberg

Ibe Liebenberg is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation. He lives in Paradise, California and works as a firefighter, and a lecturer at Chico State University. He is a recent graduate of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in both poetry and fiction. He has been published... Read More →

Thursday October 15, 2026 7:30pm - 9:00pm PDT
Make-Out Room 3225 22nd St, San Francisco

Poetry

Age Limit 21+
City San Francisco

7:00pm PDT

Heaven Looks Like Us: Palestinian Poetry

Friday October 16, 2026 7:00pm - 8:30pm PDT

Telegraph Hill Books

Buy Tickets/RSVP

FREE, $10-$15 suggested donation

Part of Words Around the World
Sponsored by Center for the Art of Translation

Poetry has always served as a mode of resistance in Palestinian culture. In defiance of dispossession and decades of military siege, of a nakba that never ended, of historical and cultural obfuscation, of unrelenting violence and thousands of martyred people, the “power to narrate,” as Edward Said wrote, remains a necessary tool for self-determination. As Palestinian history remains haunted by exile, violence, and grief, there’s more here that’s also true: queer and feminist perspectives, eco-poetry, meditations on love and time, and lineages of protest. These poems reclaim that power to narrate, bridging borders, languages, and generations to forge new conversations around resistance and liberation. Featuring Heaven Looks Like Us anthology contributors Zeina Hashem Beck, Janine Mogannam, Deema Shehabi, Jen Siraganian, Priscilla Wathington, and Omar Zahzah. Doors at 6:30pm.

Speakers

Zeina Hashem Beck

Zeina Hashem Beck is the author of This Was Supposed to Be About Beauty, a collection of mirror sonnets forthcoming from Penguin Books in March 2027. She’s the winner of the 2023 Arab American Book Award for Poetry for O, which was named a Best Book of the Year by Literary Hub and... Read More →

Janine Mogannam

Janine Mogannam is a diasporic Palestinian poet, librarian, and literary curator from San Francisco/Ramaytush Ohlone land. Her work has been supported by Tin House, VONA, RAWI, Kearny Street Workshop, and The Speakeasy Project. She has performed and programmed with Still Here San... Read More →

Deema Shehabi

Deema K. Shehabi is a Palestinian-American poet and editor. Deema is the author of Thirteen Departures from the Moon and co-editor with Beau Beausoleil of Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, for which she received a Northern California Book Award. She’s also co-author of Water to Water... Read More →

Priscilla Wathington

Priscilla Wathington is a Palestinian American poet and the author of the chapbook, "Paper and Stick." Her poems have appeared in The Adroit Journal, Four Way Review, Prairie Schooner, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is currently serving as a 2026-2028 Wallace Stegner... Read More →

Omar Zahzah

Omar Zahzah is a writer, poet, freelance journalist, and Assistant Professor of Arab, Muslim, Ethnicities and Diasporas (AMED) Studies in the Department of Race and Resistance Studies (RRS) at San Francisco State University. A scholar and organizer of Lebanese Palestinian descent... Read More →

Jen Siraganian

Jen Siraganian is an Armenian-American writer and former Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, California. Her debut collection, Everything Has Been Moved, Even the Dead, which won the 2026 Perugia Press Prize, was a finalist for the Tupelo Press Dorset Prize and The Journal’s Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize, and a semi-finalist for the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize, Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, and Vassar Miller Prize. Her poems have won... Read More →

Friday October 16, 2026 7:00pm - 8:30pm PDT
Telegraph Hill Books 1501 Grant Ave, San Francisco

Words Around the World, FREE

City San Francisco

7:30pm PDT

Irregular Feedback: Writers on Music

Friday October 16, 2026 7:30pm - 9:00pm PDT

Make-Out Room

Buy Tickets/RSVP

$12 adv / $15 door

"Music makes the people come together... yeah." That's right, Madonna. You said it. So astute. Join cultural critic, essayist, and curator Micheal Foulk (Queer Film Theory 101) for an evening of writers writing about music! Inspired by the perpetual beat inside us all and the iconic music criticism and archival work of writer Hanif Abdurraqib, Michael-Vincent D'Anella-Mercanti, Kai Gault, Joan Granite, Brittany Newell, and Kochina Rude read work written exclusively for tonight, a literary deep dive into our favorite albums, genres, and musical artists of the past 60 years. Doors at 6:30pm.

Speakers

Michael-Vincent D'Anella-Mercanti

Michael-Vincent is a writer from South Philly living in San Francisco. His work explores queerness, labor, and cities. He's a big library guy.

Brittany Newell

Brittany Newell is a writer and performer living in San Francisco. Her debut novel “Oola” was published by Henry Holt in 2017 at the age of 21. Her second novel “Soft Core” was published in 2025 by FSG in the US, UK and France. Her third novel “Blue Movie” will be published... Read More →

Kochina Rude

Cary Escovedo is an internationally recognized harm reduction advocate, drag entertainer, communicable disease specialist, and performance artist living in Oakland, California. Doing business as drag queen “Kochina Rude,” he uses this persona as a vehicle for artistic expression... Read More →

Micheal Foulk

Joan Granite

Joan Granite (she/her) is a DJ, producer, and is a devoted presence in the Bay Area underground. Her sets balance euphoria with introspection, held together by emotional intentionality and unshakeable optimism. Every set is a communion, connecting the senses between sweat, spirit, and sound... Read More →

Friday October 16, 2026 7:30pm - 9:00pm PDT
Make-Out Room 3225 22nd St, San Francisco

Nonfiction

Age Limit 21+
City San Francisco

8:15pm PDT

Generation Women: Wins & Losses

Friday October 16, 2026 8:15pm - 9:45pm PDT

The Lost Church

Buy Tickets/RSVP

$25 / $3 early bird discount until October 11th (code earlybird15)

Co-presented with Generation Women

We’re pleased to once again welcome Generation Women, a live multigenerational storytelling series. One woman or nonbinary performer in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s+ will share an original true story on the theme of “Wins & Losses,” whether personal, professional, psychological, or completely enigmatic. Founded by author Georgia Clark in New York City in 2017, the mission of Generation Women is to amplify underheard voices and create space for intergenerational connection and community. Featuring S.C. Bandreddi, Alexandra Romanoff, Kate Schatz, Bora Reed, Dashka Slater, and Sandra Jackson-Opoku. Hosted by writer, editor, and curator Samantha Schoech. Doors at 7:30pm.

Moderators

Samantha Schoech

Samantha Schoech is a staff writer at NYT Wirecutter. Her debut book My Mother’s Boyfriends has been called “witty,” “feral,” and “acutely observed.” She first brought Generation Women to San Francisco in 2022. She lives by the beach in San Francisco with her bookish family... Read More →

Speakers

Alexandra Romanoff

Alexandra Romanoff is a journalist, a cultural critic, and the author of the 831 Stories’s Big Fan series. She’s also written three novels (under Zan Romanoff), most recently LOOK, which O: The Oprah Magazine called “one of the LGBTQ books that will change the literary land... Read More →

Sandra Jackson-Opoku

S.C. Bandreddi

S.C. Bandreddi hails from California’s Bay Area, where she grew up scribbling stories deep into the night and hasn’t stopped since. When she’s not putting words on paper, she’s usually gaming, rewatching her favorite movies, or at an arcade trying to win as many plushies as she can. She... Read More →

Kate Schatz

Kate Schatz is a feminist author, educator, and public speaker. She's the New York Times–bestselling author of the Rad Women book series; the novel Where the Girls Were; the 33 ⅓ book Rid of Me: A Story; and Do the Work: An Anti-Racist Activity Book, co-written with W. Kamau Bell. She lives in the Bay Area with her wife, three children, and pets. In all she does, Kate is committed to sharing radical histories that shine light on the marginalized people who've truly made America (and the world) great: the people of color, the immig... Read More →

Bora Lee Reed

Bora Lee Reed has an MFA in creative writing from Warren Wilson College and an MA in theology from the Graduate Theological Union. She was a 2023 Reese's Book Club LitUp Fellow. She lives and works in Berkeley, CA.

Dashka Slater

New York Times–bestselling author Dashka Slater has been described as a “triple threat” for her success in journalism, adult fiction, and children’s literature. The author of many books of fiction and nonfiction for children, teenagers, and adults, her work has been translated into more than fifteen languages and has sold... Read More →

Friday October 16, 2026 8:15pm - 9:45pm PDT
The Lost Church 988 Columbus Ave, San Francisco

Performance

City San Francisco

10:00am PDT

FilBookFest

Saturday October 17, 2026 10:00am - 5:30pm PDT

SFPL Main Branch

Buy Tickets/RSVP

FREE

Part of Words Around the World

Co-presented with Friends of the San Francisco Public Library, the Filipino American Center at SFPL, PAWA, and the San Francisco Public Library

The Filipino American International Book Festival (FilBookFest) returns in October for its 8th iteration, continuing its legacy as the largest Filipino American literary festival in the United States. Held during Filipino American History Month, FilBookFest brings together an exciting array of writers, scholars, and creatives from across the globe, including the U.S., Canada, and the Philippines, to the iconic San Francisco Public Library. Keynote speakers for 2026 include Randy Ribay, author of Patron Saints of Nothing & Nest of Tongues; Dr. Robyn Rodriguez, author of Contemporary Asian American Activism: Building Movements for Liberation; and Professor M. Evelina Galang, author of When the Hibiscus Falls and recipient of the inaugural PAWA Lifetime Achievement Award. Other featured authors include Mia Alvar, Marivi Soliven, Mia Manansala (US); Yvette Tan, Jet Tagasa and Jaya Jacobo (Philippines); Candy Gourlay (UK), as well as children’s authors Tracy Badua (US) and Analene Go (Canada). The festival will also feature a bustling marketplace with tables from PAWA Books, Arkipelago Books, Eastwind Books, and Bel Canto Books. For a full program schedule and author lineup, visit filbookfestival.org.

Saturday October 17, 2026 10:00am - 5:30pm PDT
SFPL Main Branch 100 Larkin St, San Francisco

Words Around the World, FREE

City San Francisco

12:00pm PDT

Read the Room: Books Not Bans

Saturday October 17, 2026 12:00pm - 4:00pm PDT

Kerouac Alley

Buy Tickets/RSVP

FREE, $10-$15 suggested donation

Books Not Bans together with City Lights and Litquake present a party for everyone who loves reading. Join us for an afternoon filled with connection, revelry, music, games and stories. Featuring performances, readings, and all kinds of stuff from Syr Hayati Beker, Shoshana von Blanckensee, Kevin Dublin, W.S. Gong, Hyazinth, Sean Owens, and Sumiko Saulson. Hosted by Books Not Bans founder Becka Robbins. Proceeds from this event support Books Not Bans.

Moderators

Becka Robbins

Speakers

Sean Owens

Dubbed "SF's Best Comic Playwright" by the now-defunct SF Weekly, Sean Owens has written (and performed) over 50 short and full-length plays in the Bay Area and abroad. Their solo musical, "GIRLESQUE" has delighted audiences in the Bay Area, New York and Canada. Sean created the... Read More →

Kevin Dublin

Kevin Dublin is an educator, advocate, and writer of poetry, prose, scripts, and code from Smithfield, NC. Currently Director of the Elder Writing Project, a community-based outreach program of the Litquake Foundation that brings creative writing and storytelling workshops to retirement communities... Read More →

Shoshana von Blanckensee

Shoshana von Blanckensee lives in Berkeley, California, with her partner and kids. She is an Oncology Nurse by day, and a writer by any available moment. Girls Girls Girls is her debut novel.

W.S. Gong

W.S. Gong is a writer and editor based in San Francisco. An alumnus of Bread Loaf, Tin House, Kenyon, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, his work appears in Fourteen Hills. He is at work on a novel.

Sumiko Saulson

Sumiko Saulson is the BayCon/Westercon 2026 Poet Laureate, a Two-Time Bram Stoker Award® for Poetry for The Rat King (2022, Dooky Zines) and Melancholia (2024, Bludgeoned Girls Press). Four-Time Elgin Speculative Poetry Award nominee for these and Doodooality: Shots fired from U... Read More →

Syr Hayati Beker

Syr Hayati Beker (they/them) is a writer and experience creator in search of the queer love language of climate change. Their first book, What A Fish Looks Like, was a 2025 Otherwise Honoree. Syr is the co-founder of Queer Cat Productions immersive theater company and is part of the experimental performance group GH{}ST. Find their work at syrbeker.com and in theaters, pirate ships, galleries, and queer bars near you... Read More →

Hyazinth Baumann

Hyazinth Baumann is a trans multi-discplinary artist living in Oakland, CA. They currently work for Books Not Bans as an outreach coordinator. You can find their work on their website at Hyazinths.com

Saturday October 17, 2026 12:00pm - 4:00pm PDT
Kerouac Alley 275 Columbus Ave, San Francisco

Party, FREE

City San Francisco

12:30pm PDT

ZYZZYVA Movie Matinee: Amarcord

Saturday October 17, 2026 12:30pm - Sunday October 18, 2026 9:00pm PDT

Roxie Theater

Buy Tickets/RSVP

$16

Co-presented with ZYZZYVA and the Roxie

For this festival installment of our year-round film series, Andrew Sean Greer introduces a special screening of Amarcord, the dramatic comedy directed by Federico Fellini. Fellini recreates his hometown of Rimini in this carnivalesque film, where the director satirizes his childhood. Winner of an Academy Award for best foreign-language film, Amarcord remains one of the director’s best-loved creations, beautifully weaving together Giuseppe Rotunno’s colorful cinematography, Danilo Donati’s extravagant costumes and sets, and Nino Rota’s nostalgia-tinged score. Following the screening, Greer will appear in conversation with Ingrid Rojas Contreras about his film selection and most recent book, Villa Coco, in which a young man takes an unspecified job with a charismatic elderly baronessa at her crumbling villa in the Tuscan hills. Co-hosted by ZYZZYVA editor Oscar Villalon. Doors at 12:00pm for book sales/signing.

Moderators

Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Speakers

Andrew Sean Greer

Andrew Sean Greer is the author of eight works of fiction, including the bestsellers Less and its companion Less Is Lost. He lives in San Francisco and Venice, Italy. His latest novel is Villa Coco.

Saturday October 17, 2026 12:30pm - Sunday October 18, 2026 9:00pm PDT
Roxie Theater 3117 16th St, San Francisco

Film Screening

City San Francisco

2:00pm PDT

Dorothy Lazard: Behind the Desk at the Main

Saturday October 17, 2026 2:00pm - Sunday October 18, 2026 4:00pm PDT

Museum of the African Diaspora

Buy Tickets/RSVP

FREE, $10-$15 suggested donation

Co-presented with Museum of the African Diaspora

Dorothy Lazard’s celebrated 2023 memoir What You Don’t Know Will Make a Whole New World traced the beloved Oakland librarian’s coming of age through books. Now she’s back to tell more of her story, relating her experiences over two decades at the Oakland Public Library. Along the way, she makes a powerful case for the essential role of the public library as a pillar of democratic ideals, and she crafts a tribute to the library workers who have devoted their careers to supporting intellectual freedom as well as to the countless Oaklanders whom she had the privilege of serving. Lazard will be joined in conversation by Pendarvis Harshaw, community engagement reporter at KQED. Doors at 1:30pm.

Moderators

Pendarvis Harshaw

Pendarvis Harshaw is a journalist from Oakland, covering arts and culture in the Bay Area for KQED.

Speakers

Dorothy Lazard

Dorothy Lazard worked as a librarian for nearly forty years. In 2000 she joined the staff at the Oakland Main Library where she provided reference services and programming for Oakland's diverse community. From 2009 until her retirement in 2021, she was the head librarian of OPL's Oakland History... Read More →

Saturday October 17, 2026 2:00pm - Sunday October 18, 2026 4:00pm PDT
Museum of the African Diaspora 685 Mission St, San Francisco

Nonfiction, FREE

City San Francisco

12:00pm PDT

FilBookFest

Sunday October 18, 2026 12:00pm - 5:30pm PDT

SFPL Main Branch

Buy Tickets/RSVP

Sunday October 18, 2026 12:00pm - 5:30pm PDT
SFPL Main Branch 100 Larkin St, San Francisco

Words Around the World, FREE

City San Francisco

2:00pm PDT

How to Exi(s)t: A Poet’s Memoir with Truong Tran

Sunday October 18, 2026 2:00pm - 4:00pm PDT

City Lights

Buy Tickets/RSVP

FREE

Co-presented with City Lights

How to Exi(s)t: A Poet’s Memoir is an experiment in nonlinear autobiography by the author of the American Book Award–winning Book of the Other, Truong Tran. Beginning in the present—at a writing residency in the aftermath of this success—How to Exi(s)t unpeels the layers between present and past in bursts of brief poetic essays. Unsparing, even caustic in its insistence on racism as a dominant note of American life, but marked by surprising tenderness and humor, How to Exi(s)t is a compelling portrayal of Tran’s pedagogical philosophy as well as an interrogation of a poetic language that conceals as much as it reveals. In conversation with Garrett Caples.

Moderators

Garrett Caples

Garrett Caples is a poet moonlighting as an editor at City Lights, yet his most recent book is Proses (Wave 2024), a collection of tales. No one knows what he's up to.

Speakers

Truong Tran

Poet and visual artist Truong Tran was born in Saigon, Vietnam. He earned his MFA from San Francisco State University and is the author of five collections of poetry: The Book of Perceptions (1999), a finalist for a Kiriyama Prize; placing the accents (1999), a finalist for a W... Read More →

Sunday October 18, 2026 2:00pm - 4:00pm PDT
City Lights 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco

Storytelling/Memoir, FREE

City San Francisco

2:00pm PDT

Listen to Your Elders: An Elder Project Reading

Sunday October 18, 2026 2:00pm - 4:00pm PDT

SFPL Haight Branch

Buy Tickets/RSVP

FREE, $10-$15 suggested donation

Co-presented with San Francisco Public Library

Litquake’s Elder Project brings creative writing and storytelling workshops to retirement communities across San Francisco and Oakland. Seniors participate in reading, storytelling, discussion, hands-on creative writing, and in-class sharing sessions to explore their own stories, the stories of their communities, and stories about the world, while using the techniques of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction that they've learned in classes. Share in the beauty of their words, hear their stories, listen to your elders.

Sunday October 18, 2026 2:00pm - 4:00pm PDT
SFPL Haight Branch 1833 Page St, San Francisco

Storytelling/Memoir, FREE

City San Francisco

3:00pm PDT

Menopause Extravaganza: The Science and Culture of a Subject No One Used to Want to Talk About

Sunday October 18, 2026 3:00pm - 4:00pm PDT

Gray Area Theater

Buy Tickets/RSVP

$10 advance / $15 door

Co-presented with Gray Area Theater

Menopause, a natural consequence of aging, has for centuries been alternately ignored and belittled, seen mostly through a male lens of bafflement, repugnance, and boilerplate misogyny. Now, however, a growing body of women and their doctors are rejecting this traditional view, developing new therapies and strategies as well as ways to appreciate the new freedoms it can offer. This energizing (and overdue) afternoon features Dr. Louann Brizendine, author of The Female Brain, reading from her forthcoming Your Brain on Menopause and joining other panelists in a conversation led by Keli Dailey: Dr. Sarah Isquick (a colleague of Dr. Sally Greenwald, featured in the recent New Yorker article “The Billionaires’ Vagina Club”), psychiatrist Dr. Alecia Greenlee, and menopause doula Lasara Firefox Allen, author of Genderqueer Menopause. Select performers from The Menopause Monologues® will kick off the event.Bring your friends for a conversation-sparking afternoon. Doors at 2:30pm.

Moderators

Keli Dailey

Keli Dailey is a journalist, comedian, and teacher whose work explores democracy, midlife, and the absurdities of modern life. She created the comedy-news series News Hangover and founded MenoPower, a storytelling project that uses humor to tackle menopause and aging. A former John S. Knight Jou... Read More →

Speakers

Lasara Firefox Allen

Lasara Firefox Allen, MSW (they/them/Mx.) is a trans, genderqueer author, educator, and certified menopause doula and coach. They are the founder and CEO of Genderqueer Futures, a global education and coaching practice specializing in gender-affirming menopause care for providers and gender-expansive... Read More →

Louann Brizendine

Dr Louann Brizendine is a UCSF clinical professor, Yale, Harvard, and UCSF trained in medicine and neuropsychiatry; founder of the UCSF Women’s Mood and Hormone Clinic; author of the NYT bestselling The Female Brain and upcoming Your Brain on Menopause.... Read More →

Sarah Isquick

Dr. Sarah Isquick is a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist and Menopause Society Certified Practitioner who founded her San Francisco concierge practice on a simple belief: women deserve unhurried, deeply personal care from a physician who truly knows them. She specializes in hormonal healt... Read More →

Alecia Greenlee

Alecia Greenlee, MD, MPH, is a reproductive psychiatrist, speaker, and founder of Bloom & Build Integrative Psychiatry in Campbell, California. Board-certified in adult and consultation-liaison psychiatry, she trained at UCSF, Harvard's Cambridge Health Alliance, and the University of Chicago... Read More →

Rebecca Foust

Rebecca Foust’s books include You Are Leaving the American Sector: Love Poems (Blue Light Press 2026) and Only (Four Way Books 2022). Her poems appear widely in venues including The Slowdown, Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day, POETRY, and Southern Review, winning the James Dickey, New Ohio Review, Pablo Neruda, James Hearst, and Poetry International prizes in recent years... Read More →

The Menopause Monologues®

The Menopause Monologues® is an acclaimed theatrical production that combines powerful storytelling, education, and community engagement to elevate conversations around menopause and women’s health. Following sold-out runs in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City, and with a Seattle production p... Read More →

Sunday October 18, 2026 3:00pm - 4:00pm PDT
Gray Area Theater 2665 Mission St, San Francisco 94110

Nonfiction

City San Francisco

7:00pm PDT

Woof: A Celebration of Our Canine Companions

Monday October 19, 2026 7:00pm - 9:00pm PDT

Page Street Co-Writing

Buy Tickets/RSVP

FREE, $10-$15 suggested donation

Co-presented with LitCamp and Page Street

San Francisco is famously home to more dogs than kids, so let's celebrate our love for all things canine with a reading of fifteen super-short pieces about our furry, tail-wagging friends. There will be dog treats from local suppliers, plus complimentary Prosecco, wine, and fancy nonalcoholic drinks. Note: Much as we would love to see your canine companion, due to the (very) crowded nature of these events, we have to regretfully request they remain at home. The event will be emceed by LitCamp founder Janis Cooke Newman. Doors at 6:30pm.

Moderators

Janis Cooke Newman

Janis Cooke Newman is the author of a memoir and two award-winning novels. She is also the founder of LitCamp, as well as Page Street Co-working for Writers.

Monday October 19, 2026 7:00pm - 9:00pm PDT
Page Street Co-Writing 297 Page St, San Francisco

Nonfiction, FREE

City San Francisco

7:00pm PDT

A Celebration of César Vallejo's Trilce

Monday October 19, 2026 7:00pm - 9:00pm PDT

City Lights

Buy Tickets/RSVP

FREE

Part of Words Around the World
Sponsored by Center for the Art of Translation
Co-presented with City Lights and New York Review of Books

First published in 1922, and rich in startling neologisms and other forms of verbal play, Trilce is a blazingly vivid revelation of what poetry can be, at once a love poem, a poem of erotic urgency and frustration, a poem of family life, of political fury, a lament for the dead, a work of intense privacy and an address to the world. In this new edition of Trilce from NYRB—the recipient of the prestigious Premio Valle Inclán for the best translation from Spanish into English—the translators Helen Dimos and William Rowe accompany each poem with a gloss. Their incisive commentary on these legendarily challenging poems opens them up to new understanding while inviting readers to find their own pathways to and through them.

Speakers

Helen Dimos

Helen Dimos is the author of the collections No Realtor Was Compensated For This Sale (The Elephants, 2017) and Intermissions & Things, Auto-bio-graphy (forthcoming). She has worked as a teacher of poetry, composition and English, as a translator principally from the Greek, and... Read More →

William Rowe

William Rowe’s Collected Poems were published in 2016 by Crater Press. He has translated a number of Latin American poets, including Rodolfo Hinostroza, Juan L. Ortiz, Hugo Gola, Magdalena Chocano, Néstor Perlongher, and Mario Montalbetti. Three Lyric Poets, his study of Lee H... Read More →

Monday October 19, 2026 7:00pm - 9:00pm PDT
City Lights 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco

Words Around the World, FREE

City San Francisco

6:00pm PDT

Living in the Shadow of Silicon Valley

Tuesday October 20, 2026 6:00pm - 7:30pm PDT

SFPL Main Branch, Koret Auditorium

Buy Tickets/RSVP

FREE, $10–$15 suggested donation

Sponsored by Mission Local
Co-presented with Bay Area Book Festival and San Francisco Public Library

Sure, Silicon Valley’s wealth, power, and technological innovation loom large over the entire Bay Area—but what about the rest of us? Tonight we’ll hear from three authors who can share deep knowledge of Silicon Valley’s effects on Bay Area housing, economic inequality, urban planning, and public policy. Investigative journalist Brian Barth (Front Street: Resistance and Rebirth in the Tent Cities of Techlandia), anthropologist Manissa Maharawal (Anti-Eviction: The Fight Against Tech-Led Gentrification in San Francisco), and journalist Jonathan Weber (City on the Edge: Technology, Politics, and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco) will be joined by architect and urban planner Vinita Goyal. Doors at 5:30pm.

Moderators

Vinita Goyal

Vinita Goyal is trained as an architect and urban planner and advances regenerative and restorative models that center the leadership of low income communities of color. She serves as Community Investment Director of Full Spectrum Labs, a US-based think tank, incubator, and accelerator, and as... Read More →

Speakers

Brian Barth

Brian Barth is an award-winning independent journalist with bylines in the New Yorker, National Geographic, Washington Post, The New Republic and Mother Jones, among other publications. He lives between the Bay Area and California's remote Lost Coast region, where he is developin... Read More →

Manissa Maharawal

Manissa Maharawal is an assistant professor of Anthropology at American University in Washington D.C. and a member of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project. Her first book Anti-Eviction: The Fight Against Tech-Led Gentrification in San Francisco received the Setha M Low award for Engaged Anthropology... Read More →

Jonathan Weber

Jonathan Weber was named the Los Angeles Times’s first-ever Silicon Valley reporter in 1990. He was later editor in chief of The Industry Standard, which chronicled—and lived—the first dot-com boom. He served as editor in chief of The Bay Citizen, a local news nonprofit, an... Read More →

Tuesday October 20, 2026 6:00pm - 7:30pm PDT
SFPL Main Branch, Koret Auditorium 100 Larkin St, San Francisco

Nonfiction, FREE

City San Francisco

7:00pm PDT

Brian Evenson: Phantom Limb

Tuesday October 20, 2026 7:00pm - 8:30pm PDT

City Lights

Buy Tickets/RSVP

FREE, $10-15 suggested donation

Co-presented with City Lights

Master of literary horror Brian Evenson returns with a long-awaited follow-up to his 2016 novel, Last Days. After destroying the headquarters of an underground amputation cult, a burned and battered Kline finds himself in a holding cell. When he enlists the help of an ex-cop to commute his prison sentence, Kline inadvertently tangles with a schism of the very cult he sought to destroy. Can Kline investigate the sect’s ritualistic murder spree without getting lured into their ranks? Frigid and precise, Phantom Limb interrogates our notions of wholeness, fate, and the lengths we are willing to go to connect with a higher power. In conversation with Colin Winnette.

Moderators

Colin Winnette

Colin Winnette is a writer from Denton, Texas. His novel Users (2023) was a Finalist for the Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction, a New Yorker “Best Book of 2023”, a NY Times “Editor’s Choice” pick, and was called “The First Great Novel About Virtual Reality” by The Nation... Read More →

Speakers

Brian Evenson

Brian Evenson is the author of two dozen books of fiction, most recently the story collection Good Night, Sleep Tight. His collection Song for the Unraveling of the World won the Shirley Jackson Award and the World Fantasy Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times' Ray Bradbury... Read More →

Tuesday October 20, 2026 7:00pm - 8:30pm PDT
City Lights 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco

Sci-fi / Fantasy / Horror, FREE

City San Francisco

6:00pm PDT

Nafissa Thompson-Spires: The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard Milford

Wednesday October 21, 2026 6:00pm - 7:30pm PDT

Museum of the African Diaspora

Buy Tickets/RSVP

FREE, $10-$15 suggested donation

Co-presented with Museum of the African Diaspora

From the author of the multi-award-winning, National Book Award–longlisted, “vivid, fast, funny, way-smart, and verbally inventive” (George Saunders) story collection Heads of the Colored People, comes a sly, spry, literary debut novel. We find ourselves in 1920s Oklahoma, just far enough out of Tulsa, just long enough after the Race Massacre of 1921. For as long as anyone can remember, the Milfords have led plentiful lives on the backs of the townspeople of Newville. On the ominous brink of the Great Depression and at the height of Prohibition, Richard Milford is an infamous moonshiner and womanizer who, it seems, finally crossed the wrong person at the wrong time. He’s dead and buried with only his women to mourn him, but a question remains: Who killed him, and why? Top suspects are his four “wives,” but as their stories burst to light, the very idea of a true story comes apart before our eyes. In conversation with Margaret Wilkerson Sexton. Doors at 5:30pm.

Moderators

Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

MARGARET WILKERSON SEXTON studied creative writing at Dartmouth College and law at UC Berkeley. Her most recent novel, On the Rooftop, was a 2022 Reese’s Book Club Pick. The Revisioners won a 2020 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work... Read More →

Speakers

Nafissa Thompson-Spires

Nafissa Thompson-Spires is the author of the award-winning, National Book Award longlisted short story collection, Heads of the Colored People. She earned a doctorate in English from Vanderbilt University and a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University... Read More →

Wednesday October 21, 2026 6:00pm - 7:30pm PDT
Museum of the African Diaspora 685 Mission St, San Francisco

Fiction, FREE

City San Francisco

6:00pm PDT

Rapture: the art that moves us

Wednesday October 21, 2026 6:00pm - 7:30pm PDT

Decentered Arts

Buy Tickets/RSVP

FREE, $10-$15 suggested donation

An interactive evening of poetry, music, drumming, and call-and-response performance where audiences are invited to clap, sing, sway, and become part of the rhythm. Rapture transforms the reading into a collective, full-body experience of sound, movement, and shared energy. Featuring poets and performers BB Brown, Trinh Lê, Sun Park, Matt Pacelli, Kimi Sugioka, and Joe Wadlington. Curated by London Pinkney. Doors at 5:30pm.

Moderators

London Pinkney

London Pinkney is a writer and the editor-in-chief of The Ana. She is currently working on her debut essay collection that explores the history & culture of Black Californians.

Speakers

Kimi Sugioka

Kimi Sugioka is a poet, songwriter, and educator. She is the current Poet Laureate for the City of Alameda, a post that includes creating platforms for the presentation of a diverse variety of poets and spoken-word artists. Kimi also performs her own work frequently throughout the... Read More →

Joe Wadlington

Joe Wadlington is a San Francisco writer, events producer, and drag queen. His writing has been published in the New Yorker, Vox, The San Francisco Chronicle, and the recent collection The Dreams I Dream: Letters to San Francisco. As his drag persona, Jubilee, he hosts the m... Read More →

Trinh Lê

Matt Pacelli

Matt Pacelli is a fast casual restaurant chain specializing in warm, deli-style sandwiches anchored by his preservative-free sourdough bread made with a traditional San Francisco starter.

Sun Park

Sun Park is a visual artist and writer based in San Francisco whose work is informed by their upbringing and departure from the white Protestant church, current study of saju (Korean astrology), and love of the ocean and other Bay Area landscapes. Sun is a current Creative in Resident... Read More →

Wednesday October 21, 2026 6:00pm - 7:30pm PDT
Decentered Arts 1175 Folsom St, San Francisco

Performance, FREE

City San Francisco

6:30pm PDT

Kearny Street Workshop presents APAture Literary Showcase

Wednesday October 21, 2026 6:30pm - 7:30pm PDT

Arc Gallery

Buy Tickets/RSVP

$15

APAture, the only festival to put the focus on emerging Asian Pacific American artists, returns from Oct. 17th to Dec. 12th for its 27th year. This year's theme, GENERATION, turns our focus toward what we inherit, what we cultivate, and what we pass on—seeding growth for the future health of our communities while honoring the artistic lineages that have brought us to this moment. As we consider what the next generation of artists will hold and shape, we celebrate creative inheritance as an active, collective practice, one that bridges past, present, and future through art. What do you carry forward, and what will you leave behind? This year's literary showcase features writers Alyson Sagala, Bianca Datta, Brandon Vu, Leslie Nguyen-Okwu, Mai-Linh Hong, May-Li Khoe, Monica Korde, Neha M. Sampat, Rose Wong, and Vina Vo. Doors at 6:00pm.

Speakers

Alyson Sagala

Alyson Sagala is a writer from San Jose, CA currently based in Mendocino County. She has received support from the Mendocino Coast Writer’s Conference, Kearny Street Workshop, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Writers Grotto. She is currently working on her first novel.

Bianca Datta

Bianca Datta (she/her) grew up in Maryland and has lived in San Francisco for the past four years. Formally, she trained as a scientist (studying the colors of butterfly wings) and now works on sustainable foods. She is a 2026 Fellow of the Writer's Grotto Rooted and Written program... Read More →

Brandon Vu

Brandon Vu is an educator in the Bay Area. He was a season 22 member of AWP’s Writer-to-Writer Program and was a finalist for the 2025 Goldline Press Chapbook Competition. Additionally, he was a finalist for the 2026 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize. His work has appeared in... Read More →

Leslie V. Nguyen-Okwu

Leslie V. Nguyen-Okwu is a Vietnamese Nigerian American writer and journalist with bylines in The New York Times, BBC, National Geographic, The Economist, and Harper's Bazaar. She has received fellowships and residencies from the Aspen Institute’s Summer Words, Hedgebrook, Tin House... Read More →

Mai-Linh Hong

Mai-Linh Hong is a Vietnamese American refugee poet and literary scholar. Her debut poetry collection, Continental Drift, won the 2025 Trio Award and was published by Trio House Press in July 2026. Poems appear or are forthcoming in Waxwing, Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, Wildness... Read More →

May-Li Khoe

Monica Korde

Monica Korde is a poet and artist from India based in California. She served as Poet Laureate of Belmont (2021–2025) and is the city’s first South Asian immigrant to hold the role. Founder of Project POETRY 360, Monica centers the voices of bipoc, queer, youth, and immigrant artists... Read More →

Neha M. Sampat

As a besharam (shameless) brown, queer, disabled woman, Neha M. Sampat centers life on multiple margins through her speaking, writing, creating, and acting up. Their poetry, essays, insight, and art are featured in values-aligned publications and exhibits including The B'K Magazine... Read More →

Rose Wong

Rose Wong is Chinese writer and journalist from Hong Kong and Vancouver, Canada and a MFA in Creating Writing candidate at St. Mary’s College of California. Her writing has appeared in Flash Fiction Magazine, Cordella Magazine, Pile Press, the Oregonian, and the Tampa Bay Times... Read More →

Vina Vo

Vina Vo is a storyteller, facilitator, and organizer who bridges the cultural and geographic divide caused by displacement and diaspora. Her professional and community work revolve around creating and nurturing communities of belonging through storytelling, interactive learning experiences... Read More →

Wednesday October 21, 2026 6:30pm - 7:30pm PDT
Arc Gallery 1246 Folsom St, San Francisco

Performance

City San Francisco

6:30pm PDT

Artificial Intimacy: Sherry Turkle and A.I.

Wednesday October 21, 2026 6:30pm - 8:00pm PDT

YBCA Screening Room

Buy Tickets/RSVP

Co-presented with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Sherry Turkle has spent decades studying how digital technologies isolate us from one another. Now, in her latest book, Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk To Machines, the psychologist who pioneered our understanding of human-computer relationships explores the seductive and beguiling nature of chatbots presented as “perfect” companions. How does their popularity point to existing wells of deep loneliness in our current culture, and how does increasing reliance on a one-sided digital ear affect users’ ability to maintain offscreen relationships with other humans? In conversation with New Yorker cartoonist Amy Kurzweil, whose graphic novel Artificial: A Love Story suggests an alternate path in which AI isn’t used as a human connection substitute, but rather a tool to support and deepen the real-world relationships we already have. The conversation is part of Free Wednesdays at YBCA, which offers extended gallery hours, hands-on afternoon art-making, and special evening programs—all for free. Doors at 6:00pm.

Moderators

Amy Kurzweil

Amy Kurzweil is a New Yorker cartoonist and the author of two award-winning graphic memoirs: Flying Couch and Artificial: A Love Story, which was named a Best Book of 2023 by NPR, The New Yorker, and Kirkus. She is the 2024 winner of the Overseas Press Club’s “Best Cartoon Award... Read More →

Speakers

Sherry Turkle

Sherry Turkle is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and
Technology at MIT and the founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. A
leading expert in humans’ relationship with digital objects, she continues to revolutionize
ou... Read More →

Wednesday October 21, 2026 6:30pm - 8:00pm PDT
YBCA Screening Room 701 Mission St, San Francisco

Nonfiction, FREE

City San Francisco

7:00pm PDT

California Journeys

Wednesday October 21, 2026 7:00pm - 8:30pm PDT

KALW

Buy Tickets/RSVP

FREE, $10–15 suggested donation

Co-presented with KALW

Taking the driver’s seat on tonight’s narrative journey through California is Grant Faulkner, whose recent “flash novel” something out there in the distance pairs short, perfectly crystallized prose vignettes with Gail Butensky’s photographs of the American West. Riding shotgun is Irena Smith, whose memoir Troika is a modern-day Odyssey set in California’s Central Coast, as three generations of women share profound family stories and create new ones. As for Angelica Glass, she’ll opt out of driving altogether—her memoir Scavenging Beauty relates her quest to find healing while traversing all the streets in Santa Cruz County by foot. In true travelogue style, their conversation will be accompanied by photos illustrating each author’s journey. Doors at 6:30pm.

Moderators

Grant Faulkner

Grant Faulkner is the co-founder of Memoir Nation (and also the co-host of the Memoir Nation podcast), the co-founder of the Flash Fiction Institute, the co-founder of 100 Word Story, and an executive producer on America’s Next Great Author. He has published All the Comfort Si... Read More →

Speakers

Irena Smith

Irena Smith is the author of the award-winning memoir The Golden Ticket: A Life in College Admissions Essays and Troika: Three Generations, Three Days, and a Very American Road Trip. Her obsession with how words work began early (as a child growing up in Soviet Russia, she was known to occasionally stand on furniture and recite Pushkin poems), and her writing focuses on migration, memory, motherhood, generational expectations, the petty indignities of middle... Read More →

Angelica Glass

Angelica Glass had a decades-long career in social work in California, cluminating in directing and helping to design a program that provides support and services to children and families affected by methermphetamine abuse. The mother of two grown sons, she lives with her wife in Santa Cruz... Read More →

Wednesday October 21, 2026 7:00pm - 8:30pm PDT
KALW 220 Montgomery St, Suite 100, San Francisco, CA 94104

Nonfiction, FREE

City San Francisco

7:00pm PDT

Vigdis Hjorth: Repetition

Wednesday October 21, 2026 7:00pm - 8:30pm PDT

Telegraph Hill Books

Buy Tickets/RSVP

FREE, $10-$15 suggested donation

Sponsored by Norway House and Center for the Art of Translation
Part of Words Around the World

From International Booker Prize– and National Book Award–nominated author Vigdis Hjorth comes her latest novel finally translated into English, Repetition. As winter approaches in Norway and the daylight dwindles, a chance encounter prompts a novelist to reexamine her past. The seismic events following her sixteenth birthday return with haunting vividness, exposing a story both utterly familiar and desperately strange. It was the year she first got drunk, the year she first had sex with a boy. She was watched like a hawk by an anxious mother and a silent, distant father. It was a year of typical teenage fixation and typical teenage frivolity, and of all the usual parental fretting. Until something else took hold, and her family made an unspoken decision and a terrible sacrifice. Only now, decades later, can these events come close to being comprehended. In conversation with Daniela Blei.

Moderators

Daniela Blei

Daniela Blei is a historian, editor, and academic writing coach with a habit of digging up the past in unlikely places. Her work has appeared in Smithsonian Magazine, New Republic, the Atlantic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere, and she writes and edits for the Stanford Social Innovation Review. She has a Ph.D. from Stanford, was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley, and has taught at Reed College. For more than a decade, she has coached scholars whose books have gone on to leading unive... Read More →

Speakers

Vigdis Hjorth

Vigdis Hjorth is the author of over a dozen prize-winning and best-selling novels. Will and Testament sold 170,000 copies in Norway and has received several awards, including the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature and the Norwegian Booksellers’ Prize, as well as being nominated... Read More →

Wednesday October 21, 2026 7:00pm - 8:30pm PDT
Telegraph Hill Books 1501 Grant Ave, San Francisco

Words Around the World, FREE

City San Francisco

8:15pm PDT

All Hallows Eve: An Evening with Ellen Datlow & Friends

Wednesday October 21, 2026 8:15pm - 9:45pm PDT

The Lost Church

Buy Tickets/RSVP

$15 / $3 early bird discount until October 18th (code: earlybird16)

Co-presented with Locus Magazine and SF in SF

Celebrate the spooky season with Ellen Datlow, Hugo Award–winning editor of the new horror anthology All Hallows Eve: Stories of Halloween and Other Festivals of the Dead, a chilling lineup of 19 original short stories delving into our worldwide obsession with that time of year when the veil is lifted, spirits come alive, and the boundary between the living and the dead is far too thin. Joined by anthology contributors and world-class masters of the genre Linda D. Addison, Theresa DeLucci, Brian Evenson, and Jeffrey Ford, Datlow will offer a rare peek behind the publishing curtain, introducing the authors reading from their featured works with insights on how each one was hand-picked for inclusion in her anthology. But that’s not all—Datlow will also sit down with Locus Magazine editor-in-chief Liza Trombi to discuss four-plus decades of her legendary career in the horror genre, and the countless authors she’s shepherded to print. Doors at 7:30pm.

Moderators

Liza Trombi

LIZA GROEN TROMBI is the four-time Hugo Award winning Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Locus Magazine. A life-long reader of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, she studied literature, history, and translation at university, and worked in several fields before joining the magazine... Read More →

Speakers

Jeffrey Ford

Jeffrey Ford is the author of the novels The Physiognomy, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, The Shadow Year, and Ahab's Return. His collections are The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, The Drowned Life, Crackpot Palace, A Natural History... Read More →

Theresa DeLucci

Theresa DeLucci's short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Tor.com, Weird Horror, and in Fears: Tales of Psychological Horror, edited by Ellen Datlow, and received an honorable mention in The Year's Best Horror Vol. 14. She has talked pop culture for Reactor, W... Read More →

Linda D. Addison

Linda D. Addison, an award-winning author of five collections, including "How To Recognize A Demon Has Become Your Friend," recipient of HWA Lifetime Achievement Award, and SFPA Grand Master of Fantastic Poetry. Her 2025 books: "Everything Endless" written with Jamal J. Hodge; "An Illegal Feast "with... Read More →

Ellen Datlow

Ellen Datlow has been editing sf/f/h short fiction for more than four decades. She currently acquires short stories and novellas for Reactor, Tor.com, and Nightfire. She has edited numerous anthologies for adults, young adults, and children, including The Best Horror of the Year ... Read More →

Brian Evenson

Wednesday October 21, 2026 8:15pm - 9:45pm PDT
The Lost Church 988 Columbus Ave, San Francisco

Sci-fi / Fantasy / Horror

City San Francisco

6:00pm PDT

California's Diverse Food and Farming Movements

Thursday October 22, 2026 6:00pm - 7:00pm PDT

Book Club of California

Buy Tickets/RSVP

FREE

Co-presented with Book Club of California

Californians tend to think and talk a lot about food—not just who has the best farmers’ markets or where to find the latest Instagram-famous pastry, but also about how the ways we grow, harvest, distribute, and consume food can best serve goals related to climate, social justice, and collective well-being. In his new book, North Stars of Emancipation: California’s Diverse Food and Farming Movements, researcher and activist Antonio Roman-Alcalá finds guidance on all these questions in our state’s grassroots food movements, and in the vision of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and other people who are leading the way. Joining Roman-Alcalá in conversation is one of those leaders, Sara Calvosa Olson, author of Chími Nu’am: Native Californian Foodways for the Contemporary Kitchen. Member/guest reception at 5:30pm.

Moderators

Sara Calvosa Olson

Sara Calvosa Olson (Karuk) is the author of Chími Nu’am: Native California Foodways for the Contemporary Kitchen (Heyday, 2023). Her work explores narratives that nourish Indigenous food sovereignty through renewed relationships with California’s oldest foods... Read More →

Speakers

Antonio Roman-Alcalá

Antonio Roman-Alcalá is an educator, researcher, writer, musician, and organizer based in Berkeley, California who has worked on sustainable food systems and radical political change for over 20 years. Antonio is currently an Assistant Professor at California State University East Bay teaching Geography... Read More →

Thursday October 22, 2026 6:00pm - 7:00pm PDT
Book Club of California 47 Kearny St, San Francisco, CA 94108

Nonfiction, FREE

City San Francisco

6:00pm PDT

Her Story, History, Their Story, Whose Story? Facts and Fictions in Historical Queer Books

Thursday October 22, 2026 6:00pm - 7:30pm PDT

GLBT Historical Society

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$10 / FREE for GLBT Historical Society Members

Co-presented with Bay Area Reporter and GLBT Historical Society

What are the rules of engagement when telling historical tales about the lives of LGBTQ characters? Authors and scholars compare notes on their fictional and nonfiction works that resonate realistically, and even those that are completely fantastical yet set in the real world’s past. Featuring authors Mark Abramson, Lucy Jane Bledsoe, Joey Cain, and Katie Gilmartin. Moderated by Bay Area Reporter arts editor and author Jim Provenzano. Doors at 5:30pm.

Moderators

Jim Provenzano

Jim Provenzano is the author of seven novels, including the Lambda Literary Award winner Every Time I Think of You and its sequel Message of Love (a Lambda finalist), his debut novel PINS and its award-winning commissioned stage adaptation. Other works include four audiobook adap... Read More →

Speakers

Mark Abramson

Mark Abramson is the author of eight volumes of “Beach Reading”—a mystery series set primarily in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood, plus publishing nine non-fiction memoirs and diaries covering various chapters of his remarkable life story, including Sex, Drugs & Disco... Read More →

Lucy Jane Bledsoe

Lucy Jane Bledsoe’s eighth novel, Tell the Rest, received starred reviews in both Library Journal and Kirkus Reviews, and the New York Times said her work “triumphs as an intimate and humane evocation of day-to-day life under inhumane circumstances.” Her fiction has won a California Arts Council Fellowship in Literature, an American Library Association Stonewall Award, the Arts & Letters Fiction Prize, three Pushca... Read More →

Joey Cain

Joey Cain is an exhibition curator, activist and LGBT historian specializing in the history of Queer Men’s Consciousness and self-conception. He’s curated exhibits for the San Francisco Public Library and the GLBT Historical Society, and co-edits the Edward Carpenter Circle website. His... Read More →

Katie Gilmartin

Katie Gilmartin’s checkered past includes stints as a buoyant union organizer, bona fide sex researcher, and deeply engaged college professor. She cofounded City Art Cooperative Gallery, a still-thriving arts space on Valencia Street, and launched the Queer Ancestors Project, devoted to forging... Read More →

Thursday October 22, 2026 6:00pm - 7:30pm PDT
GLBT Historical Society 4127 18th St, San Francisco, CA 94114

Storytelling/Memoir

City San Francisco

7:00pm PDT

Ben Ehrenreich: Hold Still

Thursday October 22, 2026 7:00pm - 8:30pm PDT

City Lights

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FREE

Co-presented with City Lights

In the months after his mother Barbara’s death, author and essayist Ben Ehrenreich set himself the task of writing a story every day. Leaving open the question of what a “story” might be, some entries ended up fable-like tales involving animals doing surprising things. Others were closer to journal entries, many of them about his daughter, who was nearly three at the time, and who was trying to understand death herself at the same time that she was voraciously exploring the living world. This deeply moving collection of those daily journeys into storytelling—a finely crafted combination of fiction, memoir, and poetic prose—is both profound and satisfyingly whimsical. In conversation with Daniel Gumbiner.

Moderators

Daniel Gumbiner

Daniel Gumbiner is the author of The Boatbuilder, a nominee for the National Book Award and Fire in the Canyon, a California Book Award Finalist. His short story “The Vermilion Sea,” published in VQR, received the Emily Clark Balch Prize. He is the Editor of The Believer and lives... Read More →

Speakers

Ben Ehrenreich

Ben Ehrenreich is the author, most recently, of Hold Still, published October 2026 by City Lights. He has also written two books of nonfiction—the American Book Award-winning Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time and The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine... Read More →

Thursday October 22, 2026 7:00pm - 8:30pm PDT
City Lights 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco

Storytelling/Memoir, FREE

City San Francisco

7:30pm PDT

Lights, Camera, Action: Porchlight Storytelling on the Big Screen

Thursday October 22, 2026 7:30pm - 9:30pm PDT

Vogue Theater

Buy Tickets/RSVP

$20 adv / $25 door

The Bay Area’s long-running Porchlight storytelling series returns to Litquake for this special cinematic edition, featuring tales of the silver screen from the Bay’s finest writers and comedians including Jack Boulware, Mukethe Kawinzi, Ali Liebegott, Allison Mick, TK Moyer, and sam sax. Co-hosted by Arline Klatte and Beth Lisick. Music by Marc Capelle. Doors at 7:00pm.

Speakers

Mukethe Kawinzi

Arline Klatte

Arline Klatte is the co-founder of the Porchlight Storytelling series, San Francisco's longest-running storytelling show, now in its 24th season.

Beth Lisick

Beth Lisick is an author, actor, and events producer who lives in New York's Hudson Valley. Originally from the Bay Area, Beth is the co-founder of the Porchlight Storytelling Series, now in its 24th year. The popular storytelling series, known for its adventurous booking style, has featured... Read More →

Ali Liebegott

Ali Liebegott is a writer and painter that currently resides in Los Angeles. She’s published four books: The Beautifully Worthless, The IHOP Papers, Cha-Ching!, and The Summer of Dead Birds. She’s the recipient of a Peabody Award, two Lambda Literary Awards and a Ferro-Grumle... Read More →

Jack Boulware

Jack Boulware co-founded the Bay Area’s Litquake literary festival and was director for 24 years. He is author/co-author of "San Francisco Bizarro" (St. Martin’s, 2000) and the punk oral history "Gimme Something Better" (Penguin, 2009). He currently works on book projects and... Read More →

Allison Mick

Allison Mick (she/they) is a Los Angeles-based horror writer and the author of eco-gothic HUMBOLDT CUT (Erewhon Books). Her upcoming releases are DIVE (Tenebrous Press, Nov 2026), a speculative punk horror collection and maritime eco-horror DARK WAVES (Erewhon, Jan 2027). Mick’s... Read More →

T.K. Moyer

Terrence K. Moyer is an author, stand-up comedian, actor, and U.S. Navy veteran based in San Francisco, California. After serving honorably in the United States Navy, he pursued a career in the performing arts, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Acting for Film from the Academy of... Read More →

Sam Sax

Sam Sax is the author of the novel Yr Dead (Longlisted for the National Book Award) and the poetry collections PIG (best book of 2023 Vulture & Electric Lit), Bury It (Winner of the James Laughlin Award), and Madness (Winner of the National Poetry Series). They're the two time Bay... Read More →

Thursday October 22, 2026 7:30pm - 9:30pm PDT
Vogue Theater 3290 Sacramento St, San Francisco

Storytelling/Memoir

City San Francisco

8:00pm PDT

Hieu Minh Nguyen & Friends

Thursday October 22, 2026 8:00pm - 10:00pm PDT

The Stud

Buy Tickets/RSVP

FREE, $10-15 suggested donation

Co-presented with The Stud

In celebration of Hieu Minh Nguyen's third poetry collection, Staying Still, join Litquake and The Stud for a night of readings and drag performances that highlight the power and resonance of stillness. Featuring drag from Pam, Hera Wynn, Mary Vice, and Hands. Readings from Brittany Newell, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Brontez Purnell, and Garrett Schlichte. Hosted by curator Micheal Foulk and Hands. Doors at 7:00 PM.

Speakers

Brontez Purnell

Brontez Purnell is the author of several books, most recently 100 Boyfriends, which won the 2022 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Fiction, was longlisted for the 2022 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award and the 2021 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize, and was named an Editors... Read More →

Micheal Foulk

Garrett Schlichte

Hera Wynn

Hera Wynn is a transgender performer in San Francisco and the greater Bay Area, for over 5 years she has made her mark across the scene as a performer, producer, hostess, and transgender activist. From her fierce looks to enchanting performances she will no doubt leave you wanting more... Read More →

Mary Vice

Mary Vice is a staple of San Francisco’s nightlife scene. She is the current reigning winner of both the High Princx and Rollin with the Homos pageants, and has won a handful of other local titles including Miss Gay San Francisco. She emcees two weekly shows: Pillows, every Monday at Powerhouse... Read More →

Han (Hands) Ayasse

Hands is a Bay Area Drag King, current reigning Father of Pearl 2026, first-born son, self-made man, the man in the House of Cringe and the Man Cave, and your toxic ex-boyfriend's toxic-ex boyfriend.

Brittany Newell

Hieu Minh Nguyen

Hieu Minh Nguyen is the author of the poetry collections, This Way to the Sugar (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014), Not Here (Coffee House Press, 2018), and Staying Still (Tin House, 2026). Winner of the 2019 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry from the Publishing Triangle, some of his other... Read More →

Thursday October 22, 2026 8:00pm - 10:00pm PDT
The Stud 1123 Folsom St, San Francisco

Poetry, FREE

Age Limit 21+
City San Francisco

8:15pm PDT

Chad Harbach: The Brightness

Thursday October 22, 2026 8:15pm - 9:45pm PDT

The Lost Church

Buy Tickets/RSVP

$15 / $3 early bird discount until October 18th (code: earlybird16)
$35 for presale signed book (ticket not included)

From the bestselling author of literary sensation The Art of Fielding comes an urgent, deeply felt story of friendship, art, love, and grief, following two young women on the brink of irrevocable change. Parties and weddings, messy hookups and marred friendships, art and love and grief—The Brightness follows the electric, chaotic, everything-can-happen lives of Pella and her best friend, Irma, as they fumble their way out of sleepy, Midwestern Westish College and into a larger world that will upend their connection and everything they thought they understood about their own place within it. In stunning scenes and spectacular characters—each drawn with an almost superhuman vividness and humanity—Chad Harbach captures that specific, shimmering anxiety of your twenties when life still feels wide open, even as hard and irreversible choices start closing in. In conversation with novelist Eirinie Carson. Doors at 7:30pm.

Order a signed copy of The Brightness here (note: does not include general admission ticket).

Moderators

Eirinie Carson

Eirinie Carson is an award-winning Black British writer living in California. She writes about sexual taboos, death and dying, illegal substances, hauntings both real and imagined, and ancestral inheritance in a world desperate to sever the connections between what came before and... Read More →

Speakers

Chad Harbach

Chad Harbach grew up in Wisconsin and studied at Harvard and the University of Virginia. He is a cofounder of n+1 and the author of the bestselling The Art of Fielding, which has been translated into more than twenty languages.

Thursday October 22, 2026 8:15pm - 9:45pm PDT
The Lost Church 988 Columbus Ave, San Francisco

Fiction

City San Francisco

6:30pm PDT

Five Tastes: Delicious Recipes for Chinese Flavors with Fuchsia Dunlop

Friday October 23, 2026 6:30pm - 7:30pm PDT

Omnivore Books on Food

Buy Tickets/RSVP

FREE

Part of Words Around the World
Co-presented with Omnivore Books on Food

Over thousands of years, Chinese chefs have mastered how to combine the five tastes―sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and pungent―harmoniously in a dish. In her latest cookbook, Five Tastes, Fuchsia Dunlop shares with home cooks 120 easy recipes inspired by culinary traditions across China. She includes both old-fashioned favorites and her freshly invented dishes that combine Chinese flavors with produce found in any Western market or supermarket. Join us at Omnivore Books to meet this superstar of Chinese cuisine and learn about her processes for recipe research and development. In conversation with Harold McGee.

Moderators

Harold McGee

Harold McGee is the author of the award-winning books On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen and Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World’s Smells.

Speakers

Fuchsia Dunlop

Fuchsia Dunlop is a James Beard Award–winning food writer and cook specializing in Chinese cuisine. She trained as a chef at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine in the 1990s and has been researching Chinese culinary culture ever since. Fuchsia is the author of eight books including, most... Read More →

Friday October 23, 2026 6:30pm - 7:30pm PDT
Omnivore Books on Food 3885a Cesar Chavez St, San Francisco, CA 94131

Food, FREE

City San Francisco

6:30pm PDT

Walter Mosley: Hanging and Burning

Friday October 23, 2026 6:30pm - 8:00pm PDT

SFPL Main Branch, Koret Auditorium

Buy Tickets/RSVP

FREE, $10–15 suggested donation, $33 for signed book

Co-presented with SFPL

In the latest addition to the inimitable Walter Mosley’s Joe King Oliver series, King finds himself accepting (again at his grandmother’s request) a case from Arman Babylon, a powerful Los Angeles gangster now dying from cancer. Babylon’s granddaughter, Twyla Mann, has been missing for years, and he’s desperate to find her before he passes. The search pulls King into the Babylons’ stained past and the cold case of Dalia Shorts, a torch singer who vanished without a trace and whom Arman was once suspected of killing. As King follows her trail from L.A. to New York and back, he’ll realize nothing is what it seems as he uncovers a pattern of violence that has targeted the women around Babylon for decades. How much will King be willing to risk to finally set things right? In conversation with Carvell Wallace. Doors at 6:00pm.

Moderators

Carvell Wallace

Carvell Wallace is the best-selling author of the memoir Another Word For Love — a Kirkus Prize finalist, and Whiting Award winner. As a podcaster he has been nominated for a Peabody and won a Kaleidoscope Award in Journalism. His essays have appeared in the New York Times Maga... Read More →

Speakers

Walter Mosley

Walter Mosley is one of America’s most celebrated writers. He was given the 2020 National Book Award’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America, and honored with the Anisfield-Wolf Award, a Grammy, a PEN USA... Read More →

Friday October 23, 2026 6:30pm - 8:00pm PDT
SFPL Main Branch, Koret Auditorium 100 Larkin St, San Francisco

Fiction, FREE

City San Francisco

7:00pm PDT

Carolina Pihelgas: The Cut Line

Friday October 23, 2026 7:00pm - 8:30pm PDT

Telegraph Hill Books

Buy Tickets/RSVP

FREE, $10–15 suggested donation

Part of Words Around the World
Sponsored by Center for the Art of Translation

Poet, author, translator, and editor Carolina Pihelgas is a leading literary figure in her home country of Estonia. Now, with The Cut Line, translated by Darcy Hurford, Pihelgas’s “extraordinary” (Estonian Literary Magazine) prose writing is available to English readers for the first time. In fewer than 100 pages, Pihelgas takes readers to a near-future Estonian countryside, plagued by the effects of climate change and poised for an impending conflict. These hints of future violence recall the protagonist’s own troubled history, even as she attempts to find serenity and order in the rhythms of nature and simple work. Joining Pihelgas in conversation is Sasha Vasilyuk, award-winning author of the novel Your Presence Is Mandatory. Doors at 6:30pm.

Moderators

Sasha Vasilyuk

Sasha Vasilyuk is a journalist and author of a debut novel, Your Presence Is Mandatory (Bloomsbury), winner of the California Book Award and the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. It has been translated into seven languages. Her nonfiction has been published in the New York T... Read More →

Speakers

Carolina Pihelgas

Carolina Pihelgas is an Estonian writer, poet, translator, and editor. Her collection of prose poems Valgus kivi sees ('The Light Within the Stone', 2019) received the Estonian Cultural Endowment Award for the best poetry book of the year. In 2020, she was appointed Tartu’s Cit... Read More →

Friday October 23, 2026 7:00pm - 8:30pm PDT
Telegraph Hill Books 1501 Grant Ave, San Francisco

Words Around the World, FREE

City San Francisco

7:00pm PDT

Queerly Beloved: A Celebration of LGBTQ+ Writing in Foglifter

Friday October 23, 2026 7:00pm - 9:00pm PDT

The Stud

Buy Tickets/RSVP

FREE, $10-15 suggested donation

Co-presented with Foglifter and The Stud

Foglifter—created by and for LGBTQ+ writers and readers—continues the San Francisco Bay Area’s tradition of groundbreaking queer and trans writing, with an emphasis on publishing those multi-marginalized (BIPOC, youth, elders, and people with disabilities). Queerly Beloved is a celebration of the latest queer writing coming out in Foglifter's newest journals, online zone, and Start a Riot! Chapbook series. Limited print copies of the newest issue will be available for purchase—get them before anyone else! Featuring: Brent Armendinger, Juda Ātman, KB Brookins, Reggie Edmonds-Vásquez, Alix Perry, and Allegra Wilson! Doors at 6:00pm.

Speakers

Reggie Edmonds-Vásquez

KB Brookins

KB Brookins is a writer, educator, and cultural worker from Texas. KB’s poetry collection Freedom House (2023) won the American Library Association Barbara Gittings Literature Award and the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Best First Book of Poetry. KB’s memoir Pretty (20... Read More →

Brent Armendinger

Brent Armendinger (he/him) is the author of Street Gloss (The Operating System, 2019) and The Ghost in Us Was Multiplying (Noemi Press, 2015), both of which were finalists for the California Book Award in Poetry. As a poet, he is interested in queer embodiment, site-specific prac... Read More →

Allegra Wilson

Allegra Wilson (she/her) is a writer living in Northern California. Her chapbook, song & ruins, received the 2025 Lefty Blondie Press First Chapbook Award, selected by Stacey Waite. She is the author of a micro-chapbook, sex party at the opera house (Whittle Micro-Press), and her... Read More →

Judas Ātman

Judas Ātman tells trans stories for trans people. They are a trans butch, multidisciplinary artist based in Oakland. An alum of NYU Tisch's BFA in Drama program, he is now in the process of receiving his MFA in Creative Writing at SFSU. Outside of his studies, he serves as the Assistant Managing... Read More →

Alix Perry

Alix Perry is a trans writer of fiction and poetry based in Portland, Oregon. They are the author of the poetry chapbook Tomatoes Beverly (Querencia Press, 2025) and have been nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology. Their work can be found in Flash Fiction Magazine, The Shor... Read More →

Friday October 23, 2026 7:00pm - 9:00pm PDT
The Stud 1123 Folsom St, San Francisco

Party, FREE

Age Limit 21+
City San Francisco

8:15pm PDT

Playlist Storytellers

Friday October 23, 2026 8:15pm - 10:30pm PDT

The Lost Church

Buy Tickets/RSVP

$25 / $3 early bird discount until October 18th (code: earlybird16)

Everyone has a song that found them at the right time. Welcome to Playlist Storytellers, a live event where a curated group of writers share personal stories about a song that found them just when they needed it. Featuring stories from authors Laleh Khadivi, Tomas Moniz, Courtney Desiree Morris, and A. Van Jordan. Doors at 7:30pm.

Speakers

A. Van Jordan

A. Van Jordan is the author of five collections of poetry: Rise, which won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award (Tia Chucha Press, 2001); M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, (2005), which was listed as one the Best Books of 2005 by The London Times; Quantum Lyrics, (2007); and The Cineaste, (2013... Read More →

Tomas Moniz

Laleh Khadivi

Laleh Khadivi is the author of four novels, including The Age of Orphans, which received a Whiting Writers' Award; The Walking; A Good Country, a New York Times Editors' Choice; and, most recently, Female Life on Planet Earth. Her essays, stories, and criticism have appeared in ... Read More →

Courtney Desiree Morris

Courtney Desiree Morris is a visual and performance artist and associate professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her mediums include large-format portraiture and landscape photography, experimental video, performance art, and installation art. Thematically, her... Read More →

Friday October 23, 2026 8:15pm - 10:30pm PDT
The Lost Church 988 Columbus Ave, San Francisco

Music

City San Francisco

9:00pm PDT

Lit Crawl Afterparty

Saturday October 24, 2026 9:00pm - 11:00pm PDT

The Drawing Room: Annex

Buy Tickets/RSVP

$10 NOTAFLOF

We did it!! Join the Litquake team in celebrating another great festival, alongside Lit Crawl readers and programmers. Featuring libations from beverage sponsors Griffo Distillery and Saintsbury Winery!

Saturday October 24, 2026 9:00pm - 11:00pm PDT
The Drawing Room: Annex 599 Valencia St, San Francisco

Party

Age Limit 21+
City San Francisco

3:00pm PST

How They Did It: Getting Unstuck

Sunday November 8, 2026 3:00pm - 5:00pm PST

Page Street Co-Writing

Buy Tickets/RSVP

$25

Co-presented with LitCamp

You know the feeling. You're moving along, racking up the word count on your novel (or memoir, or creative nonfiction project) when suddenly you hit a wall, a dead end, a what-the-heck-am-I-supposed-to-write-next fork in the road. Call it writer’s block, or a crisis of confidence, or just the universe conspiring against you. But whatever you call it, it's happened to every writer. Join us as four authors, Samina Ali (Pieces You'll Never Get Back), Diana Kapp (The Last Free Women), Jason Roberts (Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life), and Parini Shroff (Some People) share their strategies for pushing past the roadblocks and getting the words flowing again. Moderated by Page Street founder Janis Cooke Newman (A Master Plan for Rescue). Plus, we'll serve complimentary Prosecco, wine, and NA drinks. Tickets support both Litquake and LitCamp. Doors at 3:00pm.

Moderators

Janis Cooke Newman

Janis Cooke Newman is the author of a memoir and two award-winning novels. She is also the founder of LitCamp, as well as Page Street Co-working for Writers.

Speakers

Samina Ali

Samina Ali is an award-winning author, curator, and popular speaker. Her debut novel, Madras on Rainy Days, won France’s prestigious Prix Premier Roman Etranger and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award in fiction. Her Tedx talk, ’“What the Quran Really Says About the... Read More →

Diana Kapp

Diana Kapp is a journalist who writes frequently about the intersection of women and modern culture, and has traveled in Afghanistan to report on the education of girls in the country’s rural northern provinces. Her work has has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Po... Read More →

Jason Roberts

Jason Roberts is a writer of nonfiction and fiction. His most recent book, Every Living Thing, was awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for biography, as well as the PEN America/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing award. His previous book, A Sense of the World, was a national bestseller, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and longlisted for the international Guardian First Book Award. He lives in Oakland and Montreal... Read More →

Parini Shroff

Parini Shroff is the bestselling author of The Bandit Queens, which was a Good Morning America Buzz Pick and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal and the Women's Prize for Fiction, as well as her new novel, Some People. She received her MFA from the University of Texas at Austin. She is a practicing attorney and currently lives in the Bay Area... Read More →

Sunday November 8, 2026 3:00pm - 5:00pm PST
Page Street Co-Writing 297 Page St, San Francisco

Nonfiction

City San Francisco

7:00pm PST

Nelio Biedermann: Lázár

Monday November 9, 2026 7:00pm - 8:30pm PST

Telegraph Hill Books

Buy Tickets/RSVP

Pay what you can to guarantee a seat; FREE to walk ups space depending

Part of Words Around the World
Sponsored by Center for the Art of Translation and the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia

Swiss phenom Nelio Biedermann has stormed onto the literary scene in a torrent—first racking up weeks on German bestseller lists for his debut novel Lázár, and later garnering a featured writeup in the New York Times for the novel’s English translation by Jamie Bulloch—all before the age of 25. His sweeping historical family saga has drawn comparisons to German masters such as Thomas Mann, and the epic tale was dubbed “a marvel” in a Publishers Weekly starred review. We’re thrilled to welcome Biedermann to San Francisco to discuss his novel in conversation with Blaise Zerega of Alta. Doors at 6:30pm.

Moderators

Blaise Zerega

Blaise Zerega is the editorial director of Alta Journal, an award-winning quarterly publication focused on the arts and culture of California and the West. At Alta, Blaise is responsible for print, online, events, and personnel; he personally edits all fiction and poetry. His jou... Read More →

Speakers

Nelio Biedermann

Nelio Biedermann, born in 2003, is the author of Anton will bleiben and Lázár. Originally published in Germany, Lázár is an international sensation and was an instant bestseller. It won the 2025 Favourite Book of Independent Booksellers award and is being translated into more than twenty-five languages. A native of Zurich, Biedermann is studying German literature and film at the University of Zuric... Read More →

Monday November 9, 2026 7:00pm - 8:30pm PST
Telegraph Hill Books 1501 Grant Ave, San Francisco

Words Around the World, FREE

City San Francisco

7:00pm PST

Jennifer Croft: Notes on Postcards

Tuesday November 10, 2026 7:00pm - 8:30pm PST

City Lights

Buy Tickets/RSVP

FREE, $10–15 suggested donation

Co-presented with City Lights Bookstore

Jennifer Croft may be best known as one of our foremost literary translators, bringing such acclaimed international authors as Olga Tokarczuk and Urszula Honek to English-speaking audiences. She’s also gained acclaim for her own writing, including her novel The Extinction of Irina Rey and her hybrid coming-of-age memoir Homesick, called “stunning and surprising” by the New York Times. Now Croft follows up with a second memoir, detailing her lifelong wanderlust and her habit of both collecting and sending postcards along the way. Notes on Postcards utilizes an innovative format to delve into universal topics: love, loss, parenthood, communication, and connection. We’re thrilled to host the memoir’s official pub-day launch at City Lights, featuring Croft in conversation with Britta Stromeyer. Doors at 6:30pm.

Moderators

Britta Stromeyer

Britta Stromeyer is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. Her writing appears in The Common, World Literature Today, Tupelo Quarterly, Beyond Words Magazine, Necessary Fiction, On the Seawall, Flash Fiction Magazine, Bending Genres Journal, Marin Independent Journal, and other publications. Britta has authored award-winning children's books and holds an MFA from Dominican University, CA, an M.A. from American University, and a Certificate in Novel Writing from Stanford University... Read More →

Speakers

Jennifer Croft

Jennifer Croft won a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship for her novel The Extinction of Irena Rey, the 2020 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her illustrated memoir Homesick and the 2018 International Booker Prize for her translation from Polish of Nobel laureate Olga T... Read More →

Tuesday November 10, 2026 7:00pm - 8:30pm PST
City Lights 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco

Words Around the World, FREE

City San Francisco

7:00pm PST

Saira Mohamed: What a Country Owes Its Soldiers

Wednesday November 18, 2026 7:00pm - 8:30pm PST

KALW

Buy Tickets/RSVP

FREE, $10–15 suggested donation

Co-presented with KALW

Legal scholar Saira Mohamed has focused her career on the ethics of armed conflict and mass atrocity, in particular on the legal obligations of governments around the world to protect and care for their military personnel. At a time when our own leaders publicly extol the contributions of soldiers and veterans but strategically dismantle their support systems, not to mention their sense of safety, these questions—at the intersections of law and ethics—are more essential than ever. Join Mohamed as she discusses her new book What a Country Owes Its Soldiers, deeply informed by her research and arguing compassionately for policies that convey genuine respect for soldiers’ humanity. In conversation with author and long-time New York Review of Books contributor Mark Danner. Doors at 6:30pm.

Moderators

Mark Danner

Speakers

Saira Mohamed

Saira Mohamed is Agnes Roddy Robb Chair in Jurisprudence, Ethics, and Social Responsibility and Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law.

Wednesday November 18, 2026 7:00pm - 8:30pm PST
KALW 220 Montgomery St, Suite 100, San Francisco, CA 94104

Nonfiction, FREE

City San Francisco

7:00pm PST

Jen Siraganian: Everything Has Been Moved, Even the Dead

Tuesday December 1, 2026 7:00pm - 8:30pm PST

Green Apple Books on the Park

Buy Tickets/RSVP

FREE

Co-presented with Green Apple Books

Join us when we welcome Jen Siraganian for the release of her debut poetry collection, Everything Has Been Moved, Even the Dead! Siraganian traces a self shaped by history, fragmentation, and memory as she weaves her family’s past in the Middle East with her identity as an Armenian American woman and mother. Whether portraying a grandparent’s survival during the Armenian Genocide, a father’s childhood in 1940s Palestine, or a son’s birth when “death is a neighbor,” Siraganian’s poems interrogate concepts of home, origins, belonging, and displacement. Featuring readings from Tongo Eisen-Martin, Nancy Miller Gomez, and Christin Rice. Watch online at Green Apple Books Youtube.

Speakers

Christin Rice

Christin Rice is a champion of doing the brave things that matter to you. She is a writer, a momma, a coach, and the author of The Clinic and The ABC's of Pandemic Parenting.

Nancy Miller Gomez

Jen Siraganian

Tongo Eisen-Martin

Originally from San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin is a poet, movement worker, and educator. His curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. He is the author of Someone?... Read More →

Tuesday December 1, 2026 7:00pm - 8:30pm PST
Green Apple Books on the Park 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco

Poetry, FREE

City San Francisco

7:30pm PST

Marlon James: The Disappearers

Thursday December 10, 2026 7:30pm - 9:00pm PST

Sydney Goldstein Theater

Buy Tickets/RSVP

$53 with code LITQUAKE5

Co-presented with City Arts & Lectures

In his new novel The Disappearers, award-winning author Marlon James traces the lives of a group of gay men in 1980s Jamaica after they are attacked by a mob, leaving one of them dead and the rest with terrible physical and mental injuries. As each man attempts to heal, they must also decide how they will continue their lives after facing such horrible violence. Some choose to ignore the event, while others look for retribution. In the process, James unveils the compromises society demands of oppressed people if they want to survive. In conversation with founder of NPR’s award-winning podcast Code Switch Shereen Marisol Meraji. A limited number of tickets include a copy of The Disappearers.

Moderators

Shereen Marisol Meraji

Shereen Marisol Meraji is a professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Journalism, where she also serves as the head of audio. She is a founder of NPR’s award-winning podcast Code Switch, which Apple Podcasts named its first-ever “Show of the Year.” Her past City Arts & Lectures interviews include Viet Thanh Nguyen, Hanif Abdurraqib, and Karla Cornejo Villavicencio... Read More →

Speakers

Marlon James

Marlon James was born in Jamaica in 1970. He is the author of the New York Times-bestseller Black Leopard, Red Wolf, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction in 2019. His novel A Brief History of Seven Killings won the 2015 Man Booker Prize. It was also a... Read More →

Thursday December 10, 2026 7:30pm - 9:00pm PST
Sydney Goldstein Theater 275 Hayes St, San Francisco

Fiction

City San Francisco

7:30pm PST

The Best Journey in the World: An Antarctic Story with Kim Stanley Robinson

Wednesday January 6, 2027 7:30pm - 9:00pm PST

Grace Cathedral

Buy Tickets/RSVP

FREE, $10-$15 suggested donation, $49 with signed book

Co-presented with Grace Cathedral’s The Forum

Interweaving memoir and good old fashioned ice adventure, Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest takes readers along on the journeys that have happened before and those that may never happen again. In May of 1911, Robert Scott and his men said goodbye to the sun and settled in for the long Antarctic winter. When the sun returned in September, they would try to become the first people to reach the South Pole. However, a week past the winter solstice, Scott’s second-in-command decided to take an impromptu sled trip. Chronicled by zoological assistant Apsley Cherry-Garrard, this side trip became The Worst Journey in the World, one of the best adventure books ever written. Robinson first read Cherry-Garrard’s book in his twenties and re-read it again in 1995, as preparation for a research trip to Antarctica for his Mars novels. It was a dream excursion: he traveled around the continent, by snowmobile and helicopter and airplane, and followed in their ill-fated footsteps. Doors at 7:00 PM.

Speakers

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson is the author of more than twenty books, including the bestselling Mars trilogy, The Ministry for the Future, and The High Sierra: A Love Story. He was a featured speaker at COP26 in Glasgow, at the UN’s Summit of the Future in 2024, and at COP30 in Belém... Read More →

Wednesday January 6, 2027 7:30pm - 9:00pm PST
Grace Cathedral 1100 California St, San Francisco

Sci-fi / Fantasy / Horror, FREE

City San Francisco

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