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Friday, October 16
 

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
avatar for Zeina Hashem Beck

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 →
avatar for Janine Mogannam

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 →
avatar for Deema Shehabi

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 →
avatar for Priscilla Wathington

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 →
avatar for Omar Zahzah

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 →
avatar for Jen Siraganian

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
 
Saturday, October 17
 

7:00pm PDT

Jean-Baptiste Phou: Coming Out of My Skin
Saturday October 17, 2026 7:00pm - Sunday October 18, 2026 4:00pm 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
Co-presented with Villa Albertine

Having grown up as a Cambodian immigrant in France, Jean-Baptiste Phou has long explored the challenges and contradictions of the Asian diaspora experience throughout his artistic career. However, up until now, he’s always been careful not to raise issues of sexuality—in particular, his homosexuality. In his recent memoir, Coming Out of My Skin, the artist shifts his focus to examining the role his ethnic origin has played in the construction of his sexual identity and his romantic relationships in a predominantly white environment. An astute observer of the various ways in which his body has been perceived, Phou asks: how does a marginalized person develop emotionally and build, reclaim, and express their sexuality? How does this inform the experience of a queer Asian person navigating predominantly white cultural spaces? In conversation with César Cadabes, Artistic Director for the GLBTQ Asian Pacific Alliance (GAPA) Theatre. Doors at 6:30pm
Moderators
avatar for César Cadabes

César Cadabes

César Cadabes is a Hawaii-born and raised, Queer Filipino American writer and solo performance artist based in San Francisco. He's the Artistic Director of GAPA Theatre, an intergenerational theater collective, where he mentors Queer and Trans Asian and Pacific Islander artists (QTAPI) in amplifying... Read More →
Speakers
avatar for Jean-Baptiste Phou

Jean-Baptiste Phou

Jean-Baptiste Phou is a French-Cambodian writer, director, and multidisciplinary artist. He is the author of Coming Out of My Skin (Seagull Books, 2023), which he adapted for the stage, and 80 mots du Cambodge (L’Asiathèque, 2023). His writing explores memory, identity, diaspo... Read More →
Saturday October 17, 2026 7:00pm - Sunday October 18, 2026 4:00pm PDT
Telegraph Hill Books 1501 Grant Ave, San Francisco
  Words Around the World, FREE
 
Tuesday, October 20
 

7:00pm PDT

Alain Damasio: Horde of the Counterwind
Tuesday October 20, 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
Co-presented with Villa Albertine

In 2004, Alain Damasio’s Horde of the Counterwind: An Epic Voyage to the Upper Reaches gained acclaim as France’s genre-defining sci-fi odyssey of the 21st century, inspiring the celebrated video game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and igniting the imaginations of millions around the world. Now, this seminal work appears in English translation for the very first time, offering even more readers the opportunity to experience a masterpiece of epic scope and visionary world-building in which twenty-three adventurers climb endlessly against the wind that plagues their desolate homeland. Their only purpose: identifying the mysterious source where eight centuries of past climbers have tried and failed. Join Damasio and Horde’s English translator, Alexander Dickow, for a conversation moderated by award-winning writer and translator Edward Gauvin. Doors at 6:30pm. 


Moderators
avatar for Edward Gauvin

Edward Gauvin

Edward Gauvin translates from French with a personal focus on post-Surrealist literatures of the fantastic and graphic novels, of which he has translated more than 450 to date for readers of all ages. His award-winning writing and translations have appeared in McSweeney's, the New... Read More →
Speakers
avatar for Alain Damasio

Alain Damasio

Born in 1969 in Lyon, Alain Damasio is a French science fiction author and typographer. His favorite field is political anticipation. He combines this genre with elements of science fiction or fantasy and describes political dystopias. A committed man, this intermittent of militancy... Read More →
avatar for Alexander Dickow

Alexander Dickow

Alexander Dickow writes fiction, poetry, and literary scholarship in French and English. He lives in Blacksburg, Virginia where he is professor of French at Virginia Tech. He grew up in Moscow, Idaho. Books include Le Premier Souper (La Volte, 2021) and The Distance, and You In It... Read More →
Tuesday October 20, 2026 7:00pm - 8:30pm PDT
Telegraph Hill Books 1501 Grant Ave, San Francisco
  Words Around the World, FREE
 
Wednesday, October 21
 

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
avatar for Daniela Blei

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
avatar for Vigdis Hjorth

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
 
Friday, October 23
 

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
avatar for Sasha Vasilyuk

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
avatar for Carolina Pihelgas

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
 
Monday, November 9
 

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
avatar for Blaise Zerega

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
avatar for Nelio Biedermann

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
 

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