The funny and heartfelt stories of this panel honor the chosen family who show up at the most unexpected, but perhaps most necessary, moments in our lives. Woodworking by Emily St. James follows a trans high school teacher from a small town in South Dakota who befriends the only other trans woman she knows: her seventeen-year-old student, the high school's resident political dissident and Only Trans Girl. As their unlikely friendship evolves, it comes under the scrutiny of their community, and both women are forced to confront what happens if they choose to hide their true selves. Renee Swindle's Francine's Spectacular Crash and Burn features another unexpected encounter between a young executive assistant and aspiring photographer, whose life is upended after the sudden death of her agoraphobic mother, and the ten-year-old who keeps showing up at her doorstep after she rescues him from a group of bullies. Meeting the boy's foster mother, who turns out to be her fiery high school crush, leads Francine to make a consecutive string of bad choices, and she is left wondering how to become the kind of person her young friend can depend on. The tumultuous journeys of self-discovery in this humorous yet moving panel, moderated by award-winning Sri Lankan American writer and educator Nayomi Munaweera, portray the power of chance, intergenerational queer friendships, and found family.

This event took place in Downtown Berkeley, at the Bay Area Book Festival, May 29-31 2026.

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The sonic experts of this panel will pull back the curtains for listeners wondering what it takes to create an audiobook. Ray Archie, Founder of Notes to the Soul and Chief Audio Connoisseur of Brooklyn Sound Lab, has an extensive career in audio storytelling through audiobook narration, theatrical sound design, and musical innovation. Also with a background in music is Abigail Reno, an actor, audiobook narrator, and voiceover artist with roots in opera, choral conducting, and theater. She has recorded titles for Penguin Random House, Hachette, Macmillan, Disney, Spotify, and many more. Jen Aldrich will offer insights from all parts of the production process as a freelance audiobook narrator, proofer, and prepper who is credited on over 150 titles in solo, dual, duet, and multicast audiobooks. Join us in this discussion, moderated by award-winning narrator Ann Richardson, to shine a spotlight on the backstage processes that help infuse stories with life and lyricism.

This event took place in Downtown Berkeley, at the Bay Area Book Festival, May 29-31 2026.

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Our workshop will start with a panel discussion, comprised of BIPOC writers who are part of the Rooted & Written program, on how we integrate our histories into our work.

This session will blend conversation and craft on how we listen to, record, and honor ancestral knowledge on the page, without flattening it for mainstream expectations. Then we'll talk about writing. Using guided prompts, participants will draft ideas for new work that gathers memory, place, language, and family stories into poems, micro-essays, or short scenes.

This event took place in Downtown Berkeley, at the Bay Area Book Festival, May 29-31 2026.

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It can take just one brief touchpoint to forever bend the directions of our diverging paths, as the 2025 NCBA Fiction Finalists reveal. In R.O. Kwon's Exhibit, young photographer Jin Han meets an alluring, injured world-class ballerina at a party in San Francisco, which unleashes a complex exploration of ambition, desire, and a familial curse spoken aloud. Sometimes, convergence occurs in the form of multiple lives meeting at a single path, creating reflections, distortions, and unexpected revelations. Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel features the lives of eight teenage girl boxers, each with their own sacrifices and reasons for competing, in their fight for the prize. Nina Schuyler's short story collection, In This Ravishing World, bridges nine stories of dreamers, escapists, activists, and artists who reckon with the climate crisis, urging all inhabitants of Nature to resist and fight to preserve its exquisite beauty in the face of destruction. The future is uncertain, but so is the past— the speculative stories in How We Know Our Time Travelers by Anita Felicelli reimagine time traveling as an everyday occurrence, given the fragility and unreliability of our memories that warp our understanding of the future. What, then, is the value of preservation? For the two crow sisters in Greg Sarris' The Forgetters, who recall stories in the classic style of Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok creation stories from dawn to dusk, these shared histories hold the key for voyagers to repair the rifts in their own lives and the world. Moderated by author, editor, and critic Jane Ciabattari, this panel will peer closer into those translucent moments that hold the power to change the course of our past, present, and future.

This event took place in Downtown Berkeley, at the Bay Area Book Festival, May 29-31 2026.

Support our work and help to keep the Bay Area Book Festival 96% free! https://givebutter.com/writingthefuture

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The past and the future are linked, nowhere more so than in story. In this session, we will play on the tightrope between past and present, exploring how nailing the details of the past in a story builds a foundation for future worlds, allowing you to believably take the reader anywhere. We will also investigate the empowering role of the narrator, who often speaks from the future of the story. Through four sets of dynamic, generative exercises, attendees will leave the hour with a bevy of new tricks/tips and insights for their writing tool belts.

This event took place in Downtown Berkeley, at the Bay Area Book Festival, May 29-31 2026.

Support our work and help to keep the Bay Area Book Festival 96% free! https://givebutter.com/writingthefuture

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Unfinished Atlas: Beginning When the World Has Ended, four poets gather at the shifting edge between collapse and creation.

Deema Shehabi writes with luminous attention to exile, memory, and the fragile architectures of home, tracing how language carries both loss and possibility. Daniel Summerhill's work carries the pulse of music, rhythmic and urgent. It explores justice, history, and the bright insistence of possibility. Cynthia Manick brings a sharp lyric intelligence to questions of culture, place, and survival in a rapidly changing world. Iain Haley Pollock's poems move with wry precision through landscapes of labor, ecology, and human ambition, probing how we inhabit the structures we've set in motion. Emceeing the conversation, Lourdes Figueroa brings a deep engagement with literature, and a fascination with how memory and stories move through communities and change the future.

Together, these poets sketch an atlas still in progress. One that is attentive to rupture, but equally committed to imagining what might grow in its wake.

This event took place in Downtown Berkeley, at the Bay Area Book Festival, May 29-31 2026.

Support our work and help to keep the Bay Area Book Festival 96% free! https://givebutter.com/writingthefuture

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Out of the Darkness is an exciting new anthology of classic Swedish literature which brings many stories to an English-reading audience for the very first time. Vendela Vida and David Katznelson, co-editors of the collection, and translators Victoria Häggblom and Amanda Doxtater will discuss the selection and translation process and highlight the work of these authors in particular: Hjalmar Söderberg, Karin Boye, Agnes von Krusenstjerna, August Strindberg and Selma Lagerlöf. The editors will elaborate on these writers' relevance to Swedish culture and to literature today, and the translators will focus on the joys and challenges of translating work from another era. The discussion will be moderated by Linda Haverty Rugg, professor of Scandinavian Studies at UC Berkeley.

This event took place in Downtown Berkeley, at the Bay Area Book Festival, May 29-31 2026.

Thank you to our sponsor, The Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation, for this program.

Support our work and help to keep the Bay Area Book Festival 96% free! https://givebutter.com/writingthefuture

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In Conjuring & Conjugating: Siguanabas in Future Tense, four community-engaged writers of the Central American Diaspora discuss Indigenous mythologies as vessels for embodiment and transformation. Navigating legacies of violence, they reclaim the right to name themselves—writing into futures beyond the erasure of the colonial gaze.

Taking the figure of La Siguanaba as both provocation and portal, these poets ask what happens when we listen again. What wisdom was hidden inside the warnings? What truths were transformed into myth—and what futures might emerge when those truths are spoken aloud once more?

Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta explores identity, lineage, and resistance through a poetics attentive to the long reach of colonial histories, MK Chavez's writes at the crossroads of myth, ecology, and diaspora, exploring how ancestral figures continue to haunt and guide the present, and Neida Chavez Solórzano writes with luminous attention to migration, history, and the enduring presence of land and spirit. Leticia Hernandez Linares brings a community-rooted voice to questions of memory, storytelling, and cultural survival and will share work and lead this panel that explores the myth not as relic, but as a tense we are still learning to speak. To conjure is to call something back into the world. To conjugate is to shift its time.

This event took place in Downtown Berkeley, at the Bay Area Book Festival, May 29-31 2026.

Support our work and help to keep the Bay Area Book Festival 96% free! https://givebutter.com/writingthefuture

Check out our upcoming events www.baybookfest.org

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Short stories are the swift vehicles of the written word that leave lasting impressions on both passengers and bystanders alike. This panel features writers who have experimented with the form in various ways to create unique short story collections that highlight broader issues. With genre-bending fiction, Jude Berman blends social impact fiction and activist fiction in Shot: A Dictionary of the Lost, a collection of short stories about gun violence, organized as a dictionary, with a story for each letter of the alphabet. Lisa Alvarez's Some Final Beauty and Other Stories showcases women and Chicanx characters from the vibrant streets of Southern California to the arid Nevada Nuclear Sites in thematically linked stories exploring self-discovery, rebellion, and solidarity. Set in the dive bars, bathhouses, parks, workplaces, music venues, beaches, and college campuses of 2010s Seattle, Crawl: Stories by Max Delsohn portrays the pleasures and pains of sex, romance, and gender expression in a city and a time that has branded itself a radical queer utopia but proves much more complicated in reality. In Daddy Issues: Stories, a collection of moving and complex stories of queer Asian American experiences in Los Angeles, Eric Wat offers different contemplations on solitude and the vulnerability required for connection. Shifting from the present day to the near future, from China to America and beyond, the stories in M Lin's The Memory Museum offer profound insight into the ambivalence of migration, the perverse ways race and class can operate, and what it means to be Chinese today. Join the talented authors of this panel, moderated by Latine poet, performer, and producer Marcos "Coco" James, to explore the limitless possibilities of the brief yet impactful short story.

This event took place in Downtown Berkeley, at the Bay Area Book Festival, May 29-31 2026.

Support our work and help to keep the Bay Area Book Festival 96% free! https://givebutter.com/writingthefuture

Check out our upcoming events www.baybookfest.org

Follow us on instagram: https://www.instagram.com/baybookfest/

In 2018, only 12% of San Francisco's street names, statues, parks, and public art honored women, but not because they didn't exist. How many notable women who deserve public recognition have been written out of the history of our region? Drawn from award-winning journalist Rae Alexandra's KQED Arts & Culture series "Rebel Girls From Bay Area History," Unsung Heroines: 35 Women Who Changed the Bay Area is a collection of 35 short profiles honoring the contributions of a diverse group of women from San Francisco, the East Bay, and the greater Bay Area, from the very first years of the founding of San Francisco to the present day. Together, their stories constitute a new telling of the history of Northern California from the vantage point of women who made a difference. Joining Alexandra to discuss the process of uncovering and writing about these stories is the visionary Jewelle Gomez, activist and author of the double Lambda Award-winning novel, The Gilda Stories. She has served on literature panels for the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, and the California Arts Council, and is currently Playwright in Residence at New Conservatory Theatre Center. This triumphant conversation will permanently alter readers' perspective with the realization of just how many untold stories have been lost to time, encouraging them to scan their own environment for traces of women whose stories deserve to be recovered and told. Moderated by author of Where the Girls Were and Rad American Women A-Z Kate Schatz this panel will be, as Gomez declares, "a real celebration of these daring human rights activists who cross boundaries of time, ethnicity, and class and invite us all to join in."

In collaboration with Litquake

This event took place in Downtown Berkeley, at the Bay Area Book Festival, May 29-31 2026.

Support our work and help to keep the Bay Area Book Festival 96% free! https://givebutter.com/writingthefuture

Check out our upcoming events www.baybookfest.org

Follow us on instagram: https://www.instagram.com/baybookfest/

Today's kids are well aware of the many challenges that they face in the world they are inheriting, from climate change to police violence, crowded classrooms to healthcare. The organizers of the amazing Social Justice Children's Book Fair are here to show everyone that a better world is possible, and it can be here today if we choose it! Poetically written and beautifully illustrated in Innosanto Nagara's signature style, Oh, The Things We're For! offers a vision of where we could go for today's kids, who are ready to tackle big issues to build a better world they envision. One way we can fight for our future and make an impact on our community is by voting, but as the kids in Calling All Future Voters! find out, voting isn't easy for everyone. Blending narrative and educational content in her co-written book, Laura Atkins highlights our country's ongoing struggle for a more inclusive democracy and encourages readers to understand their rights and responsibilities toward their community. Joining the fight for a better future is author, illustrator, and organizer Robert Liu-Trujillo, who will moderate this enriching panel about how all of us can build towards a better world.

This event took place in Downtown Berkeley, at the Bay Area Book Festival, May 29-31 2026.

Support our work and help to keep the Bay Area Book Festival 96% free! https://givebutter.com/writingthefuture

Check out our upcoming events www.baybookfest.org

Follow us on instagram: https://www.instagram.com/baybookfest/