Bay Area Book Festival Podcast

BABF Short Cuts is a Podcast of the Bay Area Book Festival where we introduce some of the authors and partners who will join us for the 2026 Festival in Berkeley from May 29–May 31.  In this episode, you get to meet Renee Swindle who is talking to us about her book Francine's Spectacular Crash and Burn.  You can find more 2026 festival authors and upcoming events at www.baybookfest.org.  Please support our work! 

BABF Short Cuts is a Podcast of the Bay Area Book Festival where we introduce some of the authors and partners who will join us for the 2026 Festival in Berkeley from May 29–May 31.  In this first episode, you get to meet our new podcast hosts, hear about some of the authors booked for the 2026 festival, find out more about what we do year around and how you can support all of this work! Upcoming events: Social Justice Children' Book Fair https://www.eventbrite.com/e/2025-social-justice-childrens-book-fair-tickets-1967246325717?aff=oddtdtcreator Pints and Pages https://www.baybookfest.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Pints-Pages-V5-scaled.jpg Merritt Dialogues: AI https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-merritt-dialogues-ai-tickets-1769935929009?aff=oddtdtcreator

Fight hate, make art, and build community with these graphic novels, based on true stories, that depict the importance of fighting for justice in whatever ways we can. For Eddie Ahn, author of Advocate, becoming an environmental justice lawyer for non-profits defies his Korean immigrant family's notions of economic success but allows him to confront the most immediate issues the country is facing today, from the devastating effects of California wildfires to economic inequality, all while combating burnout and racial prejudice. Maria van Lieshout, inspired by documents written by her grandparents about their experiences during the Nazi occupation, created Song of a Blackbird, which follows a group of artists who helped pull off the greatest bank heist in European history to fund the Dutch Resistance. Also based on a family story, Josh Tuininga's We Are Not Strangers follows a Jewish immigrant's efforts to help his Japanese neighbors, whose lives were upended by Executive Order 9066 that authorized the incarceration of nearly all Japanese Americans during World War II. Timely and rousing, this panel portraying the value of a life of service and civic responsibility will be moderated by Breena Nuñez, a cartoonist and educator whose diary comics help BIPOC folks give themselves permission to express their personal stories through the language of comics.

Join the Bay Area Book Festival and Litquake for an intimate (virtual) conversation with Iman Mersal and Kate Briggs, two writers who reshape our understanding of motherhood and the art of living. Mersal, acclaimed Egyptian-Canadian poet and essayist who most recently authored Motherhood and Its Ghosts, excavates the invisible labor and haunting absences of motherhood, blending irony, empathy, and unsparing honesty as she searches for lost women and lost selves. Her work is a bridge between personal memory and cultural critique, always aware of what remains unsaid. Briggs, Rotterdam-based author of The Long Form, reinvents "mom-lit" with philosophical, fragmentary prose, capturing the daily improvisations of new parenthood and the shifting architectures of care. Together, they invite us to witness the fragile, ever-changing forms of family and friendship, and the radical potential of the everyday. This conversation promises to be as nuanced and expansive as their writing, and will be moderated by beloved Sri Lankan American author Nayomi Munaweera.

Join us for an insightful conversation surrounding So Many Stars: An Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color by Caro De Robertis. In this groundbreaking work, De Robertis brings together the voices of trans, nonbinary, genderqueer, and two-spirit elders of color, offering an intimate look into their personal stories, struggles, and triumphs. This event will include an introductory conversation between De Robertis and acclaimed author Nayomi Munaweera, followed by conversation with narrators from the book—iconic artists and activists Crystal Mason, Tina Aguirre, and Chino Lee Chung—on the past, present, and future of trans BIPOC movements. Don't miss this moving, thought-provoking exploration of gender, culture, resistance, and the transformative power of storytelling.

A shape is composed of its outline and the space inside, meaning that the people around us play an integral role in forming who we are. In navigating the questions left behind following tragic loss, the authors of this poignant memoir panel honor their loved ones through writing, and, in doing so, redefine their own selves along the way. After grieving in silence for years, Susan Lieu, the daughter of refugees from the Vietnam War, finally tells her family's story in The Manicurist's Daughter, which details Lieu's twenty-year journey of piecing together her mother's life in Vietnam and the truth behind her botched tummy tuck by a surgeon who continued to operate after her death. Abby Reyes, author of Truth Demands: A Memoir of Murder, Oil Wars, and the Rise of Climate Justice, also takes aim at justice when Colombia invites her twenty years too late into Case 001 of their truth and recognition tribunal about the 1999 murder of her partner Terence Unity Freitas near Indigenous land then coveted by a US oil company. For Eirinie Carson, her book The Dead are Gods is a letter to her best friend Larissa and an attempt to make sense of the events leading up to her sudden death. Moderated by librarian and public historian Dorothy Lazard, this discussion will explore the process of documenting long-buried truths that shape us in our grief.

This poetry portal explores the wound not as an end, but as a powerful beginning. Join us for a journey where language becomes a site of transformation—where grief, memory, and survival are not just revisited, but reimagined. Mimi Tempestt breaks open conventions with a voice that insists on reclamation and the sacredness of Black queer futurity. Her work spirals through personal and collective histories, creating a radical space for becoming. Salvadoran poet Marian Urquilla mines personal and political terrain, forging poems that speak to displacement, resilience, and empowerment. With precision and heart, her language gives shape to survival. James Cagney, PEN Oakland award-winner and recipient of the Academy of American Poets' James Laughlin Award, delivers poems that honor vulnerability and rage in equal measure. His work reverberates with ancestral echoes and present-day urgency. Together, these poets wield poetry as a technology of resilience and a tool for new world-building. In their hands, the wound becomes a map—leading us toward a future where we do more than survive. We thrive. We bloom. As the poetry stage draws to a close, we will gather for one final invocation—a moment to honor what has been conjured, created, and carried forward. Incantation for Future is both a celebration and a spell for what comes next. Legendary writer and cultural icon joins us as our closing headliner, offering a rare reading that reaches across generations, geographies, and genres. Her work, rooted in the mythic, the historical, and the personal, has long opened portals for those navigating identity, exile, and transformation. In this culminating moment, Maxine Hong Kingston offers not just a reading, but a blessing—an incantation for futures rooted in justice, storytelling, and radical interconnectedness. Her presence reminds us that language shapes the world, that memory is a map, and that poetry is a path toward liberation. Together, we will close the portal not with finality, but with intention—carrying the words, visions, and reverberations of the festival into the world beyond. Let this be our collective offering to the future.

What lengths would you go to to prove your innocence? For Anglo-Indian nurse Sona, it's following a cryptic note and four paintings that lead her around Europe to uncover details about the complicated personal life of the renowned painter she is suspected of killing in Six Days in Bombay by Alka Joshi. The story of a wrongly accused Irish maid in San Quentin Prison garners the attention of an aspiring photographer grappling with infidelity and gentrification in Meredith Jaeger's The Incorrigibles, a novel exploring the different ways in which we are imprisoned and how we can break free. Starting anew is no simple task, as Miyoung from Rosa Kwon Easton's White Mulberry finds out when she faces prejudice after relocating from her impoverished village in northern Korea to Kyoto, Japan in search of a better future as a nurse. From Korea to India to our very own Bay Area, this dynamic discussion moderated by memoirist and travel writer Janis Cooke Newman will transport audiences to the pockets of history around the world that are just waiting to be uncovered.

This reading celebrates the wild, wired, and the wondrous. Inspired, and the fierce multiplicity of the natural world, this portal brings together five poets whose work transgresses borders—of body, genre, and possibility. These poets will open portals that invite us into places of resistance and rage, that when honored transform into generative and sacred places. Rachel Richardson's work bends time and language, drawing from historical fragments and embodied memory to question whose stories survive and how. Her poems illuminate what's hidden beneath the surface of the everyday. Language and spirit commingle in Georgina Marie, Lake County Poet Laureate emeritus's lyrical activism. She writes poems rooted in place, grief, and renewal—pulling language from the earth and the divine alike. Oakland's Yaffaz AS words dismantle binaries and build new grammars for queer, trans, and brown becoming. Their poetics are glitchy, expansive, and defiant. Lynne Thompson, former Los Angeles Poet Laureate, explores diasporic identity, lineage, and the many selves we carry through history and into the future. As a conduit of worlds she create poetry that transports and brings communities together. Cinematic and visceral—Shabnam Piryaei's work shapeshifts across borders and forms. Her work is a philosophical inquiry and a healing journey, and luminous defiance. This is a celebration of what refuses to be defined. Join us where the petals have teeth and language mutates into power.

Shining a light on the often invisible and incredibly complex experience of migration, the established scholars of this panel examine migration through human-centered lenses by documenting the difficult reasons people move away from an old home and the realities they must face upon arrival in their new one. Sin Padres, Ni Papeles details Stephanie L. Canizales' academic study about how undocumented Central American and Mexican teens in LA navigate unthinkable material and emotional hardship, find the agency and hope that is required to survive, and discover what it means to be successful as they come of age in the United States. Shifting the focus to Northern California, Cruz Medina's Sanctuary is a case study following the community of Indigenous Guatemalan Maya people in a Spanish-speaking church in the East Bay, many of whom sought refuge in the United States but were instead met with the dehumanizing and exclusionary rhetoric of US political leaders, militarized immigration enforcement, false promises of empowerment through literacy, and further displacement from gentrification. Journalist Jeanne Carstensen turns an investigative eye to the devastating 2015 shipwreck that resulted in the loss of hundreds of refugee lives during the biggest refugee crisis since World War II in A Greek Tragedy, which includes recollections of the refugees' lives prior to leaving their home as well as the courageous rescue efforts of the Greek islanders and volunteers who rushed to help, even as their government and the EU failed to act. Moderated by award-winning author and journalist Frances Dinkelspiel. 

From the very first contact, Indigenous people have been spoken about more than they have been heard. Early "autobiographies" of Native individuals were often penned by outsiders, distorting the essence of the genre by denying autonomy to the very subjects for whom autobiography—by definition—should uplift. In recent years, seminal works of First Nations storytelling have come to the forefront, and this panel features three recent additions to the Native voices now taking center stage to tell their own stories. Métis storyteller and Montana Poet Laureate Chris LaTray combines diligent research and compelling conversations in Becoming Little Shell, his story of discovery and embracing his Indigenous identity by joining the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians in their 158-year-long struggle for federal recognition. Essayist Terra Trevor turns to memoir in We Who Walk the Seven Ways, which recounts how a circle of Native women elders embraced and guided her through the seven cycles of life, lifting her from grief and instructing her in living following a difficult loss. Published poet and Mvskoke citizen Jennifer Foerster is one of the editors of This Music, a memoir written by—but not finished by—the late Janice Gould, who was a Koyunkowi poet and educator. Former Kansas poet laureate and founding board member of Indigenous Nations Poet Denise Low will moderate this insightful discussion featuring contemporary Indigenous perspectives on the importance of having your story told in your own voice.

The essay's subjective and fragmented nature enables writers to grapple with complexities without the restrictions of systematic, traditional approaches to writing (Theodor W. Adorno, "The Essay as Form"). It liberates the essayist to take a nuanced look at the world, as cultural essayist and social critic Steve Wasserman does in Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It's a Lie: A Memoir in Essays, an exhilarating account of the awakening of an empathetic sensibility and a lively mind, featuring personal reflections on politics, literature, influential figures, and the tumults of a world in upheaval. Award-winning author and "ethnographer on a skateboard" José Vadi turns to skateboarding as a lens to document the world in his latest memoir-in-essays, Chipped, which contemplates how skateboarding redefines space, curates culture, confronts mortality, and affords new perspectives on and off the board. Chi Boy: Native Sons and Chicago Reckonings by Keenan Norris employs the essay form to meld memoir, cultural criticism, and literary biography in a masterful and emotional depiction of the city of Chicago as both a cradle of Black intellect, art, and politics and a distillation of America's deepest tragedies. These essayists will be in conversation with Chino Lee Chung, who is currently working on a collection of essays that integrate his social activism with his intersectional identities as a recipient of the 2024–2025 San Jose State Steinbeck Fellowship. This enriching panel, moderated by writer and professor Faith Adiele, will explore the essay-writing process with authors who have published essays in diverse contexts.

Enter the liminal. In this portal, hybridity is power, and contradiction is poetry. Chimera Space brings together a group of poets whose work inhabits the monstrous, the beautiful, and the in-between—bodies, identities, and voices that resist categorization and embrace complexity. Cindy Juyoung Ok writes into multiplicity, turning silence into disruption and fragmentation into form. Her poems invite readers into nonlinear truths. Grayson Thompson conjures the poetic tenderness and fire, exploring queer embodiment and psychic rupture. Adela Najarro brings the force of nature and cultural inheritance to the page, her poetry fusing eco-consciousness with the surreal. Amanda Hawkins explores desire, disorientation, and liminality with language that glows from within. Her work vibrates with strange beauty and invites us into the sensual space of the unknowable. Mia Ayumi Malhotra writes from the rich interstices of lineage and displacement. Her lyric inquiries unfold slowly, like memory, threading together multiple inheritances and the ghosts that come with them. Join us as these poetic guides read us into the borderlands—offering a space where transformation is not only possible, but inevitable. A panel discussion will follow the reading.

Amidst current challenges like book bans in schools and libraries across the country, record numbers of legal restrictions on the human rights of immigrants and trans people, especially trans youth, in our community, creators play a crucial role when they come together in a unified voice of resistance. We have many models of people who resisted under the most repressive circumstances, including Maria van Lieshout's Song of a Blackbird, a historical graphic novel based on a true story about a collective of artists in the Dutch Resistance during WWII who used their creativity to save children and to support community resistance in heavily oppressive times.There are also many organizations pushing back now, today, demonstrating the pivotal role of the creative spirit in highlighting problems, providing possible solutions, and bringing us together to lift us up. Hear from Maggie Tokuda-Hall of Authors Against Book Bans, Rhonda Roumani of Story Sunbirds, and Robert Liu-Trujillo of the Social Justice Children's Book Fair on how they are pushing back against book bans, fighting for children in the face of war, and uplifting social justice children's books in their community. For everyone and anyone who cares about young humans, this panel, moderated by author and professor Tomas Moniz, will invite creatives and organizers to share what gives them hope, what they do, and how we can all get involved.

A sense of place is something we all deserve. For children whose roots lie in lands and cultures that are often under- or even mis-represented, the concept of home can be complex. When the politics of war propaganda and media stereotypes permeate our lives, children's books offer insight, better understanding, and for some a path home. From Iraq, Palestine, and Iran, three authors share their homeland journeys. Mona Damluji (I Want You to Know) and Maysa Odeh (A Map For Falasteen). Moderated by Khalil Bendib, host of Voices of the Middle East and North Africa on KPFA (94.1 FM).

The talented woman sleuths of this panel have once again found themselves in unexpected conundrums that hit close to home. Join Parisian PI Aimée Leduc on her quest for innocence after being framed for the murder of her daughter's father in Murder at la Villette, the 21st installment of Cara Black's New York Times bestselling mystery series. Alternatively, travel from France back to California with The Serial Killer Guide to San Francisco by Michelle Chouinard, in which the granddaughter of a suspected serial killer suddenly finds herself as the prime suspect for murder. Peaceful seaside town Haven, California is the setting for Rachel Howzell Hall's latest thriller, Fog and Fury, a town hiding more secrets than LAPD cop Sonny had anticipated when she first relocated there with her elderly mother. Family businesses take the stage in The Library Game, Book 4 of the Secret Staircase Mysteries by Gigi Pandian, which follows Tempest Raj and her family construction business's newest project to transform a home into a public library that celebrates history's greatest fictional detectives, but the mood quickly sours when their celebratory event, a murder mystery dinner and a literary-themed escape room, ends in murder and a vanished body. Speaking of libraries and detectives, this thrilling discussion will be moderated by the Curator of the California Detective Fiction Collection at the UC Berkeley Bancroft Library, Randal Brandt.

Whether in a comic panel or at a panel discussion, these earnest graphic novel stories are here to remind us to stay true to ourselves, our beliefs, and our passions! Follow Huda Fahmy's exhilarating and chaotic family vacation to Disney World, where self-conscious Huda quickly realizes that her family's public prayers make them stand out; and while she is proud of her religion and who she is, she sure wishes she could just think: Huda F Cares? Like the people Huda encounters in Florida, the students and teachers at Hassan's middle school are also particularly uninformed about the traditions of Ramadan in Wahab Algarmi's Almost Sunset, and Hassan must learn to balance it all during this hectic holy month of fasting, prayer, reflection, and community. Time plays a mischievous role in You and Me On Repeat by Mary Shyne, a swoony and hilarious rom-com graphic novel about two former friends who are trapped in a time loop that repeats their high school graduation day over and over and over. Written by high school teacher and award-winning graphic novelist Gene Luen Yang, Dragon Hoops recounts his life-changing journey following the men's varsity basketball team as they shoot for their ultimate goal: the California State Championships. Celebrating both the comical and meaningful moments in life, this compelling panel, moderated by librarian and children's author Elaine Tai, offers an endearing and intimate look into the multidimensional lives of graphic novel protagonists.

This panel unites four transformative leaders pioneering the incorporation of healing into activism, demonstrating how personal transformation fuels collective liberation. Their work bridges social justice and healing, emphasizing the need for community care in the fight for a just future. Dr. Ayodele Nzinga, poet laureate of Oakland and founder of Lower Bottom Playaz and BAMBD CDC, uses poetry as a tool for Black liberation. In Sorrowland Oracle, she redefines healing and justice through a Black gaze, centering Black space as essential for universal liberation. Myisha T. Hill, writer, social entrepreneur, and healer, leads a revolution of heart, mind, and soul. Her book, Heal Your Way Forward, challenges us to envision an antiracist future for the next seven generations, offering practical guidance on healing and meaningful change. Kazu Haga, nonviolence and restorative justice educator, argues that activism and healing must be inseparable. His book, Fierce Vulnerability, calls for centering relationships and addressing trauma, reminding us that we cannot "shut down" injustice any more than we can "shut down" pain. Malaika Parker, Executive Director of Black Organizing Project, has worked toward a racially just SF Bay Area for 25 years, addressing police accountability, racial justice in education, and race-based inequities in the child welfare system. She is the founder of Hummingbirds Urban Farming Collective, which promotes food sovereignty and ecological justice for Black children and their communities. Moderated by Renata Moreira, trauma-informed social impact consultant and Reiki Master Teacher, this conversation will explore how embracing vulnerability, addressing trauma, and incorporating healing into activism can create lasting social change.

As we face increasing attacks on our bodily autonomy from our federal and state governments, these books provide essential resources and narratives that approach the topic with acuity and compassion. Award-winning author Zetta Elliott reflects the voices of Black women and girls for whom body policing has long been an issue in Say Her Name, a collection of poems that pays tribute to victims of police brutality as well as the activists championing the Black Lives Matter cause, revealing the beauty, danger, and magic found at the intersection of race and gender. In Seema Yasmin's Unbecoming, a near-speculative novel that has predicted our anti-abortion world with terrifying accuracy, two Muslim teens in Texas create an illegal guide to abortion that includes how to secure safe medications and navigate underground networks of clinics that sprung up in response to unfair laws that prohibit the right to choose. Breathe: Journeys to Healthy Binding by bestselling author Maia Kobabe and Public Health Assistant Professor Sarah Peitzmeier, offers a real-life a graphic novel guide to chest binding as gender-affirming care not only for trans and nonbinary folks but also for anyone interested in what it means to be on a journey of expressing one's gender in ways that are joyful, healthy, and affirming. Screenwriter, poet, and educator Shia Shabazz Smith will moderate this panel, building from the crucial book Our Bodies, Ourselves, that advocates for bodily autonomy for all bodies, all selves.

Long before politicians weaponized book bans across the country, mainstream publishers have controlled which books get published, carrying out "soft book bans" through gatekeeping. For as long as books have been published (and censored), indie and alternative publishers have challenged these gatekeepers, who have often excluded and marginalized diverse voices. As these same institutions preemptively buckle to pressures from above, we must uplift true grassroots, community-based publishers that bring out books by and for their communities. Hear from Zetta Elliott (The Oracle's Door) of Rosetta Press, a self-publisher of children's books that reveal, explore and foster a Black feminist vision of the world; Robert Liu-Trujillo (Fresh Juice) of the Social Justice Children's Book Fair; and Maya Gonzalez (When a Bully Is President) and Matthew Smith of Reflection Press, a POC, queer, and trans-owned independent children's book publisher. This candid conversation, moderated by Laura Atkins of the Social Justice Children's Book Fair, will focus on envisioning and creating alternate pathways in order to bring underrepresented stories to life. With expertise in self-publishing, hybrid models, and micropresses, the creative minds of this panel will share about their work, the books they produce, the challenges they face, and how they find ways to thrive as they create important and meaningful books.