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 Terria Smith who talks to us about her forthcoming novel I Love You So Many, which will be on early sale at the Bay Area Book Festival! https://www.heydaybooks.com/catalog/i-love-you-so-many/ You can find more 2026 festival authors and upcoming events at www.baybookfest.org. Please support our work! https://givebutter.com/writingthefuture #TerriaSmith #BayArea #Literature #Podcast #BookFestival #booktok #native #memoir #travel

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 Jeremy Engels who is talking to us about his book On Mindful Democracy: A Declaration of Interdependence to Mend a Fractured World https://www.parallax.org/product/on-mindful-democracy/ You can find more 2026 festival authors and upcoming events at www.baybookfest.org. Please support our work! https://givebutter.com/writingthefuture #JeremyEngels #BayArea #Literature #Podcast #BookFestival #booktok #booktube #booktube #mindfulness #democracy

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

Nico Lang is joining us for an event at Kepler's books on September 9th, 2025. Get your tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/trans-narratives-of-america-tickets-1485118843439 Join us for a timely evening at Kepler's Books as acclaimed authors Carolina De Robertis (So Many Stars: An Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color) and Nico Lang (American Teenager: How Trans Kids Are Surviving Hate and Finding Joy in a Turbulent Era) come together for a dynamic conversation about the vital importance of preserving and honoring the lives and voices of trans people. Moderated by Brandy Collins, this event will delve into the connections between the stories of trans youth and elders, exploring how shared histories, struggles, and triumphs form the backbone of resistance and resilience. Whether you are trans, queer, an ally, or someone seeking deeper understanding, this conversation promises to be moving, illuminating, and deeply human. Nico Lang is the creator of Queer News Daily and an award-winning reporter, editor, essayist, author, and critic. You can read their work in Rolling Stone, Esquire, Teen Vogue, Them, the Advocate, Vice, the Wall Street Journal, Out, the Daily Beast, HuffPost, BuzzFeed News, and the L.A. Times, among others. Their newest book, American Teenager: How Trans Kids Are Surviving Hate and Finding Joy in a Turbulent Era chronicles trans youth living their lives in seven states across the U.S.

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.