Bay Area Book Festival Podcast

The election will be disrupted by COVID-19. There’s a secure solution: voting by mail, which would protect public health and our democracy’s integrity. What are the pathways to making vote-by-mail widely available? Jesse Wegman, author of Let the People Pick the President, is joined by Amber McReynolds, coauthor of When Women Vote. Moderated by Ian Haney Lopez. Supported by the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, Stephen M. Silberstein Foundation, Guy & Jeanine Saperstein, & Mal Warwick Donordigital.

We’re thrilled to welcome novelist Chelsea Bieker in conversation with Brooke Warner. Bieker’s literary debut Godshot is a hymn to the salvation found in hard-won personal rebirth. Stricken with drought, the community of Peaches, California clings to a cult leader for salvation, and 14-year-old Lacey is left to reap a revelatory harvest of her own. Godshot has won Bieker comparisons to Margaret Atwood and Emma Cline. The beauty lies in Lacey’s incomparable voice, who you’ll miss after turning the last page.

Homelessness, income inequality, mass incarceration, wage stagnation, housing shortages: Experts on the front lines will discuss what we need to do to create a fairer future. Zach Norris, Executive Director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, makes a strong case for the importance of collective accountability with We Keep Us Safe. He’s joined by New York Times reporter Conor Doughtery. We also welcome Joe Wilson, Executive Director of San Francisco’s Hospitality House. Moderated by Heather Knight.

In this transcendent conversation, Pulitzer Prize winner Jericho Brown and National Book Award winner Nikky Finney—two of the most prominent poets in America today—share their own responses to the murders of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd, address the protests against police brutality and white supremacy, and describe the revolutionary power of poetry to capture human experience. They offer us their own experiences of finding power and hope, even in the midst of heartbreak. Moderated by Ismail Muhammad.

Parents all over the world are facing a dilemma: what do we tell children about threatening truths, from COVID to climate change? Christine Carter, Ph.D. draws on her own parenting experiences, as well as scientific research, to give advice for living and parenting with greater joy and meaning. In her recent book, Ready or Not, Madeline Levine seems to have anticipated the struggles of families during this crisis. Sarah Jaquette Ray’s A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety is an essential toolkit as we confront the greatest environmental threat of our time. Moderated by Dacher Keltner. Sponsored by Bayer.

These novelist-teachers from the University of San Francisco MFA in Writing program dig into the challenges of writing characters haunted by their pasts. They share the narrative tools they use to push their characters to the very edge and keep the reader turning the page. Sponsored by the University of San Francisco MFA in Writing program.

These historical novels transport us to worlds full of surprising connections that cross divisions of class, race and more. These authors explore power dynamics and tricky relationships from 1930s colonial Malaysia, to pre-Civil War Ohio, to the streets of Paris and the vineyards of Midi in the Victorian era.

These writers are as fierce as their female crime fighters. Their protagonists confront corrupt cops, solve mysterious deaths while juggling personal woes, quash terrorism and try to stay alive while doling out justice. With support from the Norway House Foundation, NORLA, the Consulate General of Sweden in San Francisco, SWEA San Francisco and the Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation.

One New York Times reviewer called journalist David Wallace Wells’ “The Uninhabitable Earth” ”the most terrifying book I have ever read.” It also is one of the most important. Both literary and science-based, the book is a chilling account of the ticking clock looming over humanity as climate change threatens to render the earth unfit for human life.

One of the “Angola 3,” Albert Woodfox endured four decades of solitary confinement for a crime he did not commit. In our closing keynote session, Woodfox will be interviewed by Mother Jones reporter Shane Bauer, author of “American Prison” and himself a survivor of solitary confinement.