Bay Area Book Festival Podcast

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.

Tayari Jones can "touch us soul to soul with her words," said Oprah, who dubbed Jones' newest novel a Book Club pick for 2018. In her work, Jones takes the scars of the American South, including traumas around wrongful incarceration, and rubs them raw. She is interviewed by Brooke Warner of She Writes Press. Sponsored by She Writes Press; also with the support of Women Lit members.

To write race and ethnicity well, we need the right tools and the right reading list. Join four writer-teachers of color as they unpack the questions of identity that drive their writing, mark the pitfalls of self-exotification and weigh the rewards of penning richer, riskier work.

These masterful storytellers tackle the mysterious, the wild,the terrifying and the magical in their speculative fiction. With enthralling work that defies convention, they are creating a cultural shift in the literary landscape. Presented by the UC Berkeley English Department and the Peripheral Futures Working Group; also with the support of Women Lit members.

Let's talk about power: who has it, how it flows and how it shapes the stories we write in overt and hidden ways. Novelists from the San Francisco State University MFA program investigate how power shows up in their work and in their own writing practices. Sponsored by the San Francisco State University MFA Program.

New biomedical technologies — from prenatal testing to gene editing techniques — raise questions about how far we should go in retooling the human genome. Two leading thinkers, George Estreich ("Fables and Futures: Biotechnology, Disability, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves,") and Jamie Metzl ("Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity") explore these new frontiers — and their limits. Sponsored by Berkeleyside.

Franny Choi ("Soft Science"), Tommy Pico ("Junk"), Brenda Shaughnessy ("The Octopus Museum") and Sam Sax ("Bury It") bring us genre-bending work as playful as it is subversive. Bursting with questions and contradictions that resist hegemony at every turn, these poets are queering the canon one poem at a time.

Join David Blight, 2019 Pulitzer Prize winner, American history scholar and author of the new, definitive biography "Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom," a Top Ten Book of 2018 by the New York Times. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Otis R. Taylor Jr. interviews Blight and helps uncover this towering figure that Blight calls "thoroughly and beautifully human."

Known for promoting new talent alongside established voices, The Paris Review publishes fiction, nonfiction, poetry, graphic literature, interviews and more in its bound quarterly issues and online Paris Review Daily. We're joined by its new editor in a roundtable led by the magazine's West Coast editor along with contributors. Co-presented with The Paris Review.