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The Bay Area Book Community unites readers, writers, and changemakers through three cornerstone programs—the flagship Bay Area Book Festival, the Merritt Dialogue Speaker Series, and the Affinity Lit Collectives.

Our mission is to uplift and honor the full spectrum of literary voices, with particular care for those who have been historically excluded or marginalized, while encouraging reading, creative expression, and critical thinking across all ages and backgrounds. We aim to build authentic relationships among communities that foster understanding, resilience, and collective action, and we stand for social justice and equity by centering urgent conversations and nurturing emerging leaders in the field of literature.

Since 2015, Bay Area Book Festival has featured the boldest and most brilliant literary voices in conversations about issues that matter, with a focus on justice and diversity.

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The quarterly Merritt Dialogue Speaker Series, launching in Oakland’s California Ballroom in 2025, invites us into generative conversation.

 

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In June 2025, we officially launched Bay Area Book Festival’s three affinity lit collectives: Women Lit, LGBTQIA+ Lit, and Mixed Race Lit.

 

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Upcoming Events

Dan Alter

Dan Alter’s poems, reviews and translations have been published in journals including Field, Fourteen Hills, and Zyzzyva; his first collection My Little Book of Exiles won the 2022 Cowan Poetry Prize. A volume of translations Take a Breath, You’re Getting Excited, from the Hebrew of Yakir Ben-Moshe, was published by Ben Yehuda Press in September 2024, and Hills Full of Holes, a second collection of poems, by Fernwood Press in March 2025. He lives with his wife and daughter in Berkeley. He works at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at UC Berkeley.

2025 Writers’ Workshops

Speaker – A Compass in the Wilderness: Poetry in the Age of Environmental Crisis