2024 Sneak Peek - Bay Area Book Festival

2024 Bay Area Book Festival Sneak Peek

Three days (one in May, two in June). 157 authors (and counting). Three knockout headliners. Over a hundred panels of authors from diverse backgrounds, genres, and experiences in conversation with each other: a trove of unfiltered dialogues between some of the most provocative and brilliant minds of the day.

As always, we’ve got genres galore: literary fiction, memoir, poetry, history and biography and essay, journalism, noir, sci-fi, romance, graphic novels, horror, YA, middle-grade and children’s, and the craft and business of writing and publishing.

Enjoy this teaser of our 2024 lineup! We’ll post our full roster of authors and panels in April.

Pro tip: if you want to have the best possible experience and not miss any of your favorites, sign up as a Friend of the Festival. It’s the easiest way to get the most out of this once-a-year showcase of talent and inspiration. The best time to sign up is now—you’ll beat the rush before individual ticketing officially opens in April!

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HEADLINERS

JOAN BAEZ, in conversation with Greg Sarris

This is the second year in a row that we’re featuring legendary activist, musician, painter and poet Joan Baez as a headliner, in conversation with her dear friend, award-winning Bay Area fiction writer and memoirist Greg Sarris.

Fresh off a critically acclaimed and deeply intimate documentary on her life and work from Magnolia Pictures (Greg was one of its producers), Joan’s premiering a stunning new book of poetry, When You See My Mother, Ask Her to Dance.

Although Joan has written poems in private for decades, she’s never shared or published them —until now. Her poems, which create nothing less than a lyrical, movingly revealing diary, speak about some of her most fascinating relationships with her contemporaries (Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, Jimi Hendrix), as well her childhood, personal reflections, and family memories.

Last year, Joan’s ticketed event sold out almost immediately, and there was a waitlist to get in. Given the personal and very special nature of this year’s talk, we expect 2024’s event to be no different.

Whether you missed out last year, or you attended and want to have another unforgettable experience, we encourage you to secure a spot early. Join Friends of the Festival now to get priority seating for this rare evening with an icon.

Baez_When You See My Mother, Ask Her to Dance_Author Photo_Credit Marina Chavez

NAOMI KLEIN

With electrifying and original commentary on the most pressing global issues of the day, from the Israeli/Palestinian conflict to the Green New Deal to late-stage capitalism and the looming shadow of AI, journalist and syndicated columnist Naomi Klein is the voice we need right now.

Her nine books include international bestsellers The Shock Doctrine: The Rise Of Disaster Capitalism and On Fire: The Burning Case for the Green New Deal.

Her latest, Doppelganger (a finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award), delves into the comically absurd, almost surreal predicament of being constantly mistaken for a fellow writer and critic whose views she finds abhorrent. But it’s actually about so much more.

Raved The Nation, “Especially when it comes to the political fallout from the pandemic, no other book I know of has been this intellectually adventurous, this loopily personal, or this entertaining…the originality and political courage of this book is to turn that into an opening, an entirely different way of thinking about our enemies―and ourselves.”

Join Friends of the Festival now to lock in your seat for what’s sure to be a rollicking roller coaster of a conversation with a public intellectual at the top of her game.

Klein, Naomi by Sebastian Nevols - use for Doppelganger - Stephen Weil

FINAL HEADLINER – TO BE REVEALED SOON

FICTION

Worldbuilding that ignites the soul.

Tommy Orange

This Oakland author’s bestselling, Pulitzer finalist debut novel, There There, set the literary world ablaze, winning the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award and counting Marlon James, Louise Erdrich and Colm Toibin among its diehard fans. None other than Margaret Atwood called it “an astonishing literary debut.”

Orange is back with one of the most hotly anticipated follow-ups in recent years: Wandering Stars, a historical novel tracing the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School through three generations of a family.

Said Publishers Weekly, “This devastating narrative confirms Orange’s essential place in the canon of Native American literature.”

R.O. Kwon

Kwon’s best-selling The Incendiaries was one of the most exciting and buzzworthy fiction debuts of the past decade, translated into seven languages and named a best book of the year by over forty publications. Her new novel, Exhibit, is worth the wait. Charting a collision between two ambitious, artistically consumed women, a photographer and an injured ballerina, it asks the question “how brightly can you burn before you light your life on fire?”

Pulitzer winner Andrew Sean Greer said, “A ghost story, a tale of passion, a captivating portrait of how art is made, [Exhibit] turns myths upside down, assumptions inside out, all in the most exquisite prose in the bookstore.”

Rebecca Roanhorse

A New York Times bestselling and Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Award-winning speculative fiction writer, Roanhorse has written for Marvel Comics and for television, including FX’s “A Murder at the End of the World.” Her fiction has been optioned by Amazon Studios, Netflix, and AMC Studios.

Her latest novel, Mirrored Heavens, is the stunning conclusion to her best-selling Between Earth and Sky fantasy trilogy: a fitting resolution to the series that has captivated thousands of fans.

Dani Trujillo

A born storyteller of Pueblo and Mexican descent, Trujillo set her latest novel, Lizards Hold the Sun: A Contemporary Rez Romance, in a field traditionally dominated by white men: archeology.

Her Indigenous main characters—a Mexican archeologist and a museum architect with a secret—make an infectious couple to root for. Readers can’t get enough of the gorgeous prose and authentically tender romance at the heart of this desert-set story.

B26F8C81-4EA5-4A70-AD13-9C5B258627C9 - Dani Trujillo

Susan Muaddi Darraj

An American Book Award winner and USA Artists Ford Fellow, Palestinian-American novelist Darraj is also the head writer for the Spotify Original podcast Arabian Nights, for young listeners; and co-founder of the annual conference Conversations & Connections: Practical Advice on Getting Published.

Her new novel, Behind You is the Sea, brings us into the homes and lives of three main families—the Baladis, the Salamehs, and the Ammars—Palestinian immigrants who’ve all found a different welcome in America. Kirkus said “each chapter reads like a small masterpiece,” and Naomi Shihab Nye raved, “We desperately need more books like this in which Palestinian people are presented as beautiful, richly complex human beings.”

Susan Muaddi Darraj Author Photo_credit Matthew D’Agostino - Ashley Yepsen

NONFICTION

In the hands of these authors, the truth is as riveting as the most suspenseful fiction.

Malcolm Harris

Harris’ best-selling Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World was a game-changer upon publication in 2023. The first comprehensive, global history of Silicon Valley, it revealed how a small American suburb became a powerful engine for economic growth and war, leading the world into a surprisingly disastrous 21st century.

Said The New Yorker, “Triple exclamation points, and skull and crossbones—doodles to which I rarely resort—pepper the margins of my copy…I couldn’t stop reading.” Pulitzer winner Greg Gandin added, “If you want to understand what’s coming, you need to read this book.”

Mal photo_credit Julia Burke - Little, Brown Publicity

Manjula Martin

Remember 2020’s Day of the Orange Sky? So do we. As deluged as we’ve been lately by winter rains, fire is never far from a Californian’s mind—and the historic blazes that plagued NorCal in the first year of the pandemic were especially devastating.

Manjula Martin’s The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History, is a national bestseller that’s being described as “H Is for Hawk meets Joan Didion in the Pyrocene.”

An innovative hybrid of memoir, natural history, and literary inquiry chronicling Martin’s experience of life in Sonoma County during the worst fire season on record in 2020, this one hits close to home. Susan Orlean called it “as lyrical as a prose poem but smartly reported as the best journalism.”

Rosanna Xia

Speaking of the elements, Los Angeles Times environmental reporter Rosanna Xia has written the first book to take an incisive, human, and comprehensive look at California’s 1200 miles of morphing coastline: a visionary and intrepid expansion of her 2019 article on sea level rise that was named a Pulitzer finalist.

Since California Against the Sea was published earlier this year, booksellers have been evangelizing about it to their customers, and Xia has been packing bookstores and auditoriums all across the state, full of readers who are hungry for her unprecedented take on our relationship to the mighty Pacific and where we can go from here. Author Lizzie Johnson called it “required reading for all Californians…and all Americans.”

R.Xia Author Photo_no photo credit - Kalie Caetano

Steve Phillips, in conversation with Maurice Mitchell of the Working Families Party

Talk about timely. On the brink of a new, typically terrifying election season that threatens to deepen the ever-widening divide among Americans, Phillips will discuss his nationally bestselling How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good.

An urgent playbook for these troubled times, it’s a ray of hope and a call for action from a national political leader whose expertise is as rousing as his vision. He’ll be joined in conversation by Maurice Mitchell, National Director of the multiracial working-class coalition Working Families Party, and a visionary leader in the Movement for Black Lives.

POETRY

Want to get excited about the endless possibilities of language? Listen to a poet.

Jane Hirshfield

One of the most celebrated poets of modern times, Hirshfield has been called “one of American poetry’s central spokespersons for the biosphere.” Her work examines the world around us with mindfulness and tender grace. As Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz said, “A profound empathy for the suffering of all living beings… It is precisely this I praise in the poetry of Jane Hirshfield. The subject of her poetry is our ordinary life among other people and our continuing encounter with everything Earth brings us: trees, flowers, animals, and birds.”

The Asking, her long awaited collection of new and selected poems, takes its title from the ending of one of its thirty-one new pieces: “don’t despair of this falling world, not yet / didn’t it give you the asking.”

Brontez Purnell

With “Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt: A Memoir in Verse”, Purnell, an Oaklander by way of Alabama, has created an exhilaratingly honest and cathartic tumble through sex, self-perception, conflict, and transience. Miranda July said it best: “I felt tucked-in with him, along for the intimate ride, and paused only once to write down a part I’d been looking for my whole life.”

Even Purnell’s acknowledgments section makes for great reading: “I would like to thank the Alabama public school system for gifting me irony, foreshadowing, rage and the secular witchcraft that is literature. Also, my eighth grade writing teacher, the rabbi’s wife, who gifted me banned literature.”

Brontez Purnell (c) Melissa Dale Neal - Claire Tobin

Forrest Gander

A Pulitzer Prize winning poet who was trained as a geologist, Gander has been praised in The New York Times for the “shattering, symphonic quality” of his verses. His latest, Mojave Ghosts, is “a novel poem” that transports us to his birthplace in the Mojave Desert and his current northern California home, where tumultuous memories coalesce with the present. Excerpted in The New Yorker and Harper’s, it’s being hailed as Gander’s most poignant and personal book yet.

Cynthia Manick

Voted one of the Best Books of 2023 by the New York Public Library, Manick’s poetry collection, “No Sweet Without Brine,” personifies love of self and culture through fresh observations and bitter truths voiced with breathtaking lyricism.

With titles like “My Calm App Helps Me Sleep with Idris Elba” and “a white coworker asks if my family sits down to have frank discussions about race,” these disarming poems embody humor, introspection, social commentary, and familial love.

Cynthia Press Photo by Sue Rissberger - Courtney E Nobile

FAMILY DAY AT THE BERKELEY PUBLIC LIBRARY

Our free showcase of authors, activities, performances, and book giveaways for families has always been one of the most popular and beloved parts of the festival, attracting thousands of Bay Area kids and parents. For our tenth anniversary fest, our family-focused programming is extra special and unique. It even gets its very own day!

On Saturday May 4, Family Day programming will fill community spaces on four floors of the Berkeley Public Library downtown. In addition to our Young Readers and Writers Showcase, author talks, panels, and book signings, get ready for:

Family Reading Activities and Storytimes

A Flash Fiction Event for aspiring young writers, with Grant Faulkner from NaNoWriMo

A free comic book giveaway for National Free Comic Book Day
A cosplay (costume) contest for kids, in celebration of the Star Wars fandom’s annual Star Wars Day, “May the 4th Be With You”

….and much more, including:

Audience at Children's Stage, BABF; photo by Michael Hitchner

A Showcase of Young Native Voices

We’re thrilled that brilliant young Indigenous writers will once again have a robust presence at the festival this year.

Every spring since 2018, in partnership with Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, dozens of high school students from the California Indian Nations participate in the Graton Writing Project: a weeklong creative writing workshop guided by professional instructors.

For each student, the capstone of the course is the creation of an original essay, short story, or sequence of poems in response to a topical prompt. The experience culminates in a public performance of the students’ work at the Festival, emceed by Tribal Chairman Greg Sarris, award-winning author of the acclaimed memoir Becoming Story and the forthcoming new work of fiction The Forgetters.

We’re always awed by the thoughtful and urgent work the Graton Writing Project students produce, and by the passion and skill with which they perform their art for an audience of hundreds at the festival. These are the voices we need to hear from, bringing a jolt of hope, inspiration, and energy to readers of all ages who need a reminder of how creative expression can heal, empower, and connect people.

FAMILY DAY AUTHORS AND SPEAKERS

Keep an eye out for these exciting authors, just a few of the 50 (and counting!) speakers we’re featuring on Family Day.

Nikki Grimes

If you know a child who’s dealt with any kind of grief, loss, or difficulty, A Walk in the Woods—an exquisitely moving picture book by the New York Times bestselling author Grimes, illustrated by Caldecott winner Jerry Pinkey—is a godsend. Chronicling a young boy’s journey to come to grips with his father’s passing, it’s been named a best children’s book of the year by The New York Times, Smithsonian Magazine, Kirkus, Shelf Awareness, NPR, and many more. Don’t miss the chance to see one of the foremost children’s and young adult authors of the day at the fest, with one of her most profound and beautiful books yet.

Shawn Harris

Harris’ graphic novel The First Cat in Space Ate Pizza, illustrated by Mac Barnett, had its origins as 12 weekly installments posted to Instagram at the height of quarantine lockdown in 2020. What began as a way to spread comfort, magic, and whimsy during a difficult time turned into something entirely unexpected: a joyful combination of elements from picture books, puppetry, comics, animation, and filmmaking, recorded live over a Zoom call. Remembers Harris, “It’s the first time we ever wrote a book in front of an audience. It was also the first time we made a book with a full length soundtrack.” The result: a huge treat for the eyes, ears, and soul.

Darcie Little Badger

Badger’s Sheine Lende, one of Bookpage’s most anticipated YA books of 2024, is the prequel to her critically acclaimed debut novel, Elatsoe, featured in TIME as one of the best 100 fantasy books of all time. She’s also a Newbery award winner, a Locus Award winner, a Los Angeles Times Book Award finalist, and a longlistee for the National Book Award. A riveting book full of ghost dogs, fairy rings, floods, missing people, and the power of familial love, Sheine Lende is an enchanting fantasy with a beating heart.

Michael Genhart

Based on stories his mother told him as a boy, Genhart’s empowering picture book Spanish is the Language of My Family is about the joy of sharing cultural heritage with our families, inspired by the generations of Latino people punished for speaking Spanish, and the many ways new generations are rejuvenating the language. A Kirkus Reviews Best Picture Book of the Year and Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection, this book is a treasure for Spanish speaking families, as well as kids of all backgrounds who are learning the language.

That’s all we can tell you for now. But stay tuned for the full lineup of speakers and panels to appear in April! We still have a lot of exciting surprises in the works for you.