13th Annual Festival | June 4–6, 2027 | DOWNTOWN BERKELEY
RECONSTRUCTION
GET INVOLVED
There are multiple ways to get involved in our festival.
Please see click below for more information.
Full lineup, dates, and programming for the 2027 festival announced in early Spring. Sign up to our newsletter and we’ll let you know the moment it’s live.
2027 FESTIVAL THEME
At the Bay Area Book Festival, June 4–6, 2027, “Reconstruction” is our guiding theme and our shared invitation.
What do we do with what has cracked: our climates and coastlines, our infrastructures and institutions, our relationships and our sense of self? How do we reconstruct our emotional lives after grief, our communities after displacement, our political and economic systems after they have shown us who they serve, while still making room for joy, wonder, and play?
A DIFFICULT INHERITANCE
In the long shadow of the U.S. Civil War, Du Bois traced how Reconstruction’s promises were undercut by racism and capital, patterns that continue to organize the present. bell hooks brought that inquiry into the texture of everyday life, insisting that love, care, curiosity, and radical imagination are central to how we remake the world.
Their work points toward a more difficult understanding of reconstruction. It is not only forward-looking, it requires a reckoning with what persists: racial hierarchy, extractive economies, and patriarchal structures that continue to shape our institutions, our relationships, and our sense of what can be otherwise.
For the 2027 festival, we will once again gather writers, poets, historians, journalists, artists, organizers, scholars, and readers experimenting with new architectures of care and accountability.
Abolition & Public Health
Rethinking systems built to punish rather than to heal.
Education & Housing
What it takes to build institutions people can actually trust.
Cultural Memory & Spiritual Practice
Holding what came before while making room for what's next.
Land, Water & More-Than-Human Worlds
Reworking our relationship to the world beyond us.
Work, Art & Living Alongside One Another
Reshaping how we labor, make, and share space.
Refusal & Repair
Refusing to restore what was, and building differently instead.
Reconstruction is difficult work. It asks for patience, for imagination, for a willingness to unsettle what has long felt fixed. It is also a site of possibility. When existing structures falter, or no longer deserve to hold, what do we make in their place, and how might we make it differently this time?
If this year demonstrated anything, it is that we already have some knowledge of how to proceed. Not as individuals working in parallel, but as a set of relations that can hold, adapt, and produce something larger than any one position within it.
San Francisco Chronicle | March 29, 2026
Bay Area Book Festival returns with Boots Riley, Rebecca Solnit – San Francisco Chronicle
San Francisco Today | March 29, 2026
Bay Area Book Festival returns with expanded programming
KQED | April 24, 2026
PAST SPONSORS
Attendees can become a “Friend of the Festival” to secure early headliner tickets and other perks, including free access to year-round programming like our Merritt Dialogue Speaker Series, access to the kickoff Authors’ Party, and much more.
The Bay Area Book Festival is powered by more than 250-300 volunteers from across the Bay Area who come together to create this extraordinary literary celebration. Volunteer opportunities include event support, author hospitality, stage management, and more. Festival organizers are still accepting application for vendors and sponsors.
