2027 Bay Area Book Festival Speaker Application
The festival will take place June 4-6, 2027, sprawling over several venues in Downtown Berkeley during daytime, and with ticketed headliner events in the evenings at the Freight. Saturday, June 5, will feature our Writers’ Workshops, Democracy Dialogues, YouthLit Programming, and Sunday, June 6, will feature Inside Ideas and Bookworm Block Party.
You can read about our 2027 festival theme (“Reconstruction”) here.
We are accepting applications, from September 21 to November 20, 2026 through the forms below. There are several ways to potentially be a speaker at the festival so please read the application guidelines carefully to know the best way to submit your information.
IMPORTANT NOTE: The submission of an application does not guarantee that you will be invited as we have very limited space
If you have questions, please email us at [email protected].
We encourage applications from a wide variety of genres (fiction, nonfiction, poetry) and subgenres, including historical fiction, philosophy, cookbooks, anthropology, sociology, arts advocacy, politics, science, spirituality, finance written via a social justice lens, essays, memoir, works in translation, sci-fi, fantasy, horror, mysteries, thrillers, romance, graphic novels, travel, young adult fiction, children’s books, and many more. See our full genre list on the proposal form and please note that we welcome genres outside of those listed.
We heartily encourage nominations for BIPOC/LGBTQIA+ authors and all are welcome. We do not currently have the capacity to support live cooking demos on-site at the festival.
We are unable to financially support international travel at this time but we welcome publishers, embassies, and cultural institutions to support the travel and accommodation for their international authors.
Book sales are an important part of the BABF ecosystem. Festival speakers should ideally have a book published in the year preceding the opening date of the festival, but this is not a requirement. Books must be available for our independent bookseller partners to order via their customary distribution channels or directly via the publisher. Books by self-published authors should be easily accessible for booksellers to order directly from authors or printers.
All proposals will be initially evaluated by the BABF’s programming staff for eligibility. Some proposals that meet the nomination guidelines outlined above will also be evaluated by the Literary Advisory Committee.
We are looking for work that offers broad audience appeal, shows a connection to conversations larger than ourselves, contributes to BABF’s objective of representing numerous themes and topics, connects with other speakers’ works as we consider the makeup of particular panels, and work that dares to push boundaries and imagine alternative futures. Financial feasibility will also be taken into account, especially with regards to travel and accommodation, if it is not funded by the author or publisher.
Your work has merit and we are honored to be considered. Please remember that if your work is not selected, it may not have been selected for any number of reasons and we encourage you to submit nominations again next year. While we consider all proposals, we receive many more proposals than we are able to accept.
Due to staffing limitations, we are unable to offer status updates but you will hear back from us no later than February 1, 2027.
