The fond memories of a beloved grandpa bring sadness but also comfort to a young girl learning about loss. She thinks of all the ways her grandpa will always be there for her through the experiences they shared together. This nourishing read-aloudof Charlotte Cheng’s I Miss You Most is just right for starting the necessary conversations about grief, and for paying tribute to the loved ones we’ve lost.

Flap your wings and fly high with these lyrical and poignant picture books about the magnificent birds around us! Learn about the resilient and mysterious crows, who roost together by the thousands and teach us important lessons about cooperation and survival in I Am We: How Crows Come Together to Survive by Leslie Barnard Booth. Soaring alongside the crows is a special type of raven, a leucistic raven, who must rise above rejection to gain self-acceptance with the support of a child’s kind and resilient spirit in Kathryn Otoshi’s The White Raven. Warble, chirp, and chatter your way through this meaningful session, moderated by Tomiiko Baker, which will feature read-alouds and a discussion between the authors!

The future is not a clean horizon. In Carrying the Land: Bodies and Belonging, five poets consider how land lives within us and how we are shaped by the terrains we cross, inherit, and survive. If the future is to be imagined differently, it must begin with what we are already carrying.

Abi Pollokoff writes with a fierce tenderness toward landscape and longing, tracing how intimacy with place can be both sanctuary and fracture. Kenneth Wong’s work moves through family history and cultural memory, illuminating how inherited stories become tools for navigating what comes next. Daniel Moysaenko’s poems dwell in displacement and reinvention, where language itself becomes a provisional homeland. Wendy M. Thompson grounds her work in community and witness, exploring how bodies marked by history still insist on joy, survival, and transformation.

Moderated by Maw Shein Win whose own poetry dissolves the boundary between self and ecosystem, and reality and the magical. This reading considers the body as archive, as borderland, as blueprint.

These poets do not offer utopia. They offer something more durable: language rooted enough to hold grief, bright enough to grow possibility.

The future isn’t waiting for permission. It’s already here and moves through language, familia, cuentos and the everyday acts of naming ourselves.

In El Futuro Vive Aquí / The Future Lives Here, four poets bring work rooted in culture, community, and the living textures of bilingual and Spanglish life. Humor and tenderness with a fierce presence, reminding us that we shape the future in real time.

Josiah Luis Alderete brings sharp wit and kinetic swagger, capturing the rhythms of culture and daily life with big corazón. Deyci Carrillo Lopez writes with tender attention to memory, migration, and the emotional landscapes of belonging. April Lopez explores identity and inheritance, tracing how stories move across generations, and Áurea María Altamirano grounds her work in resilience and cultural memory. These poets write from the present tense of community, where language shifts, stories travel, and the future is already speaking.

Ren is heartbroken to leave Popo and her magical stories behind to move to a new country where nothing feels familiar. One day, Ren discovers that with her pencil, she can bring to life what she can’t find the words to say! Through drawing, she bridges the gap between her two worlds. Join award-winning author and illustrator Bo Lu in this read-aloud of Ren’s Pencil, a heartfelt tale about immigration and imagination.

Celebrate laughter, love, Native pride, and the world’s best frybread with the phenomenal Cynthia Leitich Smith, critically-acclaimed Mvskoke author and curator of Heartdrum, a Native-focused imprint at HarperCollins publishing. She has written several bestselling books, including Jingle Dancer, Eternal, and Hearts Unbroken, which won the American Indian Youth Literature Award. Her latest book, Legendary Frybread Drive-In: Intertribal Stories, features stories from Indigenous writers connected by the big green-and-gold sign of Sandy June’s Legendary Frybread Drive-In, and it won the Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature and the American Indian Youth Literature Award! In this incredible session, Cynthia Leitich Smith will be joined by moderator Laura Atkins—children’s book author, editor, and co-organizer of the Social Justice Children’s Book Fair and YouthLit at the Bay Area Book Festival—to discuss her renowned stories, her advocacy for Native writing, and the inspiration behind her latest legendary book.