Eddie Ahn is an environmental justice attorney and nonprofit worker based in San Francisco. He is a self-taught artist who has been recognized as a Cartoonist-in-Residence by the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa. Advocate is his debut graphic novel.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Drawn to Justice: Graphic Novels and the Power of Social Action

Faith Adiele is a memoirist, essayist, travel writer, and speaker. She is author of Meeting Faith, an award-winning account of becoming Thailand’s first Black Buddhist nun, and recently, experimental chapbooks Her Voice: Hänen Äänensä: A Hybrid Memoir and Voice/Over: A Memoir Breakout in 7 Movies. Media credits include A World of Calm (HBO-Max), Sleep Stories (Calm App), and the documentary My Journey Home (PBS) about finding her family in Nigeria. Her award-winning journalism appears in Alta, Smithsonian, Hyperallergic, Miami Herald, and others. Faith teaches in the MFA Writing Program at California College of the Arts and chairs Writing & Literature.

2025 Bookworm Blockparty

Speaker  – Embrace Furiously This Burning World: Writers Reckon with Now

2025 Inside Ideas

Moderator  – Essay as Form

Tina Valentin Aguirre (they/them) is Director of the Castro LGBTQ Cultural District in San Francisco. A graduate of Stanford University with a BA in Communication, Tina has dedicated decades to grantwriting, documentary filmmaking, and arts festival production. Their leadership includes four years as Chair of the Board of Directors for the GLBT Historical Society. Tina curated the exhibition “Chosen Familias: LGBTQ Latinx Family Photo Albums” (2019) at the GLBT Historical Society Museum and is a published poet. They have lived in San Francisco since 1987.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – So Many Stars: A Celebration of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color

Wahab Algarmi is a writer and comic artist. He has been creating comics and a community space for other artists in the San Francisco Bay Area for years. Some of his past comic work includes The Society of Unordinary Young Ladies, which has been well reviewed by numerous news outlets, including the Comics Beat, Newsarama, and USA Today. He was also a recent recipient of one the inaugural grants from the City of Oakland of Cultural Affairs Division, the Akonadi Foundation, and the East Bay Community Foundation for his comic work Town Force 1 and the Battle for East Oakland. For years, he also worked with another arts nonprofit, Kearny Street Workshop, to spotlight emerging Asian American artists. He currently lives in Oakland, California, with his wife and children.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Follow Your Heart to Graphic Novels

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

Adenike Amin is a creative force, equal parts artist, mystic, and cultural visionary. As the Storytelling Lead at BLACspace Cooperative, she architects narratives that reinforce Black-led arts and culture movements in Oakland, treating storytelling as an act of defiance, and a blueprint for liberation. Trained in Visual Arts with a minor in Meditative Studies at SUNY Purchase, Adenike wields aesthetics like a scalpel, slicing through the noise to uncover what is raw, urgent, and necessary. As an East Oakland native, she moves through the world with the sharp eye of a documentarian and the soul of a poet. A multidisciplinary artist and Pan-Africanist, her work is a hybrid of social impact, film, literature, photography, design, and education.

2025 Democracy Dialogues 

Speaker  – Mutual Aid and Community Care in California

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of Lessons in Magic and Disaster, coming August 2025 from Tor Books. Her other novels include All the Birds in the Sky, The City in the Middle of the Night and the young-adult Unstoppable trilogy. She’s also the author of the short story collection Even Greater Mistakes, and Never Say You Can’t Survive, a book about how to use creative writing to get through hard times. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.

2025 Family Day 

Moderator  – The End of the (Fantastical) World: Complicated Relationships in Dystopia

Mx. Yaffa is a an author and storyteller that paves the way for us to imagine utopia through every word. Having shared their story with over 300,000 audience members at speaking events globally.

Mx. Yaffa is an acclaimed disabled, autistic, trans, queer, Muslim, and indigenous Palestinian individual who has received multiple awards for their transformative work around displacement, decolonization, equity, and centering the lived experiences of individuals most impacted by injustice.

Mx. Yaffa is the Executive Director of Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity (MASGD), as well as the founder of several non-profits and community projects.

Mx. Yaffa is an engineer, death and birthing doula, peer support specialist, consultant, and artist.

2025 Bookworm Blockparty

Speaker  – Women, Cyborgs, Revolutionary Petunias, and Other Creatures

Nefertiti Asanti is a poet from the Bronx residing in Oakland, CA. Nefertiti is a recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Watering Hole, Lambda Literary, Anaphora Arts, Winter Tangerine, Museum of the African Diaspora, PEN America, VONA, and SeaSalted Honey. Nefertiti’s debut chapbook fist of wind won the inaugural Start a Riot! Chapbook Prize. They’re also a recipient of the 2023 SFF/Nomadic Press Literary Award. Their work can be found at Foglifter, Split Lip Magazine, Santa Fe Writer’s Project, and elsewhere.

2025 Writers’ Workshops 

Speaker  – Panel: We Will Not Disappear: Queer/Trans Voices in a Time of Backlash

Isis Asare earned a degree in psychology from Stanford University. She then lived in Ghana, her parents’ homeland, as part of the Peace Corps. Her subsequent life chapters include graduate degrees from Columbia Business School and Harvard University, a career in tech at companies such as Microsoft, Shutterfly, and Brightroll, and starting a film entertainment site for queer women of color named Sistah Sinema which Asare sold for 2x revenue in 2010. In 2019, Isis Asare started Sistah Scifi, the first Black owned bookstore focused on science fiction and fantasy. Located primarily in cyberspace, Sistah Scifi launched three Sistah Scifi Book Vending Machine in 2023. In 2024, Isis Asare was selected as the first African American executive director of Aunt Lute Books, a San Francisco based, non-profit feminist press.

2025 Inside Ideas

Moderator  – Telling Our Futures: Speculative Fiction and Social Change

2025 Family Day 

Moderator  – Fantastical Worlds and Beings

Laura Atkins is a children’s book author, editor and coach, and a member of the Social Justice Children’s Book Fair organizing team. She co-authored Fred Korematsu Speaks Up, with Stan Yoga, a title that earned multiple honors including the Carter G. Woodson Award and the Jane Addams Honor Award. She also co-authored Biddy Mason Speaks Up, with Arisa White which won a Nautilus and Independent Publisher Book Award. Laura has worked at Children’s Book Press and as an editor at Lee & Low Books and offers freelance editorial services to individuals and several publishers. With an MA in Children’s Literature from Roehampton University in London, and an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts, Laura lives in Berkeley, CA. She is passionate about equity and true access to all voices in children’s publishing.

2025 Bookworm Blockparty

Speaker  – Storytime with Laura Atkins & Drag Story Hour – Bringing the Beach Home

2025 Inside Ideas

Moderator  – Storming the Gatekeepers: Past, Present, & Future Publishing Alternatives

2025 Family Day 

Moderator  – Healing and Resistance

Bernadette Atuahene is a Harvard and Yale trained property law scholar whose work focuses on land and homes stolen from Black people. She currently holds the Duggan Chair at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. Atuahene has served as a judicial clerk at the South African Constitutional Court, worked as a consultant for the South African Land Claims Commission, and practiced at a global law firm called Cleary Gottlieb. She is the author of We Want What’s Ours: Learning from South Africa’s Land Restitution Program,and she directed and produced an award-winning short documentary film about one South African family’s struggle to regain their land. Atuahene has won several accolades and has published extensively in both academic journals and news outlets such as the New York Times and LA Times

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Decolonizing Wealth: Confronting Systemic Barriers, Creating Lasting Change

Annie Barrows is the bestselling author of books for both children and adults, including the New York Times bestselling Ivy + Bean series, The Best of Iggy series, the YA novel Nothing, and the adult bestselling novel The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. She lives in Northern California.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Pages and Pictures from Early Reader to Middle Grade

Zack Beauchamp is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers challenges to democracy in the United States and abroad, right-wing populism, and the world of ideas. He has received funding awards from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting to report on democratic decline in Israel and Hungary in the field, and is the author of “On The Right,” a newsletter on the American conservative movement. He has appeared on a wide range of television and radio networks, including MSNBC, CNN, Fox News, BBC, CBC, ABC (Australia), and Al Jazeera. His book on democracy, The Reactionary Spirit, was published July 2024.

2025 Democracy Dialogues 

Speaker  – Voices Against the Tide: Independent Media and the Struggle for American Democracy

Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet. Her collection of 40 palindromic sonnets, titled This Was Supposed to Be About Beauty, is forthcoming from Penguin Poets in Spring 2027. She’s the winner of the 2023 Arab American Book Award for Poetry for O, which was named a Best Book of the Year by Literary Hub and The New York Public Library. She’s also the author of Louder than Hearts and To Live in Autumn, as well as the chapbooks 3arabi Song and There Was and How Much There Was. Her work has appeared in LARB, Lithub, The Nation, Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. She’s the co-editor, with Hala Alyan, of the anthology We Call to the Eye and the Night: Love Poems by Writers of Arab Descent. She’s the co-creator and co-host, with poet Farah Chamma, of Maqsouda, a podcast in Arabic about Arabic poetry. Zeina currently resides in California.

2025 Bookworm Blockparty

Speaker  – Embrace Furiously This Burning World: Writers Reckon with Now

KhalilBendib is the co-author of the New York Times bestseller Zahra’s Paradise, which was published in 16 languages and nominated for two Eisner Awards. Born in Algeria, Bendib has lived in Berkeley, CA since the 1980s. After eight years as political cartoonist at the San Bernardino County Sun, Bendib now distributes his cartoons to 1700 independent publications nationwide and co-hosts a weekly one-hour show, Voices of the Middle East and North Africa,on Pacifica station KPFA.

2025 Family Day 

Moderator  – Homeland to Home

Ari Berman is the national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones and a reporting fellow at Type Media Center. He’s the author of Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It, Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction) and Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics. His writing has also appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post and Rolling Stone, and he is a frequent commentator on MSNBC and NPR. He’s won the Sidney Hillman Foundation Prize for Magazine Journalism and an Izzy Award for outstanding achievement in independent media. He lives in New Paltz, New York.

2025 Democracy Dialogues 

Speaker  – Voices Against the Tide: Independent Media and the Struggle for American Democracy

Mia Birdsong is a pathfinder and futurist who reconnects us with our forgotten wisdom and practices of collective liberation. She is the author of How We Show Up and the founding Executive Director of Next River, an institute for practicing the future.

2025 Headliners 

Speaker  – The Embodiment of Care

Cara Black is the author of twenty-one books in the New York Times bestselling Aimée Leduc series, the national bestseller Three Hours in Paris, and its follow-up, Night Flight to Paris. She has been awarded La Médaille d’Or du Rayonnement Culturel—the medal for distinguished service in sharing historic and cultural insights of Paris by the French Republic, received multiple nominations for the Anthony and Macavity Awards, and her books have been translated into German, Norwegian, Japanese, French, Spanish, Italian, and Hebrew. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and visits Paris frequently.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Murder in Mysterious Places

Randal Brandt is a librarian at The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, where he serves as Head of Cataloging and as Curator of the California Detective Fiction Collection. He is a member of the American Library Association’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Section and the Northern California chapter of Mystery Writers of America.

2025 Inside Ideas

Moderator  – Murder in Mysterious Places

Jaz Brisack is a union organizer and cofounder of the Inside Organizer School, which trains workers to unionize. After spending one year at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, they got a job as a barista at the Elmwood Starbucks in Buffalo, New York, becoming a founding member of Starbucks Workers United and helping organize the first unionized Starbucks in the United States. As the organizing director for Workers United Upstate New York and Vermont, they worked with organizing committees at companies ranging from Ben and Jerry’s to Tesla.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Organized Resistance From the Ground Up

Cat Brooks is an award winning actress and playwright. In her role as an artivist, she is also the host of Law and Disorder on KPFA and resident playwright and actress with The Lower Bottom Playaz in Oakland and 3 Girls Theater in San Francisco. As an organizer, she played a central role in the struggle for justice for Oscar Grant, and spent the last decade working with impacted communities and families to rapidly respond to police violence and radically transform the ways our communities are policed and incarcerated. She is the co-founder of the Anti Police-Terror Project (APTP) and the Executive Director of the Justice Teams Network. Cat was also the runner-up in Oakland’s 2018 mayoral election, facing incumbent Libby Schaaf.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Art as Radical Practice: Black Women’s Creative Expression as Social Change

Alex Brown is a queer, biracial Filipino American writer who loves rooting for the final girl—especially if she’s a monster. Her YA comedy-horror debut, Damned If You Do was a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection and a Locus Award finalist. Alex edited The House Where Death Lives, a YA horror anthology that received the Junior Library Guild distinction. Alex also co-edited YA horror anthology Night of the Living Queers. She enjoys spending time with her partner and their three chaotic cats somewhere in northern California.

Sylvia Brownrigg is the author of several acclaimed works of fiction, including the novels Morality Tale; The Delivery Room, winner of the Northern California Book Award; Pages for You, winner of the Lambda Award; and The Metaphysical Touch; and a collection of stories, Ten Women Who Shook the World. Brownrigg’s works have been included in The New York Times and Los Angeles Times lists of notable fictions and have been translated into several languages. Her novel for children, Kepler’s Dream, written under the name Juliet Bell was published in 2012 and turned into a feature film. Brownrigg lives with her family in London and in Berkeley, California.

2025 Inside Ideas

Moderator  – Fiction Debuts Navigating Historical Memory

Katryn Bury is the author of the middle-grade mystery Drew Leclair Gets a Clue and the forthcoming sequel Drew Leclair Crushes the Case. A lifelong true crime nerd, she has a bachelor’s degree in sociology and criminology. Her short and serialized fiction can be found in Suspense Magazine and The Sleuth. By day, she is a library technician who is lucky enough to work with her target audience. She lives in Oakland with her family and a vast collection of Nancy Drew mysteries.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Finding Your Place in Middle Grade

Judith Butler is the author of several books, including Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity; Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”; The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection; and The Force of Nonviolence. In addition to their numerous academic honors and publications, Butler has published editorials and reviews in a wide range of journals and newspapers, including The New York Times, Time, and the London Review of Books, and has been featured on radio programs and podcasts throughout the world. They live in Berkeley, California.

2025 Headliners 

Speaker  – Who’s Afraid of Gender?

Bryan Byrdlong is a Black poet from Chicago, Illinois. His debut poetry collection, Strange Flowers, is out from YesYes Books in 2025. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from the Helen Zell Writers Program, and is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at USC in Los Angeles. He has been published in Guernica, The Kenyon Review, Poetry Magazine, among others. Bryan is a Cave Canem fellow and received the 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.

2025 Bookworm Blockparty

Speaker  – Garden of Possibilities

Cave Canem fellow James Cagney is the award winning author of Black Steel Magnolias In The Hour Of Chaos Theory (Black Lawrence Press, 2023) and MARTIAN: The Saint Of Loneliness (Nomadic Press, 2022). Ghetto Koans: A Personal Archive will be released by Black Lawrence Press this July, 2025. He was born, raised, and currently resides in Oakland, California.

2025 Bookworm Blockparty

Speaker  – Wound is the Portal: Healing into the Future

Kristina M Canales (she/they) is a lifelong reader, writer, and gaymer. She is the founder of Queerthology – an online QTBIPOC book club – and loves to blur the border between horror and romance with her monster erotica. When not working their day job, you can find Kris facilitating Micro RPG games at Games of Berkeley and racking up their library holds. Kris lives on Ohlone Land.

2025 Inside Ideas

Moderator  – Nightmares Revealed: The Rise of Latinx Horror Fiction

2025 Bookworm Blockparty

Speaker  – Official Launch of the BABF Affinity Lit Collectives

Coming Soon!

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – In Search of Sanctuary: Stories of Migration, Hardships and Hope

micha cárdenas is an artist, author and Associate Professor of Critical Race & Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her debut novel Atoms Never Touch (AK Press 2023) imagines trans latina love crossing multiple quantum realities. Her academic monograph Poetic Operations : Trans of Color Art in Digital Media(Duke UP 2022) was the co-winner of the Gloria Anzaldúa Book Prize in 2022 from the National Women’s Studies Association. cárdenas is an editor of the journal Transgender Studies Quarterly. She is the director of the Critical Realities Studio. Her artworks have been shown at museums, galleries and biennials internationally.

2025 Headliners 

Speaker  – Who’s Afraid of Gender?

Eirinie Carson is a Black British writer, born to a Jamaican father and Scottish-ish mother and raised in South East London. Her work has appeared in the Sonora Review and she is a frequent contributor to Mother magazine. A member of the San Francisco Writers Grotto, Eirinie writes about motherhood, grief, and relationships. Eirinie lives in Northern California with her musician husband and their one dog and two daughters. The Dead are Gods is her first book.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – A Memoir for Remembrance

Jeanne Carstensen is an award-winning journalist. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, and Salon, and broadcast nationally on The World. She covered the Syrian refugee crisis in Greece and Turkey. Jeanne has been awarded grants and fellowships from The Pulitzer Center, Logan Nonfiction Program, and Mesa Refuge, where she was the Peter Barnes Long-Form Journalism fellow. She lives in San Francisco.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – In Search of Sanctuary: Stories of Migration, Hardships and Hope

Yuria Celidwen, Ph.D., I am a native of Indigenous Nahua and Maya lineages from the cloudforests of Chiapas, Mexico. I am of Earth; my heart is on fire. My family is one of mystics, healers, poets, and explorers of the soil and the soul of life’s strength, tenderness, and fragility. I grew up with one wing in the wilderness and another in the magical realism of Indigenous dreamlands and stories. My Elders’ songs enthralled my childhood and enhanced my mythic imagination and emotional intuition. They’ve become the fertile soils and waters where the seeds of reverence, play, and wonder dig their roots. I am a Truth-bearer, trickster dreamer, and culture-shifter. As a scholar, I research Indigenous forms of contemplation and the transcendent experience embodied in prosocial behavior (reverence, ethics, compassion, and a sense of awe, love, and sacredness). I call my research broader statement the “Ethics of Belonging,” encouraging awareness, intention, and relational actions toward planetary flourishing and a path of meaning and participation rooted in honoring Life.

2025 Democracy Dialogues 

Speaker  – In Dialogue: Building Communities that Thrive

Katya Cengel is a freelance journalist and author based in California. Her work has appeared in New York Times Magazine, Marie Claire, Newsweek, Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. She is the author of From Chernobyl with Love: Reporting from the Ruins of the Soviet Union, which was the Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY) 2020 winner and Foreword Indies 2019 winner. She is also the author of Exiled: From the Killing Fields of Cambodia to California and Back and Bluegrass Baseball: A Year in the Minor League Life.

Nidhi Chanani is a freelance illustrator, cartoonist, and writer. Born in Calcutta and raised in suburban Southern California, she creates because it makes her happy—with the hope that it can make others happy too. Her debut graphic novel, Pashmina, received starred reviews from School Library Journal and Publisher’s Weekly, was a Junior Library Guild Selection, a YALSA Top Ten Great Graphic Novel for Teens, and was reviewed in The New York Times. She has a number of other comics and picture books out in the world as well, including Binny’s Diwali, Jukebox, and What Will My Story Be? Chanani draws and dreams every day with her husband, kid, and their kittens in the San Francisco Bay Area.e

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Quiet Voices, Loud Feelings

Adam Ryan Chang was born and raised in San Francisco. Adam infuses his experience as a queer Asian American into his writings. Adam is the Executive Director of Oasis Legal Services, a California nonprofit supporting LGBTQ+ asylum seekers. He is the proud adoptive parent of a Latine daughter. Adam graduated from the University of California in Davis with a degree in African Studies and completed law school at the University of Hawai`i in Mānoa.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Moving House, Moving Place, and Opening Our Minds

MK Chavez is an Afro-Latinx writer and educator. Chavez co-directs Berkeley Poetry Festival, is co-founder/curator of Lyrics & Dirges reading series, and is executive director of Ouroboros Coaching & Writing Lab.

Chavez’s writing explores mixed-race identity, social justice, environmental resilience, horror cinema, ritual, and the creative process.

Chavez’s work has been recognized with a Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Award, Alameda Arts Leadership Award, San Francisco Foundation/Nomadic Press Literary Award, and Ruth Weiss Maverick Award. Chavez’s work has been recognized by the Berkeley Public Library Foundation and with an Alameda Leadership Award. In 2023, she was a Yerba Center of the Arts 100. Chavez has received fellowships from CantoMundo, Caldera, Community of Writers, Hedgebrook, Playa, Small Press Traffic, and VONA.

Chavez’s literary offerings include Dear Animal,Mothermorphosis, the lyric essay chapbook A Brief History of the Selfie, and Virgin Eyes. Recent work can be found on the walls of the art installation Manifest Differently.

2025 Bookworm Blockparty

Speaker  – Official Launch of the BABF Affinity Lit Collectives
Speaker  – Incantations to Open Portals

2025 Headliners 

Moderator  – Who’s Afraid of Gender?

2025 Writers’ Workshops 

Speaker  – The Power of Voice: Writing for Social Change & Personal Truth

Charlotte Cheng’s writing credits include Roar-Choo!, Night Market Rescue, and I Miss You Most. She has illustrated the picture books Silly McGilly and A Moment in Time. In the field of education, she has written and illustrated K-12 curriculum for a variety of companies such as LeapFrog, Disney, and Wonder Workshop. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, daughter, and two dogs.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Play with Your Food!

Michelle Chouinard is the author of the Serial Killer Guide to San Francisco mysteries, and under another name, the USA Today and Publishers Weekly bestselling author of nine previous mysteries. Michelle has a Ph.D. in developmental psychology from Stanford University and was one of UC Merced’s founding faculty members. She lives in the Bay Area and enjoys caffeine in all forms, amateur genealogy, baking, and anything to do with Halloween or the zombie apocalypse.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Murder in Mysterious Places

Arree Chung is the author and illustrator of Ninja! and Ninja! Attack of the Clan, as well as the illustrator of How to Pee: Potty Training for Boys/Girls. Prior to writing and illustrating picture books, Arree worked at Pixar, where he learned the secret to success: loving what you do. To pursue his passion, Arree enrolled at the Art Center College of Design where he learned to draw, paint, and think differently. When Arree is not practicing his Ninja moves, you can find him playing basketball or riding his bike. He lives with his family in San Francisco, California.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Finding Your Place in Middle Grade

Chino Lee Chung is a queer Chinese Mexican personal essay writer and is currently working on a collection of essays that integrate his social activism with his intersectional identities. He is a recipient of the 2024-2025 San Jose State Steinbeck Fellowship and holds MFAs from the California College of Arts and San Francisco State University. His work appears in Invitation to Joy – Writer’s Creating in Community, Gender Queer: voices from beyond the sexual binary, Our Family Coalition Newsletter, and is an Assistant Fiction Editor at 14 Hills Literary Magazine.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Essay as Form
Speaker  – So Many Stars: A Celebration of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color

Jane Ciabattari, author of the short story collection Stealing the Fire, is a former National Book Critics Circle president (and current NBCC vice president/events), a Lit Hub columnist, BBC Culture contributor, on the advisory boards of the Bay Area Book Festival, Lit Camp, and The Story Prize; a Pushcart Prize contributing editor, and a member of the Writers Grotto. Her reviews, interviews and cultural criticism have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, NPR, The Guardian, Bookforum, Paris Review, the Washington Post, Boston Globe, and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications.

2025 Inside Ideas

Moderator  – Stories of Tomorrow: Speculative Fiction

Hello I am Claire. I enjoy going on hikes, school, and going on adventures with friends. I love to hang out with friends and outdoor animals in my free time as well as going on picnics in my backyard with my brother. I am joining the Bay Area Book Festival for fun and because of my connections with Cinnamongirls an organization!

2025 Family Day 

Moderator  – Healing and Resistance

Sharon Coleman is a fifth generation Northern Californian with a penchant for languages and their entangled word roots. She co-curates the reading series Lyrics & Dirges and co-directs the Berkeley Poetry Festival. Her books include Paris Blinks, micro-fiction and Half Circle, poetry. She received the Maverick Award from the ruth weiss Foundation. She teaches creative writing at Berkeley City College and composition at U.C. Berkeley www.sharoncolemanpoetry.com.

2025 Bookworm Blockparty

Speaker  – Poetry Postcards (all day drop-in activity)

Alex L. Combs and Andrew Eakett are a creative team and a couple who’ve been together for more than twenty years. They have spent much of their time studying and making art about topics relating to feminist and gender studies. Trans History; From Ancient Times to Modern Day represents the culmination of a decade of journeying into this topic since they both came out as trans. They live in the San Francisco Bay Area.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Healing and Resistance

Janis Cooke Newman is the author of two award-winning historical novels, as well as a memoir. She is also the founder of Page Street and LitCamp.

2025 Inside Ideas

Moderator  – Seeking Justice in Historical Fiction

2025 Writers’ Workshops 

Speaker  – Paths to Publishing: From the Big Five to DIY
Speaker  – How to Find (& Create) Your Writing Community

Dr. Yamonte Cooper is a scholar, author, professor of counseling, adjunct professor of clinical psychology, Clinical Director of the West Coast Sex Therapy Center, Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor (LPCC), and Certified Sex Therapist Supervisor (CST-S). Dr. Cooper is the author of Black Men and Racial Trauma: Impacts, Disparities, and Interventions and co-editor of Black Couples Therapy: Clinical Theory and Practice. Further, as a Fulbright scholar, Dr. Cooper has exchanged best practices globally in career counseling and development.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Bridging the Gaps: Redefining Healthcare Through a Justice Lens

Gabriel Cortez is a poet, educator, and organizer. He is a VONA fellow, 2023 YBCA Creative Corps awardee, board secretary at Performing Arts Workshop, and the inaugural poet in residence with the Shelterwood Collective and the Ecology Center in Berkeley. From 2014 to 2023, Gabriel served as Lead Poet Mentor and Director of Programs at Youth Speaks, one of the world’s leading presenters of spoken word performance, education, and youth development programs. Gabriel is a member of the artist collective, Ghostlines, and co-founder of The Root Slam, an award-winning poetry venue dedicated to inclusivity, justice, and artistic growth, as well as Write Home, a project working to challenge public perceptions of houselessness and shift critical resources to houseless Bay Area youth through poetry and arts programming. For more on Gabriel, visit www.gabrielmcortez.com

2025 Inside Ideas

Introducer  – Organized Resistance From the Ground Up

2025 Bookworm Blockparty

Speaker  – Garden of Possibilities
Moderator  – Strength and Solace in Numbers

Debut novelist Aaron John Curtis is an enrolled member of the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe, which he’ll tell you is the white name for the American side of Akwesasne. Aaron has judged for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance prizes, the 2019 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction, and the 2021 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Since 2004, Aaron has been Quartermaster at Books and Books, Miami’s largest independent bookstore.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Redefining Home

Angela Dalton is an award-winning author of children’s literature whose work has been recognized by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, Jane Addams Peace Association, Northern California Book Awards, and other esteemed organizations. Her titles include If You Look Up to the Sky, Ruby’s Reunion Day Dinner(HarperCollins), Show the World! (Viking), To Boldly Go: How Nichelle Nichols and Star Trek Helped Civil Rights(HarperCollins), and her forthcoming debut early reader, Freedom Celebration: A Juneteenth Party(HarperCollins). When she’s not reading or writing, Dalton is involved in several organizations that support children’s literacy. She is the executive director and co-founder of Storytime Friends, a board member of Tandem Partners in Early Learning Literacy, and a writing mentor for fourth and fifth-grade students at Chapter 510 in Oakland, California.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Telling Our Futures: Speculative Fiction and Social Change

Mona Damluji grew up on the other side of the world from the places that her ancestors called home. And yet, thanks to her parents, she has always felt a deep attachment to her Iraqi and Lebanese roots. As a student, Mona moved around quite a bit, over the years called many places home including Beirut, Boston, Berkeley, London, and China. Today she lives and works in Santa Barbara, California with her family, where she’s an assistant professor of Film and Media Studies. When she’s not hanging out with her kids or teaching her students, you can find her writing, organizing poetry readings, and dreaming up her next creative project.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Homeland to Home

JASMIN DARZNIK is the New York Times bestselling author of three books, most recently The Bohemians. Her personal essays have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. She is chair and associate professor of the MFA in Writing Program at California College of the Arts.

2025 Bookworm Blockparty

Speaker  – Embrace Furiously This Burning World: Writers Reckon with Now

Author, founder, and organizer Aida Mariam Davis is relentlessly committed to the dignity and distinction of the African and Black way of life. She is part of a long tradition of poets, philosophers, and prophets who participate in liberation movements in the US and abroad. She is a descendant of anticolonial fighters who kept Ethiopia free from colonialism when virtually all of Africa was colonized. Her life’s work has been to excavate the historical and ongoing impacts of settler colonialism, making explicit the ways in which extraction, oppression, and enslavement serve the goals of empire—not least by severing ancestral connections and disrupting profound and ancient relationships to self, nature, and community. Mariam Davis is the founder of Decolonize Design and Kindred Creation is her first book.

2025 Democracy Dialogues 

Speaker  – In Dialogue: Building Communities that Thrive

Matthew Clark Davison is co-author, with Alice LaPlante, of The Lab, Experiments in Writing Across Genre(W.W. Norton), based on The Lab: Writing Classes with MCD, a non-academic school Matthew started in San Francisco in 2007 in a friend’s living room. He is the author of the novel Doubting Thomas (Amble Press), which was hailed as one of “46 Must-Read Books by Queer Authors” in Esquire Magazine. His prose has been published in BOMB, LitHub, Lambda Literary, The Advocate, Exquisite Pandemic, Guernica, The Atlantic Monthly, Lumina Magazine, and others.

2025 Writers’ Workshops 

Speaker  – The Lab: Experiments in Writing Across Genre—Turning Obsession into Art with Aesthetic Force

Aya de León is a Black/Puerto Rican author who teaches creative writing at UC Berkeley. She is the current poet laureate of the City of Berkeley. Aya’s novels have won the Northern California Book Award, the Jane Addams prize for social justice children’s literature, two first-place International Latino Book Awards and three first place Independent Publisher Awards. A former spoken word poet and hip hop theater artist, Aya’s work has also appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, Ebony, Guernica, The Guardian UK, Writers Digest, Bitch Magazine, VICE, The Root, Ploughshares, and on Def Poetry, and she has been interviewed for “By the Book” in The New York Times. Aya has an intersectional memoir-in-progress about race, gender, war, body image, and the environment. In spring 2022, she organized an online conference entitled “Black Literature vs. the Climate Emergency” (available on YouTube). She currently does intergenerational cultural organizing with the Working Families Party, the Movement for Black Lives, and ADJNCEA (pronounced “agency”), a Black climate, environmental and food justice network in Northern California.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Art as Radical Practice: Black Women’s Creative Expression as Social Change

2025 Bookworm Blockparty

Speaker  – Incantations to Open Portals

2025 Headliners 

Introducer  – The Embodiment of Care
Moderator Introducer  – Portable Intersectionality: Roxane Gay in conversation with Alicia Garza

Natasha Dennerstein was born in Melbourne, Australia. She has an MFA from San Francisco State University. Natasha has had poetry published in many journals internationally, including The North American Review and Spoon River Poetry Review. She has published several poetry collections and chapbooks including, most recently in 2024, the collection Apps Poetica from The Los Angeles Press and the chapbook Caught in the Machine from Be About It Press in Philadelphia. She lives in Oakland, California, where she is a freelance editor. She is a Fellow of the Lambda Literary Writer’s Retreat.

2025 Writers’ Workshops 

Speaker  – Panel: We Will Not Disappear: Queer/Trans Voices in a Time of Backlash

Danielle Deveaux is a Bookseller/Event Coordinator at Books Inc. San Leandro where she runs a monthly Romantasy Book Club and a quarterly Dark Romance Book Club, both of which are filled with some of the loveliest humans in the world. When she’s not busy organizing bookish events, she’s hunting down her next favorite read or struggling to find more room on her shelves for it.

2025 Inside Ideas

Moderator  – Romantasy — Not for the Faint of Heart

Emile Suotonye DeWeaver is a formerly incarcerated activist, widely published essayist, owner of Re:Frame LLC, and a 2022 Soros Justice Fellow. California’s Governor Brown commuted his life sentence after twenty-one years for his community work. He has written for publications including the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, Colorlines, The Appeal, The Rumpus, and Seventh Wave. The author of Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine (The New Press), he lives in Oakland, California.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Ghosts of Justice: Exposing the Failures and Reimagining the Future of the American Legal System

Tara Dorabji is the author of the novel, Call Her Freedom, winner of the Simon & Schuster Books Like Us first novel contest. She is the daughter of Parsi-Indian and German-Italian migrants. Her documentary film series on human rights defenders in Kashmir won awards at over a dozen film festivals throughout Asia and the USA. Tara’s work has been published  in Al Jazeera, The Chicago Quarterly, Huizache, and acclaimed anthologies Good Girls Marry Doctors and All the Women in My Family Sing. She lives in Northern California with her family and rabbit.

2025 Headliners 

Speaker  – “Writing as an Other”

Katie Dorame is a Tongva artist of mixed ancestry–Indigenous and European American, born in Los Angeles, currently living and working in Oakland. Her work focuses on Indigenous representation, mythology, and Hollywood narratives. Dorame’s work has been exhibited at Shulamit Nazarian in Los Angeles, the National Willa Cather Center in Nebraska, Form & Concept in Santa Fe, and the Handwerker Gallery at Ithaca College in New York, in addition to Slash Art, Anglim Trimble, Southern Exposure, Galería de la Raza, Guerrero Gallery, and the Thacher Gallery in San Francisco. She received her MFA from the California College of the Arts and her BA from UCSC. See more of Katie’s work at katiedorame.com.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Bite-Sized Biographies: Picture Books of Resistance and Resilience

Kinsale Drake (Diné) is a winner of the 2023 National Poetry Series for her debut poetry collection The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket (University of Georgia Press, 2024). Her work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Poets.org, Best New Poets, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. She directs programming for NDN Girls Book Club, which distributes free books to Indigenous youth and communities. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Indigenous Poetry: Words that Map the Natural World

2025 Bookworm Blockparty

Speaker  – Garden of Possibilities

Alex L. Combs and Andrew Eakett are a creative team and a couple who’ve been together for more than twenty years. They have spent much of their time studying and making art about topics relating to feminist and gender studies. Trans History: From Ancient Times to Modern Day represents the culmination of a decade of journeying into this topic since they both came out as trans. They live in the San Francisco Bay Area.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Healing and Resistance

Brian Edwards-Tiekert is the host of UpFront, the morning public affairs show on KPFA-FM.

2025 Democracy Dialogues 

Moderator  – Mutual Aid and Community Care in California

Ashara Ekundayo is a queer Black feminist interdisciplinary independent curator, cultural theologian, writer and consultant whose creative arts practice utilizes joy-informed pedagogies to reimagine collective liberation strategies. She is the founder and lead steward at Artist As First Responder as well as The Black Curator’s Lab artist residency. Currently, she is editing a series of 33 artist interviews she conducted over the course of the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic of Black women sharing stories on art, joy, and rage titled BLATANT. Ekundayo conjures between the San Francisco Bay Area and her hometown of Detroit, MI.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Art as Radical Practice: Black Women’s Creative Expression as Social Change

Zetta Elliott is the author of over forty books for young readers, including the award-winning picture books Bird and A Place Inside of Me. Her bestseller Dragons in a Bag was selected for the 2021 Global Read Aloud. Her young adult poetry collection, Say Her Name, won the 2021 Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry. Her verse novel, Moonwalking, made the 2023 Notable Books for a Global Society list. Her own imprint, Rosetta Press, generates culturally relevant stories that center children who have been misrepresented and/or rendered invisible in children’s literature. She currently lives in Chicago.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Storming the Gatekeepers: Past, Present, & Future Publishing Alternatives

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – All Bodies All Selves
Speaker  – Fantastical Worlds and Beings

Huda Fahmy grew up in Dearborn, Michigan, and has loved comics since she was a kid. She attended the University of Michigan where she majored in English. She taught English to middle and high schoolers for eight years before she started writing about her experiences as a visibly Muslim woman in America and was encouraged by her older sister to turn these stories into comics. Huda, her husband, Gehad, and their children reside in Houston, Texas.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Follow Your Heart to Graphic Novels

Sara A. Fajardo is a Peruvian-American writer whose dad constantly reminded her that potatoes are from the Andes. So, she jumped at the chance to work as a consultant for the International Potato Center. Over the years she’s learned which potatoes help paint your lips the perfect shade of red, how to cure a sour stomach with potato, and how much we owe the farmers and plant scientists who care for our potatoes. She’s lives in the North Bay where she now works as a first grade dual immersion teacher.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Play with Your Food!

Diana Farid is a poet, an award-winning author, and a physician at Stanford University. Her debut picture book, When You Breathe, a poetic introduction to respiration, was named a 2021 Notable Poetry Book by the National Council of Teachers of English, won a 2021 EUREKA! Gold Award for children’s nonfiction and made the 2021 Communication Arts shortlist for Illustration. Her debut middle grade verse novel, Wave, released on 3/29/22. “Raw and powerful…Rich, layered, and heart-rending.” –Kirkus Reviews.Wave celebrates the healing power of poetry and music.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Storytime for Littles

Grant Faulkner is the executive director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and the cofounder of 100 Word Story. His work has been widely anthologized in flash-fiction collections, and he is the author of several books, including All the Comfort Sin Can Provide, Fissures, and Nothing Short of 100: Selected Tales from 100 Word Story. His most recent book is The Art of Brevity: Crafting the Very Short Story.

2025 Writers’ Workshops 

Speaker  – Becoming an Authorpreneur

Rickey Fayne is a fiction writer from rural West Tennessee. He holds an MA in English from Northwestern University and an MFA in Fiction from the Michener Center for Writers at UT Austin. His short stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, Guernica, The Sewanee Review, and Joyland. His first novel, All God’s Children, is forthcoming from Little, Brown.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Fiction Debuts Navigating Historical Memory

Garrett Felber is an educator, writer, and organizer. He is the author of Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State, and coauthor of The Portable Malcolm X Reader, with Manning Marable. Felber is a cofounder of the abolitionist collective Study and Struggle and is currently building a radical mobile library, the Free Society People’s Library, in Portland, Oregon.

2025 Democracy Dialogues 

Speaker  – Unyielding Resistance: Perspectives on Political Prisoners and the Lifelong Pursuit of Freedom

Anita Felicelli is the author of How We Know Our Time Travelers and other books. She is the editor of Alta Journal’s California Book Club. She was a director on the board of the National Book Critics Circle from 2021-2024.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Stories of Tomorrow: Speculative Fiction

Yalitza Ferreras was a recent Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Creative Writing. She has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and a Steinbeck Fellowship at San Jose State University. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Best American Short Stories, Kenyon Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Aster(ix), The Southern Review, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. She teaches at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

2025 Bookworm Blockparty

Speaker  – Embrace Furiously This Burning World: Writers Reckon with Now

Lourdes Figueroa is a queer Chicanx oral poet and award-winning poetry filmmaker whose work honors her family’s history working in el azadón in Yolo County. Based in San Francisco, she has worked as a case manager, advocate, translator, and community organizer. She has led poetry workshops at Marin Academy Literary Festival and College of Alameda and co-wrote Fugue (2017), celebrating LGBTQIA+ history in the Mission. During the pandemic, she created Paru-paru y Colibri, an intergenerational writing workshop with SOMCAN, funded by an SFAC grant. Her chapbooks include yolotl, Ruidos = To Learn Speak, and Vuelta (Nomadic Press). In 2021 she received the Nomadic Press Bay Area Literature Award for Poetry, her poem “Pieces” from yolotl was a 2022 Pushcart Prize nominee, and her long verse poem I will kiss your mouth b/w the overgrown Milpa is forthcoming in Mexico. Her latest work appears in Tierra Adentro and the poetry film Las Marimacha Fragments, made with filmmaker Peggy Peralta, A Good Symptom (3rd Thing’s Press). A native of limbo nation, she celebrates the pocha marimachita tongue and believes in your lung and throat.

2025 Bookworm Blockparty

Speaker  – Planting Poetry (Grow a Poem. Sow a Future)(all day drop-in activity)

Emily Flitter covers banking and Wall Street for The New York Times. Before this, she spent eight years at Reuters, writing about politics, financial crimes, and the environment. Flitter holds an MA in Near Eastern studies and journalism from New York University and a BA from Wellesley College. She began her journalism career as a freelance reporter in Cairo. The White Wall is her first book.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Decolonizing Wealth: Confronting Systemic Barriers, Creating Lasting Change

Jennifer Elise Foerster is the author of three books of poetry, most recently, The Maybe Bird, and was the Associate Editor of When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry. She is the recipient of a NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, was a Wallace Stegner Fellow, and currently teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop, Institute of American Indian Arts, and as visiting faculty at the Michener Center at UT Austin. A Mvskoke citizen, she lives in San Francisco.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Living Legacies: Native Authors on Memoir and Memory

Kate Folk is the author of a novel, Sky Daddy, and a story collection, Out There, which was a finalist for the California Book Award in First Fiction. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, and The Baffler, among other venues. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she’s also received fellowships and residencies from MacDowell, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and Willapa Bay AiR.

2025 Writers’ Workshops 

Speaker  – Revisions and the Muse

Soma Mei Sheng Frazier’s debut novel, Off the Books, earned positive reviews from The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Kirkus, Publishers Weekly and others, and was included in Bustle’s “Most Anticipated” roundup. Her essays and interviews are featured in People Magazine, Electric Literature, Literary Hub and elsewhere. She served as a San Francisco Library Laureate before relocating to New York to teach creative writing at SUNY Oswego, where she shovels lots of snow and is editing her next novel (forthcoming from Macmillan).

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Strength and Solace in Numbers

Fumilayo is a dancer, writer, and activist. She wants to work to make the world a more fair place through using creative expression to spread awareness about issues and advocating for everyone’s human rights.

2025 Family Day 

MC  – Play with Your Food!

Margaret Elysia Garcia (she/her) is the author of the poetry collection the daughterland, of the short story collection Graft, and the poetry chapbook Burn Scars. She writes a history column for High Country Life, a regional California magazine covering the eastern Sierra Nevada.

2025 Democracy Dialogues 

Speaker  – Mutual Aid and Community Care in California

Alicia believes that Black communities deserve what all communities deserve — to be powerful in every aspect of their lives. An author, political strategist, organizer, and cheeseburger enthusiast, Alicia founded the Black Futures Lab in 2018 to make Black communities powerful in politics. In 2023, the Black Futures Lab conducted the Black Census Project — the largest survey of Black communities in US history. Alicia is the co-creator of #BlackLivesMatter and the Black Lives Matter Global Network, an international organizing project to end state violence and oppression against Black people. The Black Lives Matter Global Network now has 40 chapters in four countries. She currently serves as the Senior Vice President for Movement Infrastructure and Explorations at the JPB Foundation. Alicia is the co-founder of Supermajority, a new home for women’s activism, and a Senior Advisor to the President at the National Domestic Workers Alliance. Alicia has become a powerful voice in the media, contributing expert commentary on politics, race, gender, sexual orientation and gender identity. Her work has been featured in Time, MSNBC, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Guardian. She has received numerous accolades and recognitions, including being on the cover of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in the World issue (September 2020), named to TIME’s 100 Women of the Year list (March 2020), and is a 3x recipient of The Root’s list of 100 African American achievers and influencers. Alicia has received the Sydney Peace Prize, Adweek Beacon Award, Glamour’s Women of the Year Award, Marie Claire’s New Guard Award, and was honored as a Community Change Agent at BET’s Black Girls Rock Awards. Alicia’s first book, The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart, was released October 20, 2020 with One World (Penguin Random House.) She shares her thoughts on politics and pop culture on her podcast, Lady Don’t Take No. Alicia warns you–hashtags don’t start movements. People do.

2025 Headliners 

Speaker  – Portable Intersectionality: Roxane Gay in conversation with Alicia Garza

Roxane Gay’s writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Bad Feminist, the nationally bestselling Difficult Women and the New York Times bestselling Hunger. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. She has several books forthcoming and is also at work on television and film projects.

2025 Headliners 

Speaker  – Portable Intersectionality: Roxane Gay in conversation with Alicia Garza

Michael Genhart, PhD, is a licensed clinical psychologist and author of several picture books including: I See You, Love Is Love, Rainbow: A First Book of Pride, and Spanish Is the Language of My Family. After being together for 22 years, Michael married the love of his life in 2008–when they could legally marry. He is thrilled to share Edie’s and Thea’s story about love, commitment, and courage with readers of all ages.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Bite-Sized Biographies: Picture Books of Resistance and Resilience

Tiffany “Ms. Tee” Golden is a vibrant teaching artist, author, and illustrator dedicated to empowering young voices through creativity and play. With a warm teaching style that blends imagination and empathy, she designs writing experiences that encourage curiosity and self-expression. Tiffany’s published books, including I WANT TO BE BIG and WASH DAY, reflect her passion for storytelling that embraces diversity and celebrates everyday magic. Living by a philosophy of joyful resilience, Tiffany believes in nurturing emotional wisdom through laughter, art, and authenticity, inspiring both students and readers to find courage, kindness, and connection in every adventure life offers.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Tiffany Golden activity

Cynthia Gómez writes horror and other types of speculative fiction, set primarily in Oakland, where she makes her home. She has a particular love for themes of revenge, retribution, and resistance to oppression, and she loves to write dark and frightening things while cuddling with her shadow, aka her adorable little dog. Her work has appeared/will appear in Fantasy Magazine, Strange Horizons, Luna Station Quarterly, Nightmare Magazine, and numerous anthologies. The Nightmare Box and Other Stories, her first collection, was released from Cursed Morsels Press in July 2024. 

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Nightmares Revealed: The Rise of Latinx Horror Fiction

Maya Gonzalez is an award-winning children’s book artist, author, activist and progressive educator. Maya’s work addresses systemic inequity in relation to race/ethnicity, sexism and cissexism using children’s books as radical agents of change and healing, both personally and culturally. Maya co-founded Reflection Press, a POC, queer and trans owned independent publishing house that uses holistic, nature-based, and anti-oppression frameworks in their books and materials for kids and grown-ups. Maya is also the creator of the Gender Wheel, an approach to gender and body diversity that is nature-based, decolonized and holistic and provides lectures and workshops to educators, parents and caregivers.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Storming the Gatekeepers: Past, Present, & Future Publishing Alternatives

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Healing and Resistance

Dr. Vanessa Grubbs is a double board-certified nephrologist and internist, published author, activist, and kidney donor. She is currently a primary care provider and director of adult medicine at Baywell Health, a federally qualified health center dedicated to being the trusted hub advancing the dignity and health of the Bay Area’s Black communities. She is also the founder & president of Black Doc Village, Inc., a non-profit organization dedicated to addressing the inequitable dismissal of Black resident physicians through research and policy change. Her first book, Hundreds of Interlaced Fingers: A Kidney Doctor’s Search for the Perfect Match (Amistad, 2017) tells her story of becoming a kidney donor, then nephrologist, and her experiences with ethical and controversial topics in nephrology. Her new book, Negligent by Design: Anti-Blackness in American Medicine and How to Address It, will be published in Fall 2025 by North Atlantic Books.

2025 Inside Ideas

Moderator  – Bridging the Gaps: Redefining Healthcare Through a Justice Lens

Georgina Marie Guardado is the Poet Laureate Emerita of Lake County, CA for 2020-2024, and a Poets Laureate Fellow with The Academy of American Poets. She is the Literacy Program Coordinator for the Lake County Library and President of the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference. Her work has appeared in The Bloom, Noyo Review, Poets.org, Humble Pie Magazine, Gulf Coast Journal, Yellow Medicine Review, The Muleskinner Journal, Colossus: Freedom, and Two Hawks Quarterly. She is a graduate student and scholar of the Kwame Dawes Mapmakers and Master of Fine Arts Merit endowments at the Pacific University MFA in Writing program.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Indigenous Poetry: Words that Map the Natural World

2025 Bookworm Blockparty

Speaker  – Women, Cyborgs, Revolutionary Petunias, and Other Creatures

Edward Gunawan is a multi-genre writer and literary translator based in the East Bay, CA. A queer Indonesian-born Chinese immigrant, they are the author of two chapbooks–most recently the Start a Riot! Prize-winning The Way Back (Foglifter Press, 2022) and recipient of the Gabo Prize in Literary Translation and Multilingual Texts from the journal Lunch Ticket. Edward earned their MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, where they received the Distinguished Graduate Achievement Award. Their work has appeared in Asymptote, MAYDAY, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere.

2025 Writers’ Workshops 

Speaker  – Panel: We Will Not Disappear: Queer/Trans Voices in a Time of Backlash

Saeeda Hafiz is the author of The Healing: One Woman’s Journey from Poverty to Inner Riches. Since 1993, Saeeda has been a yoga teacher and wellness expert with certifications from the Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centers and the Natural Gourmet Institute. She is also a graduate of Temple University. Saeeda applied her self-care techniques to overcome adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and traumas as well as create and maintain her overall good health. As a holistic health educator with the San Francisco Unified School District, she focuses on sharing her knowledge of physical and mental wellness with diverse groups She has appeared on various international podcasts, radio stations, and television programs and has been featured in several national and regional publications. Her speaking engagements have educated the public in yoga, holistic nutrition, and healthy living on platforms such as NPR, KQED, Essences Magazine, and KRWM (106.9FM) Seattle – Inspirational Women – The Morning Show.

2025 Writers’ Workshops 

Speaker  – Paths to Publishing: From the Big Five to DIY

Kazu Haga is a trainer and practitioner of nonviolence and restorative justice, a core member of the Fierce Vulnerability Network, a founding core member of the Ahimsa Collective, a Jam facilitator and author of Healing Resistance: A Radically Different Response to Harm and Fierce Vulnerability: Healing from Trauma, Emerging through Collapse. He works with incarcerated people, youth, and activists from around the country. He has over 25 years of experience in nonviolence and social change work and is a resident of the Canticle Farm community on Lisjan Ohlone land, Oakland, CA, where he lives with his family. You can find out more about his work at www.kazuhaga.com.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Healing, Activism and Collective Liberation: Strategies for Building a New World

Kate Hannigan is the author of several children’s books, including A Lady Has the Floor, which received four starred reviews, Josephine and Her Dishwashing Machine, a 2024 NSTA-CBC Best STEM Book, and Nellie vs. Elizabeth, one of Smithsonian Magazine’s Ten Best Children’s Books. Kate’s other books have also made the 2022 Texas Topaz Nonfiction Reading List, the 2023 Bank Street Best Books of the Year, and were nominated for the 2023 Illinois Bluestem Award, among many other honors.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Bite-Sized Biographies: Picture Books of Resistance and Resilience

Shawn Harris is an award-winning creator of books for kids. He is the author and illustrator of Let’s Be Bees, a book he drew with crayons. He received a Caldecott Honor for his debut authored book Have You Ever Seen a Flower. He lives in Northern California.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Drawing with Shawn Harris (cancelled)

Amanda Hawkins’ first book of poetry, When I Say the Bones I Mean the Bones, was published by Wandering Aengus Press in January 2025. Their work has been nominated for three Pushcart prizes, listed as honorable mention, semi-finalist, and finalist for various contests and awards, and won the Scotti Merrill Award from Key West Literary Seminar, the Editors’ Prize for Poetry at The Florida Review, and the Wandering Aengus Book Prize. Their work has been published or is forthcoming in Boston Review, The Cincinnati Review, Honey Literary,Massachusetts Review, The Orison Anthology, Orion, The Rumpus, The Southampton Review, Terrain, Tin House, and Image, among others.

2025 Bookworm Blockparty

Speaker  – Chimera Space: Monstrous, Lovely, and Liminal

Christina Heatherton (she/her) is the author of Arise! Global Radicalism in the Era of the Mexican Revolution(University of California Press, 2022), the Spanish translation of which will be published by La Cigarra Press (Mexico City, Mexico) in 2025. She co-edited Policing the Planet:Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (Verso, 2016) with Jordan T. Camp along with Freedom Now! Struggles for the Human Right to Housing in LA and Beyond (Freedom Now Books, 2012). She is currently the inaugural Everett and Joanne Elting Associate Professor for Human Rights and Global Citizenship and Associate Professor of American Studies and Human Rights at Trinity College in Hartford, CT. There she serves as Director of the Trinity Social Justice Institute and co-hosts the web series/podcast, Conjuncture.

2025 Inside Ideas

Moderator  – Organized Resistance From the Ground Up

Prentis Hemphill is the bestselling author of What It Takes to Heal, a groundbreaking exploration of healing, justice, and transformation. A therapist, somatics teacher, facilitator, political organizer, and writer, Prentis is also the founder of The Embodiment Institute and a leading voice in embodied leadership and collective healing. For over a decade, Prentis has worked with individuals and organizations through their most challenging moments of change—navigating leadership transitions, conflict, and the alignment of practice with values. Grounded in an embodied approach, their work ensures that our intentions aren’t just ideas, but are fully lived, felt, and practiced. Before founding The Embodiment Institute, Prentis served as the Healing Justice Director at Black Lives Matter Global Network and was a lead somatics teacher with generative somatics and Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity (BOLD). They hold an M.A. in Clinical Psychology and have provided therapeutic services in low-cost mental health clinics, centering marginalized communities. Prentis has contributed to Atlas of the Heart (Brené Brown), The Politics of Trauma (Staci K. Haines), You Are Your Best Thing (edited by Brené Brown & Tarana Burke), and Holding Change (adrienne maree brown). They are also the creator and host of the acclaimed podcasts Finding Our Way and Becoming the People, which have surpassed over a million downloads. At its core, Prentis’ work challenges the complacency of mainstream therapeutic models, infusing healing with the rigor of justice, repair, and accountability. They believe that reclaiming feeling and relationship creates space for true transformation–in ourselves, our movements, and the world. Prentis lives on a small farm in Durham, NC, with their partner, Kasha, their child, and two dogs.

2025 Headliners 

Speaker  – The Embodiment of Care

Jon Hickey earned his MFA at Cornell University and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the Sewanee Writers Conference, and he is an enrolled member of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians. His short fiction has appeared in Massachusetts Review, Gulf Coast Online, Virginia Quarterly Review, Meridian, and The Madison Review. Jon lives in San Francisco with his wife and two sons.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Redefining Home

myisha is a writer, social entrepreneur and healer who’s leading a revolution of heart, mind, and soul. Her work awakens others to purposeful passion and serves as a guide towards personal accountability and intergenerational healing. Learn more by diving into her new book, Heal Your Way Forward: The Co- Conspirator’s Journey to an Antiracist Future.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Healing, Activism and Collective Liberation: Strategies for Building a New World

Rachel Howzell Hall is the New York Times bestselling author of The Last One; What Fire Brings; What Never Happened; We Lie Here; These Toxic Things; And Now She’s Gone; They All Fall Down; and, with James Patterson, The Good Sister, which was included in Patterson’s collection The Family Lawyer. A two-time Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist as well as an Anthony, Edgar, International Thriller Writers, and Lefty Award nominee, Rachel is also the author of Land of Shadows, Skies of Ash, Trail of Echoes, and City of Saviors in the Detective Elouise Norton series. A past member of the board of directors for Mystery Writers of America, Rachel has been a featured writer on NPR’s acclaimed Crime in the City series and the National Endowment for the Arts weekly podcast; she has also served as a mentor in Pitch Wars and the Association of Writers & Writing Programs. Rachel lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Murder in Mysterious Places
Speaker  – Romantasy — Not for the Faint of Heart

Traci Huahn (she/her) writes books for kids and especially loves stories rooted in Asian American culture, history, and identity. Mamie Tape Fights to go to School is her debut picture book. As a former attorney and the daughter of Chinese immigrants, Traci feels a deep connection to Mamie’s story and hopes it will inspire young readers to become changemakers, even if it starts by taking just one small step. Traci lives in the San Francisco Bay Area where, on most days, can find her writing at home, along with her husband, two kids, and their pup who loves belly rubs and Brussels sprouts.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Fighting for What You Love

Gloria L. Huang is a freelance writer. Her fiction has been accepted for publication in literary journals including Michigan Quarterly Review, The Threepenny Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Witness Magazine, Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, Southern Humanities Review, Fiction Magazine, North American Review, Arts & Letters, Washington Square Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Gargoyle Magazine, Sycamore Review, and The Antigonish Review. She received her B.A. in English Literature from Stanford University.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Fantastical Worlds and Beings

Carolina Ixta is a writer from Oakland, California. A daughter of Mexican immigrants, she received her BA in creative writing and Spanish language and literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and obtained her master’s degree in education at the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently an elementary school teacher whose pedagogy centers critical race theory at the primary education level. Shut Up, This Is Serious is her debut novel.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Coming of Age in an Unsteady World

Jocelyn Jackson is an award-winning chef, artist, teacher, and activist. Raised in Kansas by a Tuskegee Airman and Wichita’s first Black woman mayoral candidate, she studied art and law on her way to food justice. After serving as a Natural Resource Volunteer in Mali, she earned an MS in Environmental Education. Now based in the Bay Area, she is the Chef-in-Residence at the Museum of the African Diaspora and co-founder of People’s Kitchen Collective, a social practice group that’s done food projects such as the FARM KITCHEN TABLE STREETS meal, EARTH SEED, and the documentary film, “EARTH SEED: A People’s Journey of Radical Hospitality.” A celebrated artist and chef, she has received numerous grants and awards, including from Creative Capital and the Mellon Foundation, and has published work on food and justice.

2025 Democracy Dialogues 

Speaker  – Mutual Aid and Community Care in California

Meredith Jaeger is the USA Today bestselling author of The Incorrigibles, The Pilot’s Daughter, Boardwalk Summer, and The Dressmaker’s Dowry. She has been described as “a gripping voice” by the Los Angeles Times, while Publishers Weekly calls her dual-timeline historical novels “moving and well-researched.” Born and raised in Berkeley California, Meredith holds a BA in Modern Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Seeking Justice in Historical Fiction

Candice Jalili is an Iranian American writer whose work has appeared in Cosmopolitan, The Cut, Rolling Stone, Elite Daily, and more. Candice lives in New York City with her husband, where she is a convenient walk away from her cousins and childhood best friend. She grew up in the Bay Area and spends hours of her days FaceTiming her parents who live there.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Love +

Markowitz Award–winning and Astounding Award-nominated author Naseem Jamnia (they/them) writes speculative fiction for adults, teens, and kids. Their adult novella The Bruising of Qilwa was nominated for the Crawford, Locus, and World Fantasy awards. A Persian-Chicagoan, educator, and pro-library activist, Naseem lives outside Reno, Nevada. The Glade (May 2025, Aladdin) is their middle-grade debut.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Fantastical Worlds and Beings

David Jay brings a lifetime of experience building fulfilling relationships that drive social change. At 18, David founded AVEN—the world’s first large online community of people identifying on the asexual spectrum. He has since gone on to play a leading role in the movement to reform social media. Through this work, David came to appreciate how the work of forming relationships is both a powerful tool for social change and invisible to many of our most powerful institutions. David has spent a decade developing novel approaches to relational measurement. He regularly advises social movements and political campaigns that want to understand how to create the conditions for relationships to thrive and measure when their efforts have been successful.

2025 Democracy Dialogues 

Speaker  – In Dialogue: Building Communities that Thrive

Miah Jeffra is author of four books—most recently The Violence Almanac (finalist for several awards, including the Grace Paley and Robert C Jones Book Prizes) and the novel American Gospel, finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award—and is co-editor of the anthology Home is Where You Queer Your Heart. Work can be seen in StoryQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, The North American Review, Epiphany, DIAGRAM, ANMLY and many others. Miah is co-founder of Whiting Award-winning queer and trans literary collaborative, Foglifter Press, and teaches writing, decolonial studies and cultural theory at Santa Clara University.

2025 Writers’ Workshops 

Speaker  – Panel: We Will Not Disappear: Queer/Trans Voices in a Time of Backlash

Khari Johnson reports on how artificial intelligence impacts people, their communities, and society and has done so for nearly a decade. He currently works as a tech reporter at The Markup, which is part of CalMatters, and is a practitioner fellow at the Karsh Institute Digital Technology for Democracy Lab at the University of Virginia. He’s also a guest speaker at the Pulitzer Center and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists board of directors and previously worked at WIRED and VentureBeat.

2025 Inside Ideas

Moderator  – Problematic Reports from the Frontlines of Tech

Rhea Joseph is a poet, curator, and event producer who comes from a family of artists and entrepreneurs. She is the co-creator of the monthly series Poolside Poets at the Phoenix Hotel and a founding member of Decentered Arts, a non-profit dedicated to building community through art of all mediums. She is currently working on her first book of poems.

2025 Writers’ Workshops 

Speaker  – How to Find (& Create) Your Writing Community

Kalyn Josephson is a New York Times-bestselling author who works as a technical writer in the tech industry, which leaves room for too many bad puns about technically being a writer. She grew up in San Luis Obispo, California, and graduated from Santa Clara University with degrees in biology and creative writing. Currently, she lives in the Bay Area with two black cats (who are more like a tiny dragon and an even tinier owl). She is the author of the Storm Crow duology as well as the middle grade series Ravenfall.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Romantasy — Not for the Faint of Heart

Born in India and raised in the U.S. since the age of nine. Alka Joshi has a BA from Stanford University and an MFA from California College of Arts. Joshi’s debut novel, The Henna Artist, immediately became a NYT bestseller, a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick, was Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and has been translated into 30 languages. The Secret Keeper of Jaipur (2021) and The Perfumist of Paris(2023) completed the Jaipur Trilogy. Her fourth novel, Six Days in Bombay, will be released in April 2025. She is currently working on her fifth novel. In 2024, Joshi was selected for the Forbes 50 over 50 List, celebrating women who are shattering age and gender norms across all sectors of the American economy and culture.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Seeking Justice in Historical Fiction

Cindy Juyoung Ok is a former physics teacher and current English professor in the UC Davis MFA. Her debut Ward Toward won the Yale Younger Poets Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize.

2025 Bookworm Blockparty

Speaker  – Chimera Space: Monstrous, Lovely, and Liminal

Upasna Kakroo was born in Srinagar as a part of the internally displaced Kashmiri Pandit community. Her writing often talks about belonging, identity, and roots, drawing inspiration from songs and stories her grandmothers shared. Upasna has been a brand storyteller for over 20 years and currently leads a nonprofit, Peerbagh in the United States where she leads creative confidence and storytelling workshops for kids and adults. She has published two nonfiction books, Loal (Gulshan, 2024), and Citywide Wi-Fi Networks (Lap Publications, 2012). From 2021 onwards, she has penned four children’s books commissioned by various nonprofits. Her children’s book, Shaliya Discovers Coronavirus Frumpfchi was translated into seventeen Indian languages and was commissioned by the Government of India. She is the managing editor for Bento – the only South-Asian children’s magazine in print. Upasna has won writing scholarships and residencies from Centrum, the Writing Barn, SCBWI, and the Kweli Journal. She lives in Ann Arbor with her husband and son.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Bento Children’s Magazine – storytelling workshop

My name is Kamiyah and I’m a current 9th grader who’s passionate about making a difference in the world. I currently serve as the Freshman Class Vice President at my high school, participate in Model United Nations, and run for my school’s Track and Field team. I love reading and literature and am so thrilled to get the opportunity to MC at the Bay Area Bookfestival!

2025 Family Day 

MC  – Fighting for What You Love

Leslie Karst is the Lefty Award-nominated author of the Orchid Isle mysteries Waters of Destruction and Molten Death, of the Sally Solari mystery series, and of the IBPA Ben Franklin and IPPY award silver medal-winning memoir, Justice is Served: A Tale of Scallops, The Law, and Cooking for RBG. After years waiting tables and singing in a new wave rock band, she decided she was ready for a “real” job and ended up at Stanford Law School, then returned to school to study the culinary arts. Now retired from the law, Leslie spends her time cooking, cycling, gardening, observing cocktail hour promptly at five o’clock, and of course writing. She and her wife split their time between Santa Cruz, California and Hilo, Hawai‘i.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Mystery Writers Unmasking Larger Issues

Obi Kaufmann is the author of The California Field Atlas (2017, #1 San Francisco Chronicle Best Seller), The State of Water (2019), The Forests of California (2020), The Coasts of California (2022), and The Deserts of California (2023), all published by Heyday Books. When he is not backpacking, you can find the painter-poet at home in the East Bay, posting trail paintings on Instagram.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Our Beautiful, Burning World

Leora (Lee) Kava is an Assistant Professor of Critical Pacific Islands & Oceania Studies, housed within the department of Race and Resistance Studies at San Francisco State University. She is a poet and musician of mixed, Tongan descent, and dedicates her work to her family, community, students, and genealogies of creativity and liberation within and beyond Oceania. Some of her work can be found in The Hawaiʻi Review, Amerasia Journal, Academy of American Poets, and Orion Magazine with recordings on podcasts It’s Lit with PhDJ (based in Honolulu) and For The Qultures (based in the Bay Area).

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Bringing our Youth Back to the Land
Speaker  – Our Beautiful, Burning World

Piper Kerman is the author of the memoir Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison from Spiegel & Grau. The book was adapted into an Emmy Award-winning original series for Netflix. Piper teaches writing to incarcerated people and is at work on a second book. She serves on the board of directors of the Women’s Prison Association and the Bay Area Book Festival, and the advisory boards of the PEN America Writing For Justice Fellowship, InsideOUT Writers, Healing Broken Circles, JustLeadershipUSA and History Studio.

2025 Inside Ideas

Moderator  – Ghosts of Justice: Exposing the Failures and Reimagining the Future of the American Legal System

Laleh Khadivi is a fiction writer who lives in Oakland, California. Her three books of the Kurdish Trilogy were named New York Times Editor’s Choice selections and won, among other awards, a Whiting Award, an NEA grant and the Stein Fellowship at Stanford. Her work has appeared in the SF Chronicle, VQR, LA Times and she is the chair of the University of San Francisco’s MFA Program.

2025 Writers’ Workshops 

Speaker  – Revisions and the Muse

Cheryl Kim is an elementary school teacher from San Jose, California, and teaches second grade at an international school in Thailand. She received the SCBWI Kate Dopirak Craft and Community Award for her original manuscript for Wat Takes His Shot. When she’s not teaching or writing, she enjoys watching professional basketball with her husband and sons.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Fighting for What You Love

Laurie R. King is the award-winning, bestselling author of seventeen Mary Russell mysteries, five contemporary novels featuring Kate Martinelli, and many acclaimed standalone novels such as Folly, Touchstone, The Bones of Paris, and Lockdown. Her latest novel is Back to the Garden. She lives in Northern California, where she is at work on her next Mary Russell mystery.

2025 Inside Ideas

Moderator  – Mystery Writers Unmasking Larger Issues

Maia Kobabe is a nonbinary queer cartoonist, a kpop fan, a voracious reader, and a daydreamer. You can learn an astonishing number of intimate details about em in GENDER QUEER: A MEMOIR (America’s most challenged book 2021-2023) and in eir short comics and writing published in The Nib, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, NPR, and Time Magazine. Maia’s second book is BREATHE: JOURNEYS TO HEALTHY BINDING with Dr Sarah Peitzmeier (2024) and their third book is a middle grade coming-of-age comic written with Lucky Srikumar, due out from Scholastic Graphix in 2026.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – All Bodies All Selves

anine Kovac writes about power dynamics and women’s bodies. She is the author of two memoirs: the self-published Spinning: Choreography for Coming Home, which was a semi-finalist for Publishers Weekly’s BookLife Prize and the hybrid-published The Nutcracker Chronicles, which was a finalist for the American Best Book Awards. Janine is an alumna of Hedgebrook and a MacDowell fellow. She lives in Oakland.

2025 Writers’ Workshops 

Speaker  – Paths to Publishing: From the Big Five to DIY

Rosa Kwon Easton was born in Seoul, Korea, and grew up with her extended family in Los Angeles. Easton holds a bachelor’s degree in government from Smith College, a master’s in international and public affairs from Columbia University, and a JD from Boston College Law School. She is a lawyer and an elected trustee of the Palos Verdes Library District. She is an Anaphora Writing Residency Fellow, and her work has been published in CRAFT Literary, StoryCenter.org, Writer’s Digest, and elsewhere. She has two adult children and lives with her husband and Maltipoo in sunny Southern California.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Seeking Justice in Historical Fiction

Chris La Tray is a Métis storyteller, a descendent of the Pembina Band of the mighty Red River of the North and an enrolled member of the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians. His third book, Becoming Little Shell: A Landless Indian’s Journey Home, was published by Milkweed Editions on August 2024 and was the winner of a 2024 Pacific Northwest Book Award. His first book, One-Sentence Journal: Short Poems and Essays from the World at Large won the 2018 Montana Book Award and a 2019 High Plains Book Award. His book of haiku and haibun poetry, Descended from a Travel-worn Satchel, was published in 2021 by Foothills Publishing. Chris writes the weekly newsletter “An Irritable Métis” and lives near Frenchtown, Montana. He is the Montana Poet Laureate for 2023–2025 and will serve as the 2025 Kittredge Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Montana.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Living Legacies: Native Authors on Memoir and Memory

Nina LaCour is the bestselling and Michael L. Printz Award–winning author of several young adult novels, including We Are Okay, Hold Still, The Disenchantments, and Everything Leads to You, as well as a novel for adults, Yerba Buena. She is also the author of the picture book Mama and Mommy and Me in the Middle,illustrated by Kaylani Juanita, and My Friend, Loonie, illustrated by Ashling Lindsay. Her books have won many awards and have been translated into several languages. LaCour lives with her wife and their daughter in San Francisco.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Pages and Pictures from Early Reader to Middle Grade

Hon Lai Chu is one of Hong Kong’s most prominent writers and the author of several novels, including Mending Bodies, Degravitation Zone, and A Dictionary of Two Cities, co-authored with Dorothy Tse, which won the Hong Kong Book Prize. Her most recent works are Half-Eclipse and Darkness under the Sun, two diaristic essay collections about Hong Kong. She has also received accolades from Taiwan’s Unitas Literary Association, the Liang Shiu-chiu Literature Award, the Dream of the Red Chamber Award, and the Hong Kong Biennial Awards for Chinese Literature, among many others.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Stories of Tomorrow: Speculative Fiction

Laila is an accomplished competitive dancer and cheerleader. This marks her third year as a Cinnamongirl and co-moderator for the Bay Area Book Festival, a responsibility she embraces with enthusiasm. In her free time, she enjoys dancing, singing, learning Japanese, and engaging in conversations with friends as they navigate the experiences of middle school life. Laila eagerly anticipates co-moderating the 2025 Bay Area Book Festival, as each year brings new excitement and opportunities to interact with renowned authors.

2025 Family Day 

Moderator  – Pages and Pictures from Early Reader to Middle Grade

Keiko Lane is an Okinawan American poet, essayist, memoirist, and psychotherapist writing about the intersections of queer culture, oppression resistance, liberation psychology, racial and gender justice, HIV criminalization, and reproductive justice. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Visual AIDS,The Rumpus, The Feminist Porn Book, and Between Certain Death and a Possible Future. Blood Loss: A Love Story of AIDS, Activism, and Art is her first book.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Strength and Solace in Numbers

Xochtil Larios is a 25-year-old full-time big sister, social justice advocate, and community leader born and raised in South Hayward. Having navigated the juvenile justice system, foster care, homelessness, and the struggles of economic mobility as a transitional age youth, Xochtil has consistently shown resilience and strength. Despite the challenges she has faced, she continues to show up, bring positive energy, and inspire those around her. It was during this journey that she connected with Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice (CURYJ), and became deeply passionate about social justice reform through an indigenous “land-back” healing framework. As a community champion, Xochtil was honored with the California Endowment 2018 Youth Award, served as the youngest Fellow of the Peer-to-Peer Initiative through the Community Justice Network for Youth (CJNY) through the Burns Institute, and received a $50k SOROS Youth Justice Fellowship with the support of CURYJ to launch her innovative “Youth Transformation Curriculum” for detained youth. Xochtil is also a dedicated youth commissioner on the Alameda County Juvenile Justice Delinquency Prevention Commission (JJDPC) working to improve the conditions of detained young people. She believes that community-based solutions are the only real solutions worth investing in and implementing.

Devi S. Laskar is a poet and photographer, a former journalist and the author of The Atlas of Reds and Blues,winner of multiple awards including the 2020 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. Her second novel, Circa (2022), was a Goop Book Club selection. Her next novel, Midnight, At the War, will be published by Mariner in 2025.

2025 Bookworm Blockparty

Speaker  – A Revolution of Raised Voices

Dorothy Lazard is widely known as a librarian and public historian. From 2009 until her retirement in 2021, she was the head librarian of Oakland Public Library’s Oakland History Center, where she encouraged people of all ages and backgrounds to explore local history. Her memoir, What You Don’t Know Will Make a Whole New World, is an intellectual coming-of-age story set in San Francisco and Oakland during the heady 1960s and 1970s.  She is currently at work on a nonfiction book about the Oakland Public Library where she worked for twenty years.

2025 Inside Ideas

Moderator  – A Memoir for Remembrance

Avione Lee was born and raised in Texas, as indicated by her excessive use of the word y’all. As a kid, she loved reading Sunday comics (a very, very extremely short graphic novel you got weekly); as an adult, she loves reading almost anything. You can find her with a good book.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Fantastical Worlds and Beings

Laura G. Lee is a second-generation Korean American children’s book author and illustrator, who is passionate about stories that spark our connection to the world and one another. She lives in Northern California with her husband, son, and daughter. When she’s not making books, you may find her in her kitchen adding soy sauce to make tasty food even more delicious, or out on a hunt for authentic Korean-Chinese jajangmyeon (a black bean noodle dish popular in 1960s Seoul.)

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Play with Your Food!

Peggy Lee is one of the founding members and the current Director of The Ruby, since 2022. They love San Francisco and The Ruby is their love letter to the arts and culture that make the Bay Area a truly special place. The Ruby is a sanctuary for curious and open minded people to explore and grow. They’ve worked locally and globally on programs addressing HIV/AIDS, family planning, mental health, child nutrition, women’s health, and substance abuse throughout Asia, Africa, and the US. They also created Made By Girls, a national program to build stem confidence in girls ages 8-17 spanning 18 locations in the US and Canada. They have Bachelor of Arts in Social Welfare from UC Berkeley and a Masters of Science in Public Health from Johns Hopkins University.

2025 Writers’ Workshops 

Speaker  – How to Find (& Create) Your Writing Community

Sharon Levin has been reviewing Children’s and Young Adult Literature for 27 years. She runs Book Clubs for kids and teens, and co-teaches Black Civil Rights History Through the Lens of Children’s Literature. She has served on multiple committees for the American Library Association, the California Independent Bookstore Association, and is in her sixth year Chairing the Los Angeles Times Young Adult Book Award.

2025 Family Day 

Moderator  – Love +

Vietnamese-American author, playwright, and performer Susan Lieu takes audiences on a journey of healing intergenerational trauma, embracing authenticity, and finding boldness in vulnerability. Her debut memoir, The Manicurist’s Daughter (Celadon), has received accolades from The New York Times, NPR Books, Elle Magazine, and The Washington Post, and is an Apple Book Pick of the Month and Must Listen of the Month. Lieu is the creator of her theatrical solo show “140 LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother,” which received critical acclaim from LA Times, NPR, and American Theatre. The co-founder of Socola Chocolatier, Susan is a proud alumnus of Harvard College, Yale School of Management, and Hedgebrook.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – A Memoir for Remembrance

Peter Limata is a public school elementary educator and literacy advocate for young readers. He was born and raised in Lusaka, Zambia. He lives in Oakland California. Peter has been reading and telling stories since childhood. You can see Peter at a venue near you reading and telling stories and every weekday on his YouTube and Facebook channels through his show dubbed Story Time with Mr. Limata. The show is rooted in social justice and promotes reading and access to books for families–the young and young at heart.
When not reading books, Peter can be found playing or watching soccer, biking or hanging out with friends or on his Porch with an ice cream bar.

2025 Family Day 

MC  – Quiet Voices, Loud Feelings

Robert Liu-Trujillo is the author-illustrator of Furqan’s First Flat Top and the illustrator of many picture books, including Alejandria Fights Back. When he was a kid, his dad made fresh wheatgrass juice and his stepfather juiced fruits and vegetables. Now as a husband and father, Robert makes fresh juice for his family. He lives in Oakland, California, with his wife and two kids. Visit him online at work.robdontstop.com.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Storming the Gatekeepers: Past, Present, & Future Publishing Alternatives

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Creators’ Collective Action

Denise Low is a former Kansas Poet Laureate and a founding board member of Indigenous Nations Poets. Her Northern Cheyenne Ledger Art by Fort Robinson Breakout Survivors won a Kansas Notable Book Award. She currently is a literary co-director for The 222 in Sonoma County, California, and on the advisory board of Write On Door County. She has Northern European and Lenape/Munsee (Delaware) heritage.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Indigenous Poetry: Words that Map the Natural World
Moderator  – Living Legacies: Native Authors on Memoir and Memory

Maia is an avid reader who can be found reading fantasy books until well past bedtime on most nights, preferably something by Sayantani DasGupta or Shannon Messenger. When she’s not reading, Maia also enjoys rehearsing and performing with musical theater or playing violin.

2025 Family Day 

MC  – Moving House, Moving Place, and Opening Our Minds

Mia Ayumi Malhotra is the author of Isako Isako, a California Book Award finalist and winner of the Alice James Award, Nautilus Gold Award for Poetry, National Indie Excellence Award, and Maine Literary Award. She is also the author of the chapbook Notes from the Birth Year. A Kundiman Fellow and a founding member of The Ruby SF, a gathering space for women and nonbinary artists, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

2025 Bookworm Blockparty

Speaker  – Chimera Space: Monstrous, Lovely, and Liminal

Tania Malik is the author of the novel Hope You Are Satisfied (Unnamed Press), which was recommended by NPR and named one of the best espionage novels of 2023 by CrimeReads. Her previous novel, Three Bargains (W.W. Norton), received a Publishers Weekly Starred review and a Booklist Starred review. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, Lit Hub, The Brooklyn Rail, Off-Assignment, Write or Die Magazine, Full Stop Magazine, Salon.com, Calyx Journal, Baltimore Review, and other publications. She lives in San Francisco’s Bay Area.

2025 Writers’ Workshops 

Speaker  – Paths to Publishing: From the Big Five to DIY

Ajuan Mance (she/they) is an artist and writer based in Oakland, California and a Professor of Illustration at the California College of the Arts. Ajuan is the author of several books including, most recently, 1001 Black Men: Portraits of Masculinity at the Intersections; Living While Black: Portraits of Everyday Resistance; and the children’s picture book What Do Brothas Do All Day? Ajuan’s comics have appeared in the Women’s Review of Books, New Yorker.com and several anthologies, including: We’re Still Here, winner of the 2019 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Anthology; Drawing Power, winner of the 2020 Eisner Award for Best Anthology; We Belong: An All-Black/All-Queer Sci-Fi/Fantasy Anthology, and others. Gender Studies: Portrait of an Accidental Outlaw, Ajuan’s first graphic novel, was nominated for the 2024 Ignatz Award for Best Comics Collection.

2025 Headliners 

Moderator  – “Writing as an Other”

Pecolia, an Oakland resident, entrepreneur and artist and a passionate organizer with over 30 years of organizing and advocacy experience. She brings a deep understanding of diverse issues and global affairs. Pecolia has served in various roles over their organizing career including nonprofit executive director, school district taskforce chair and chair of a city government commission. In 2024, Pecolia became the Executive Director of Oakland Rising, and is leading the collaborative of racial, economic and environmental organizations to use the civic process to build political power for and with BIPOC, working-class, immigrant, and formerly incarcerated community members to bring about systemic change. For over 17 years, Oakland Rising has advanced Oakland’s most important policies and ballot measures including the minimum wage increases, progressive business tax and most recently campaign finance reform. Pecolia’s transformative leadership will lead the collaborative to explore innovative and sustainable solutions that advance equitable democracy and economic recovery for working class, immigrant and formerly incarcerated residents in Oakland, California.

2025 Inside Ideas

Moderator  – Art as Radical Practice: Black Women’s Creative Expression as Social Change

Shereen Marisol Meraji is a veteran audio producer and journalist who has been telling stories with sound for more than two decades. Shereen helped create NPR’s critically acclaimed podcast covering race and identity, Code Switch. During her time as co-host and senior producer, Code Switch won numerous awards and Apple Podcasts named Code Switch its first-ever “show of the year.” Shereen’s currently an assistant professor of race in journalism and head of audio at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, educating the next generation of audio storytellers. When she’s not teaching or reporting, Shereen’s listening to hip-hop, dancing to salsa, or cooking up something delicious.

2025 Democracy Dialogues 

Moderator  – Voices Against the Tide: Independent Media and the Struggle for American Democracy

Lauren Markham is the author of the award-winning The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life. Her work has appeared in VQR, Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, The New York Review of Books, and other publications. She teaches writing at the University of San Francisco and in the Ashland University MFA in Writing Program.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Our Beautiful, Burning World

Coming Soon!

2025 Democracy Dialogues 

Moderator  – Unyielding Resistance: Perspectives on Political Prisoners and the Lifelong Pursuit of Freedom

Carlos Martinez, MPH, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Latin American and Latino Studies and faculty of the Global and Community Health program at UC, Santa Cruz. His research and advocacy are aimed at promoting health and social justice among migrants, asylum seekers, deportees, substance users, and other marginalized groups.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Bridging the Gaps: Redefining Healthcare Through a Justice Lens

Amber McCrary is a Diné poet and zinester. She is Red House Clan born for Mexican people. She received her MFA in creative writing with an emphasis in poetry from Mills College. Blue Corn Tongue is her first book.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Indigenous Poetry: Words that Map the Natural World

Tim McKee is the publisher at Berkeley-based North Atlantic Books. Born in New York City, McKee grew up in Los Angeles and received a BA from Princeton University and an MA in journalism from the University of Missouri. He has worked in the nonprofit sector for his entire career, including serving as the long-time managing editor of The Sun magazine, the grants director for a social-justice foundation in San Francisco, and as a writer for several community-based organizations in California. He has also taught college-level writing and journalism. His book No More Strangers Now: Young Voices from a New South Africa (Dorling Kindersley) was an Honor Book for the Jane Addams Book Award and a Los Angeles Times bestseller. He is happiest when bringing necessary stories to the page. He lives with his family in Oakland

2025 Democracy Dialogues 

Moderator  – In Dialogue: Building Communities that Thrive

Stephen Meadows is a Californian poet with roots in both the Ohlone and the pioneer soil of his home state. He was born and raised on the Monterey Bay of Central California and received his secondary education at U.C. Santa Barbara, U.C. Santa Cruz where he earned his Bachelor of Arts Degree and went on to earn a Master’s Degree at San Francisco State University. Stephen has published poems in anthologies and collections nationwide. The Sounds of Rattles and Clappers from the University of Arizona Press. The Dirt is Red Here from Heyday Books and his first book also from Heyday, Releasing the Days. Stephen is included in; Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California from Scarlet Tanager Books edited by Lucille Lang Day and Ruth Nolan and Red Indian Road West also from the same press. In addition, his poems can be found on the spoken word CD Red Smoke Dawn Wind with background music by David Blonski as well as appearing on the CD from Mignon Geli entitled Under the Buffalo Sun. His latest publication is Winter Work that was released on November 19, 2022 currently available Black Lawrence Press. Stephen is the current Poet Laureate of El Dorado County, California.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Indigenous Poetry: Words that Map the Natural World

Cruz Medina is associate professor of English at Santa Clara University and faculty at the Bread Loaf School of English. He wrote about resistance through pop culture in Arizona in response to anti-Latinx legislation in his first book Reclaiming Poch@ Pop: Examining the Rhetoric of Cultural Deficiency in 2015. He co-edited Racial Shorthand: Coded Discrimination Contested in Social Media in 2018 for Computers and Composition Digital Press/University of Utah Press. Cruz served as co-chair of the National Council of Teachers of English/CCCC Latinx Caucus from 2017-2021. And his book Sanctuary: Exclusion, Violence, and Indigenous Migrants in the East Bay was published by the Ohio State University Press in 2024.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – In Search of Sanctuary: Stories of Migration, Hardships and Hope

Kellie Menendez is an award-winning artist, designer and creative writer. Her decor studio, Half Full, produces patterns for the home inspired by wildlife and wild places. Kellie’s work has been featured in California Home + Design, Business of Home, Domino and Aldea Home — and her poems published in an anthology for CCSF’s Poetry for the People. Kellie loves looking for patterns in San Francisco with her husband, son, and dog, Raya.

2025 Bookworm Blockparty

Speaker  – Story time with Kellie Menendez, author and illustrator of Patterns, Patterns Everywhere

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Patterns with Kellie Menendez

Tomas Moniz is a Latinx writer living in Oakland, CA. His debut novel, Big Familia, was a finalist for the 2020 PEN/Hemingway, the LAMBDA, and the Foreward Indies Awards. He edited the popular Rad Dad and Rad Families anthologies. He is the recipient of the prestigious SF Literary Arts Foundation’s 2016 Award and the 2020 Artist Affiliate for Headlands Center for Arts. He currently teaches at Berkeley City College and the Antioch MFA program.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Strength and Solace in Numbers

2025 Family Day 

Moderator  – Creators’ Collective Action

Angela Montoya lives in Northern California with her family. When she isn’t with her partner, two children, goats, chickens, and dogs, you can find Angela co-hosting the podcast, “Of the Publishing Persuasion.” Her debut novel, SINNER’S ISLE, has received starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly and trade reviews from Booklist and The Bulletin. Her sophomore novel, A Cruel Thirst, was chosen as a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection, an Editor’s Pick: Best YA of December by Amazon Books, and one of the Best Young Adult Books of the Year by Kirkus Reviews.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – The End of the (Fantastical) World: Complicated Relationships in Dystopia

Lisa Moore Ramee was born and raised in Los Angeles and now lives in Northern California with her husband, daughter, obnoxious cat, and rambunctious (but sweet) dog. She’s a devout believer in dreams coming true and is the author of A Good Kind of Trouble, a Walter Dean Myers Honor Book, Something to Say, and MapMaker. 

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Finding Your Place in Middle Grade
Moderator  – Pages and Pictures from Early Reader to Middle Grade

A Social Impact Consultant with over two decades of experience igniting social and climate justice movements across the Americas, Renata brings both strategy and soul to every space she holds. A proud Queer immigrant Mama, former executive director, and recovering academic, she is a lifelong mobilizer of people and resources committed to collective liberation. Rooted in both her Xucuru Kariri (Brazilian Indigenous) and , she walks the Earth as a perpetual learner, writer, practitioner, creator and healer. She is a Certified Clinical Hypnotherapist, a Mindfulness Teacher at the East Bay Meditation Center, and a plant spirit guide trained by maestras and her lineage’s elders. Her work centers radical joy, justice, and deep healing—especially through beloved “Literary Therapy” Circles, where LGBTQI+, BIPOC communities, and parents gather to liberate themselves and each other. With every word and action, she invites us to imagine—and build—a more just and awakened world. Follow her @renatametta on IG to stay connected and discover upcoming offerings!

2025 Inside Ideas

Moderator  – Healing, Activism and Collective Liberation: Strategies for Building a New World

Former newspaper reporter Jennifer K. Morita believes a good story is like good mochi – slightly sweet with a nice chew. Her debut mystery, Ghosts of Waikiki was published by Crooked Lane Books in November 2024 and has been nominated for a Left Coast Crime Lefty Award for Best Debut Mystery and an Agatha Award for Best First Novel. Jennifer was a runner up for the Sisters in Crime Eleanor Taylor Bland Award in 2022. She is a member of SinC, Crime Writers of Color, Mystery Writers of America and International Thriller Writers. Jennifer is also active with her local SinC chapter, Capitol Crimes, where she served as vice president and president. Jennifer writes for a university in Northern California, where she lives with her husband and two daughters. When she isn’t plotting murder mysteries or pushing Girl Scout cookies, she enjoys reading, experimenting with recipes, leisurely hikes, Zumba and Hot Hula.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Mystery Writers Unmasking Larger Issues

Nayomi Munaweera is an award-winning novelist. Her debut, Island of a Thousand Mirrors, won the Commonwealth Book Prize for the Asian Region and was short-listed for the DSC Prize and Man Asia Prizes. It was chosen as a Target Book Club book. Her second novel What Lies Between Us, won the Sri Lankan National Book Award and was short-listed for the Northern California Book Prize. The Huffington Post raved, “Munaweera’s prose is visceral and indelible, devastatingly beautiful-reminiscent of the glorious writings of Louise Erdrich, Amy Tan and Alice Walker, who also find ways to truth-tell through fiction.”  She is proud of all her writing students from various MFAs and in her Writing Covens.

2025 Inside Ideas

Moderator  – So Many Stars: A Celebration of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color

Vijaya Nagarajanis an Associate Professor, former Chair of the Department of Theology/Religious Studies, and in the Program of Environmental Studies at the University of San Francisco. She writes and teaches on Hinduism, gender, ritual, ecology, Hinduism/climate, the commons, energy, and ethics. She has also been active in the American Academy of Religion and in environmental movements in the United States and in India. Her book, Feeding a Thousand Souls: Women, Ritual and Ecology in India— An Exploration of the Kolam, is a deep exploration of a popular women’s ephemeral ritual art made of rice flour, the kolam, and the multiple ways in which beauty can embody ethics.

2025 Inside Ideas

Moderator  – Our Beautiful, Burning World

Adela Najarro’s fifth poetry collection, Variations in Blue, was selected by the Letras Latinas/ Red Hen Collaborative for publication in March, 2025. The California Arts Council recognized her as an established artist for the Central California Region, appointing her as an Individual Artist Fellow. Her extended family left Nicaragua and arrived in San Francisco during the 1940s; after the fall of the Somoza regime, the last of the family settled in the Los Angeles area.

2025 Bookworm Blockparty

Speaker  – Chimera Space: Monstrous, Lovely, and Liminal

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and numerous other awards. His most recent publication is A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial. He is a University Professor, the Aerol Arnold Chair of English, and a Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. He is also a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations.

2025 Headliners 

Speaker  – “Writing as an Other”

Loa Niumeitolu is a Tongan poet, community organizer, educator and tender of land. She’s the director of Planting Oceania, a Pacific Islander collective that plants their ancestral Pacific Islander food and medicine, like Taro, Kava, and Ti, here on Lisjan and Raymatush territories.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Bringing our Youth Back to the Land

Keenan Norris’s latest book is Chi Boy: Native Sons and Chicago Reckonings. Keenan’s novel The Confession of Copeland Cane won the 2022 Northern California Book Award and his essays have received the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award and Folio: Eddie Award. Keenan is Associate Professor of English and coordinator of the Steinbeck Fellows Program at San José State.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Essay as Form

Dorsey Nunn began advocating for the rights of California prisoners and their families while incarcerated. As co-director of Legal Services for Prisoners with Children (LSPC), in 2003 he co-founded All of Us or None (AOUON), a grassroots movement of formerly incarcerated people working on their own behalf to secure their civil and human rights. AOUON is now the policy and advocacy arm of LSPC, which Nunn has led as executive director since 2011. Collective victories include ending indefinite solitary confinement in California, expanding access to housing and employment for formerly incarcerated people, and restoring the vote to those on parole and probation.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Ghosts of Justice: Exposing the Failures and Reimagining the Future of the American Legal System

ayodele nzinga is poet laureate of Oakland, founder of Lower Bottom Playaz and BAMBD CDC, a California Arts Legacy Artist, a Rainin Fellow, and a member of the Alameda County Women’s Hall of Fame. nzinga holds an MFA in Writing and Consciousness and a PHD in Transformative Education and Change. She is the author of Preforming Literacy a Narrative Inquiry into Performance Pedagogy, The Horse Eaters, SorrowLand Oracle, Incandescent, and Poet Tree(s).

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Healing, Activism and Collective Liberation: Strategies for Building a New World

Achy Obejas is the author of The Boy Kingdom/El reino de los varones, forthcoming in September, and of Boomerang/Bumerán, both bilingual collections of poetry written in a mostly gender-free English and Spanish. She also authored The Tower of the Antilles, which was a PEN/Faulkner finalist, among other honors. Her novels include Ruins and Days of Awe, which was a Los Angeles Times Best Books of the Year. Her poetry chapbook, This is What Happened in Our Other Life, was both a critical hit and a national best-seller. As a translator, Havana-born Achy has worked with Wendy Guerra, Rita Indiana, Junot Díaz and Megan Maxwell, among others. A recipient of a USA Artists fellowship, an NEA and a Cintas fellowship, and other awards, she lives in the San Francisco Bay area. She is an occasional contributor to the New York Times.

Daniel Oberhaus is a science writer based in Brooklyn, New York. He is the founder of the deep tech communications agency HAUS and was previously a staff writer at WIRED. His first book Extraterrestrial Languages (MIT Press) is about the art, science, and philosophy of interstellar communication.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Problematic Reports from the Frontlines of Tech

Maysa Odeh is a Palestinian writer who grew up between Amman, Jordan and the United States. Her debut picture book was written during the assault on Gaza in 2021, which sparked a conversation between herself and her inner child. A Map for Falasteen answers the questions she was too shy to ask as a child of Palestinian refugees. What is a homeland? Where do you find it? How can you be sure it’s there when you can’t see it? Maysa resides in California with her five year old daughter, Malak, who asks questions all day long in Arabic and English, and sometimes even in her sleep.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Homeland to Home

M. M. Olivas is an alumna of the 2022 Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop and the 2023 Under the Volcano Writers Residency. Her short fiction, which has appeared in publications like Uncanny Magazine, Weird Horror Magazine, and Apex, explores the intersections of queer and Chicana experiences.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Nightmares Revealed: The Rise of Latinx Horror Fiction

Daniel A. Olivas is the author of 12 books including Chicano Frankenstein (Forest Avenue Press, 2024), My Chicano Heart: New and Collected Stories of Love and Other Transgressions (University of Nevada Press, 2024), and Crossing the Border: New and Collected Poems (Pact Press, 2017). He is also a playwright, editor, and book critic. Widely anthologized, Olivas has written on literature for The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Los Angeles Times, Zocálo, Latino Book Review, Alta Journal, and The Guardian. He earned his degree in English literature from Stanford University, and law degree from UCLA. By day, Olivas is a senior attorney with the California Department of Justice.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Nightmares Revealed: The Rise of Latinx Horror Fiction

Gabriela Orozco Belt is a Costa Rican-American children’s book author who lives in a small town in the Mojave Desert. Inspired by her experiences of growing up bilingual and bicultural, she writes stories for children so they can see themselves in books. When not teaching, writing, or reading, she can be found spending time with her husband, three children, and extended family.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – I’m Awesome, Just the Way I Am

Nkeiruka Oruche, a multimedia creative, cultural organizer, and producer, founded and directs Afro Urban Society, a hub for Pan African arts and culture. She created and directed ‘Mixtape of the Dead & Gone #1’’ dance-theater comedy about death and igbo cosmology. In 2023, she was on the creative team of ‘Nollywood Dreams’ at SF Playhouse. Oruche was a Dance/USA Artist Fellow, Kikwetu Honors Awardee, a NYFA Immigrant Artist Fellow, and YBCA 100 Honoree. She has received awards from Creative Work Fund, MAP Fund, Kenneth Rainin Foundation, and California Arts Council. Her work has been featured in BBC Africa, Goethe-Institut, Fjord Review, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Coal City University-Enugu, and Oakland Museum of California.

ZioraMmachi is a 12-year old who is curious about the world around her. She loves to write, spend time with friends and family, run, read (taking away books is a dreaded consequence), take photos, listen to music, make playlists, and a lot of other things. She is a co-author of the Notable & Notorious Nigerian Women Coloring book.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Nkeiruka Oruche (Notable & Notorious Nigerian Women) coloring book

J. Richard Osborn lives in Oakland, California. Not Long Ago Persons Found is his first novel.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Mystery Writers Unmasking Larger Issues

Gigi Pandian is a USA Today bestselling and award-winning mystery author, breast cancer survivor, and locked-room mystery enthusiast. The child of anthropologists from New Mexico and the southern tip of India, she spent her childhood being dragged around the world on their research trips, which inspired her fiction. Gigi has been awarded Agatha, Anthony, Lefty, and Derringer awards, and been a finalist for the Edgar. She writes the Secret Staircase mysteries, Accidental Alchemist mysteries, and Jaya Jones Treasure Hunt mysteries.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Murder in Mysterious Places

Not born with a quill in her hand but a courageous will to take a stand, Sonali Patodia recognizes the power of storytelling and its ability to shape young minds. She felt compelled to address deep-rooted societal issues in simple yet impactful ways. Fascinated by cultural traditions, she constantly finds creative ways to pass them along to future generations. Beyond writing, Sonali shares her journey as an author on her blog, engages with her audience on social media, and finds solace in art. Born and raised in India, she now lives in California with her husband and two teenage daughters.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Quiet Voices, Loud Feelings

Crystel Patterson is an Award-Winning Author, Children’s Book Creator, and Advocate for Diversity in Children’s Literature. Crystel is  based in Sacramento, California and is the creator of the Inspired to Be… series, a collection of empowering children’s books that amplify positive Black narratives and promote social-emotional learning and growth mindset for kids. As a proud mother, Crystel writes diverse children’s books that inspire young readers with real-life stories of perseverance, achievement, and self-expression. With a degree in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from UC Berkeley, Crystel’s journey to becoming an author is rooted in her passion for uplifting the next generation. Her work has been recognized in the media and honored with multiple awards for its impact on young readers and communities. Through her books, school programs, and community involvement, Crystel encourages children to embrace their uniqueness, dream big, and believe in their ability to make a difference.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Quiet Voices, Loud Feelings

Sarah Peitzmeier, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Behavioral and Community Health at the University of Maryland School of Public Health. Her mixed-methods research focuses on the epidemiology and prevention of gender-based violence, as well as LGBTQ+ health promotion. She is co-author (with Maia Kobabe) of the graphic novel Breathe, which is based on her research on chest binding in transmasculine individuals. Sarah received her PhD from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2017.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – All Bodies All Selves

Aimee Phan was born and raised in Orange County, California. She received her BA in English from UCLA and her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of two books for adults, We Should Never Meet: Stories and the novel The Reeducation of Cherry Truong. She has received fellowships and residencies from NEA, MacDowell Colony, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, Djerassi, and Hedgebrook. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Time, USA Today and CNN.com among other publications. Aimee teaches as an associate professor in writing and literature at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and resides in Berkeley, California with her family.

2025 Bookworm Blockparty

Speaker  – Embrace Furiously This Burning World: Writers Reckon with Now

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – The End of the (Fantastical) World: Complicated Relationships in Dystopia

Shabnam Piryaei is an award-winning poet, playwright, and filmmaker. She’s published four books. She has directed films that have screened at film festivals and art galleries around the world. She wants everyone to be and feel free.

2025 Bookworm Blockparty

Speaker  – Women, Cyborgs, Revolutionary Petunias, and Other Creatures

john a. powell is an internationally respected expert in the areas of civil rights, racial identity, fair housing, poverty, and democracy. He is director of the Othering & Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley, where he holds the Robert D. Haas Chancellor’s Chair in Equity and Inclusion, and is a professor of law, African American studies, and ethnic studies. He is the author of Racing to Justice, coauthor of Belonging without Othering, and cofounder of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council.

2025 Democracy Dialogues 

Speaker  – In Dialogue: Building Communities that Thrive

From playing the DM in Dungeons and Dragons to writing fantasy novels, Nikhil Prabala loves storytelling, delighting in fantasy fiction from the epic to the cozy and everywhere in between. The Duchess of Kokora is his first published novel. Born and raised in Austin, Texas, he graduated from Stanford in 2019 and is currently based in the Bay Area. In his free time he enjoys ballroom dancing, singing, playing the guitar, tabletop games, and spending time with friends and family.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – The End of the (Fantastical) World: Complicated Relationships in Dystopia

Vanessa Priya Daniel has worked in social justice movements for twenty-five years as a labor and community organizer and funder. She founded and served for seventeen years as executive director of Groundswell Fund, a leading funder of grassroots and electoral organizing led by women of color, queer and transgender people. Under her leadership, Groundswell moved over $100M to the field; centering intersectional grassroots organizing led by women of color and using a breakthrough philanthropic model that featured supermajorities of women of color movement leaders and former grassroots organizers on its staff and boards of directors. She is a recipient of the Smith College Medal, was featured by The Chronicle of Philanthropy as one of fifteen “Influencers” who are changing the non-profit world, and by Inside Philanthropy as one of the “Top 100 Most Powerful Players in Philanthropy.” Daniel has written for The New York Times and the San Francisco Bay Guardian, among other publications. She and her co-parent Tricia are mothers to two daughters, ages 6 and 13.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Organized Resistance From the Ground Up

Bridget Quinn is a writer, art historian, and critic. She’s the author of the lively biography Portrait of a Woman: Art, Rivalry & Revolution in the Life of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard—think Hamilton or Amadeus, but women artists. Her book She Votes was an Amazon Editors’ Pick for Best History Books of 2020, and her debut, Broad Strokes, was an Amazon Editors’ Pick for Best Art & Photography Books of 2017 and a 2018 Amelia Bloomer List selection of recommended feminist literature by the American Library Association. A regular contributor to arts magazine Hyperallergic, Bridget is a nationally sought-after speaker on women and art.

2025 Writers’ Workshops 

Speaker  – Paths to Publishing: From the Big Five to DIY

Meggie Ramm (they/them) is a nonbinary cartoonist from Michigan. They spent their 20s teaching comics to kids in Oakland, California, and it was the best job in the whole world. They’ve had work in The New Yorker,have worked with Everyday Feminism and Silver Sprocket, and have a limerick-based comic strip called “The Littlest Dungeon Guard” distributed through Sunday HaHa. They love rhymes, reading gay sci-fi and fantasy, and comics.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Pages and Pictures from Early Reader to Middle Grade

Ralph Remington has extensive professional experience in arts administration and government, and has experience as a director, actor, essayist, playwright and screenwriter. Prior to joining the City and County of San Francisco as Director of Cultural Affairs for the San Francisco Arts Commission, he served as the Deputy Director for Arts and Culture for the City of Tempe, Arizona. In that role, he was responsible for Tempe Center for the Arts’ comprehensive performance and visual art programming, as well as overseeing public art, the Tempe History Museum, arts engagement and municipal arts granting. He previously served as the former Western Regional Director and Assistant Executive Director for Actors Equity Association in Los Angeles. Prior to that, he was Director of Theater and Musical Theater at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in Washington, D.C. In 2010, he received the NEA Chairman’s Distinguished Service Award. Prior to working at the NEA, Remington was a City Council member for the City of Minneapolis. He is a former Guthrie Theater Acting Company member, and is the founding Producing Artistic Director of award-winning Pillsbury House Theatre in South Minneapolis. Ralph is a US Army veteran. Remington has a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Drama from Howard University.

Abby Reyes cut her teeth doing rural environmental legal assistance in the Philippines, her father’s homeland, and walking alongside the Colombian U’wa Indigenous pueblo for dignity against big oil. She directs community resilience at University of California, Irvine, supporting community-academic partnerships to accelerate community-owned just transition solutions.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – A Memoir for Remembrance

J.R. Rice is a Black man, writer, teacher, event host & curator, and spoken word artist, born and raised in Oakland, California. He has a B.A in Creative Writing and an English Education teaching credential from California State University of Long Beach. His novel, Broken Pencils earned the 2024 Literary Titan Gold Book Award, 2024 Pencraft Summer Best Book Award winner for Young Adult Coming of Age Fiction, and the 2024 Hawthorne Prize Finalist for Best Fiction. His poetry collection, I Was, Am, Will Be, is a continuation in the Broken Pencils series. In addition to his writing accolades, he earned the Rookie of the Year award at the 2005 National Collegiate Poetry Slam in Philadelphia. He was a Semi-Finalist in the 2023 Berkeley Poetry Slam Finals.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Coming of Age in an Unsteady World

Rachel Richardson is the author of Smother (W. W. Norton, 2025) and two earlier poetry collections, Copperhead and Hundred-Year Wave. She is co-founder of the community writing center Left Margin LIT in Berkeley, as well as a former Wallace Stegner and NEA Fellow. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times, The Yale Review, APR, and elsewhere. In 2024 she was named an inaugural Artists-in-Fire Resident through the Confluence Lab, and is now trained as an FFT2 wildland firefighter.

2025 Bookworm Blockparty

Speaker  – Women, Cyborgs, Revolutionary Petunias, and Other Creatures

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Our Beautiful, Burning World

David Roderick is the author of two poetry collections, Blue Colonial and The Americans. His poetry has been recognized with the Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and the Julie Suk Award. He directs Left Margin LIT, a creative writing center and work space for writers in Berkeley.

2025 Writers’ Workshops 

Speaker  – How to Find (& Create) Your Writing Community

Nicholas Rosenlicht, M.D. is a clinical professor at UC San Francisco School of Medicine in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. During his time at UCSF, he has worked at the San Francisco VA hospital in both the outpatient department and on the consultation-liaison team and has served on the Human Subjects Committee of their Human Research Protection Program. He has more than forty years of clinical, research, administrative, and teaching experience and was previously on the faculty at the UCLA School of Medicine, UC Davis School of Medicine, and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (now the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School) and is the author of more than thirty peer-reviewed publications.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Bridging the Gaps: Redefining Healthcare Through a Justice Lens

Rhonda Roumani is an award-winning Syrian American author and journalist. She is the author of the Middle Grade book Tagging Freedom (Union Square), which received an Arab American Book Award honor and was an Indies Introduce and Indies Next pick; the picture book Insha’Allah, No, Maybe So (Holiday House), which was named a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection and a New York Public Library Best Books of 2024. Her most recent non-fiction picture book is Um Kulthum: The Star of the East (Interlink Publishing.) She lives in New Haven, CT with her husband and two kids.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Coming of Age in an Unsteady World
Speaker  – Creators’ Collective Action

D. M. Rowell (Koyh Mi O Boy Dah) an enrolled citizen of the Kiowa Tribe, comes from a long line of storytellers within a Plains Indian culture that treasures oral traditions. After a thirty-two-year career spinning stories for Silicon Valley corporations and start-ups with a few escapes creating award-winning documentaries, Rowell started a new chapter writing the Mud Sawpole mysteries featuring a Silicon Valley professional Kiowa woman solving thefts and murders in Kiowa country. The first, NEVER NAME THE DEAD was a 2023 Simon & Schuster Mary Higgins Clark Award Finalist. Publishers Weekly said of SILENT ARE THE DEAD, “Rowell’s clever second whodunit … elegantly threads tangible details about tribal life into the action, which remains propulsive throughout.”

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Mystery Writers Unmasking Larger Issues

Aida Salazar is an award-winning author, translator, and arts activist whose writings explore issues of identity and social justice. Her critically acclaimed verse novels and picture books have received over twenty five awards including an ALA Caldecott Honor, ALA Pura Bélpre Honor, Malka Penn Human Rights in Children’s Literature Award, The Américas Award, The Tomás Rivera Book Award, NSK Nuesdtat Finalist, International Latino Book Awards among other distinctions. She lives with her family of artists in Oakland, CA.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Storytime for Littles

Cintia Santana’s debut poetry collection, The Disordered Alphabet (Four Way Books, 2023) received the 43rd Annual Northern California Book Award in Poetry, the 2024 IPPY Bronze Medal, the 2023 North American Book Award’s Silver Medal, and was short-listed for the 2023 California Independent Booksellers Alliance “Golden Poppy” Award. Santana’s poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2016 and 2020, 2023 Best of the Net Anthology, Poets.org, Poetry Daily, Split this Rock, and numerous journals. She is the recipient of fellowships from CantoMundo, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Santana teaches literary translation and poetry workshops in Spanish and English at Stanford University.

2025 Bookworm Blockparty

Speaker  – Garden of Possibilities

2025 Writers’ Workshops 

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

Greg Sarris is an accomplished writer, university professor, and tribal leader serving his sixteenth term as Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria. Sarris is also a producer, playwright, and the author of several books, including the award-winning How a Mountain Was Made (2017), Kirkus Book Prize finalist Becoming Story (2022), and Grand Avenue (1995), which was adapted to an HBO film, co-produced by Sarris with Robert Redford. He is co-executive producer of Joan Baez: I Am A Noise (2023) and his most recent play, Citizen (2023) debuted at San Francisco’s Word for Word Theater and was lauded as a “lush […] linguistic feast” by the San Francisco Chronicle. He is board chair of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, a member of the University of California’s Board of Regents, and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

2025 Inside Ideas

Moderator  – Native Voices: Youth Writers from the 2025 Graton Writing Project
Moderator  – Redefining Home

2025 Headliners 

Speaker  – “Writing as an Other”

Shanthi Sekaran is a novelist and television writer. Her most recent adult novel, Lucky Boy, was named an Indie Next Great Read, an Amazon Editor’s Pick and a Best Book of 2017 by NPR, Barnes & Noble, Library Journal, and the San Francisco Chronicle. In 2021, she published her middle grade debut, The Samosa Rebellion, which won the Northern California Book Award and was named an Amazon Editor’s Pick for readers aged 9-13. Her second middle grade novel, Boomi’s Boombox, comes out on May 23rd. She recently wrapped up her work on the acclaimed NBC medical drama, New Amsterdam. She lives in Berkeley with her family and a cat named Frog.

2025 Family Day 

Moderator  – Finding Your Place in Middle Grade

My name is Serena and I attend a private Catholic school in Hayward. I am part of the dance program and spend most of my time working in the library after school.

2025 Family Day 

MC  – Moving House, Moving Place, and Opening Our Minds

Shia Shabazz Smith is a screenwriter, poet, and educator who strives to ensure that her art and service represent her varied communities at large. Professionally, with over 18 years of experience as a writer for film and TV, as a published poet, and as an accomplished educator. Personally, Shia is a committed mother, wife, daughter, and community member. She lives and thrives in Oakland, California.

2025 Family Day 

Moderator  – All Bodies All Selves

Betty Shamieh (she/her) is a Palestinian American writer and the author of fifteen plays. She is the playwright-in-residence at the Classical Theatre of Harlem. Her six New York play premieres include the sold-out off-Broadway runs of “Roar and Malvolio,” a sequel to Twelfth Night, which were both New York Times Critic’s Picks. She is a founding artistic director of The Semitic Root, a collective that supports innovative theatre cocreated by Arab and Jewish Americans. A graduate of Harvard College and the Yale School of Drama, she lives with her family in San Francisco.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Fiction Debuts Navigating Historical Memory

Marguerite Sheffer is the author of The Man in the Banana Trees (University of Iowa Press, 2024) winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award. Her stories appear in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Epiphany, The Adroit Journal, The Cincinnati Review, Smokelong Quarterly, and BOMB, among other magazines. Formerly, she was a high school teacher in Oakland, and now teaches design thinking and speculative fiction for social change at Tulane University in New Orleans.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Stories of Tomorrow: Speculative Fiction

Russell Shoatz III is well-versed in a multitude of educational modalities, restorative justice and equity practices. His father, a Black Panther, was imprisoned in 1972. Russell championed the campaign to liberate his father from fifty years of incarceration. Russell is the Co-Founder of Building Fearless Futures an anti-racist consulting firm. He was production manager for NASA’s Yuri’s Night. Russell also facilitated a restorative STEAM curriculum entitled ISIS (Instituting Science In Schools). He also has spoken at museums, public schools and universities including Yale, Harvard and The United Nations. He has presented for UNESCO on Internal Truth and Reconciliation. Russell has a lifetime of education, curriculum structure, child services and youth mentoring work. Little Maroons, is a school founded by Russell and fellow parents. Russell is also the creator of the multimedia juggernaut Blu magazine.

2025 Bookworm Blockparty

Speaker  – CurbFest for Political Prisoners

2025 Democracy Dialogues 

Speaker  – Unyielding Resistance: Perspectives on Political Prisoners and the Lifelong Pursuit of Freedom

Kim Shuck is a visual artist and poet. She is author of 11 solo books, two co-authored books, and has contributed to many journals and anthologies. Shuck has also been involved in editing another 12 books. She imagines building a book fort soon. Kim is the 7th Poet Laureate Emerita of San Francisco. Her latest full length book of poetry is Pick a Garnet to Sleep In.

2025 Inside Ideas

MC  – Indigenous Poetry: Words that Map the Natural World
Moderator  – Bringing our Youth Back to the Land

Mary Shyne is a Chicago-area native, who spent a decade in New York working in publishing before getting her MFA at the Center for Cartoon Studies. She currently lives in the Bay Area where she works on all things Snoopy at the Schulz Studio. Her comics have appeared in The Nib, Electric Literature and Solrad.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Follow Your Heart to Graphic Novels

Jesus Francisco Sierra is a Cuban writer who immigrated to San Francisco, and grew up in San Francisco’s Mission District. His work has appeared in Zyzzyva, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Common, Alta, Gulf Stream Literary Journal, The Bare Life Review, Solstice Literary Magazine, The Caribbean Writer and The Acentos Review among others. He holds an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles. A member of The Writers Grotto, he is currently at work on his first novel.

2025 Writers’ Workshops 

Speaker  – How to Find (& Create) Your Writing Community

Matthew is the co-founder and director of operations for Reflection Press, a POC, queer, and trans-owned independent publishing house based in San Francisco since 2009. The press integrates holistic, nature-based, and anti-oppression frameworks in their books and materials for both children and adults. With over 15 years of experience in the independent publishing industry, often on the fringes, Matthew is continually finding new ways to build resilience and adapt in the face of challenges like book bans and shifting cultural landscapes. As coauthor of They She He Me: Free to Be! and the banned book They, She, He Easy as ABC, Matthew collaborates with Maya Gonzalez to create expansive and impactful materials and resources supporting Maya’s Gender Wheel Approach—a nature-based, decolonized, and holistic approach to body, gender, and relationship diversity.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Storming the Gatekeepers: Past, Present, & Future Publishing Alternatives

K. X. Song is a diaspora writer with roots in Hong Kong and Shanghai. Raised between cultures and languages, she enjoys telling stories that explore the shifting nature of memory, translation, and history. She is the author of An Echo in the City and the forthcoming The Night Ends with Fire, her adult fantasy debut.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Romantasy — Not for the Faint of Heart

Hi my name is Sophie and I’m in 7th grade. This is first year with the Cinnamon Girls and I’m loving it – specially the new friendships I’ve made. I like books, track and playing with my dog.

2025 Family Day 

MC  – I’m Awesome, Just the Way I Am

Elizabeth Stark is the author of the novel Shy Girl (FSG, Seal Press, finalist for Lamda Literary and Ferro-Grumely Awards), host of Story Makers Podcast (StoryMakersShow.com), co-director and co-writer of films FtF: Female to Femme, a creative documentary, and Little Mutinies, a short (both distributed by Frameline), and producer of the award-winning feature film Lost in the Middle. She earned an M.F.A. from Columbia University in Creative Writing and has taught at the Pratt Institute, UCSC, St. Mary’s, as visiting distinguished writer, and elsewhere. She co-directs and teaches at BookWritingWorld.com.

2025 Bookworm Blockparty

Speaker  – A Revolution of Raised Voices

Dr. Lester is the award-winning author of six critically acclaimed books. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, USA Today, CNN, Ebony, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, Black Issues Book Review, Ms., Cosmopolitan, Common Dreams, and Huffington Post, among others.

Her memoir Loving Before Loving: A Marriage in Black and White won the PEN-Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, and was a Finalist for the Northern California Book Award, Story Circle Sarton Award, and the Foreword Indie Award. It won the Montaigne Medal for the Eric Hoffer Awards.

Other recognitions include the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists’ Siegenthaler Award for NPR Commentary, Finalist for the PEN/Bellweather Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction (Mama’s Child), and the Arts & Letters Creative Nonfiction Finalist Award for her Fannie Lou Hamer essay (adapted in her blog).

Her books have been excerpted in Essence, Black Issues in Higher Education, Ebony, Executive Female, and the anthologies When a Woman Tells the Truth, and 20 Over 60 (forthcoming).

www.JoanLester.com

2025 Writers’ Workshops 

Speaker  – Paths to Publishing: From the Big Five to DIY

Meredith is a picture book author who strives to tell authentic stories that reflect kids’ uniqueness, wonder, and magic. An activist and advocate, Meredith is passionate about equity, anti-racism, and anti-oppression work. She loves playing board games, making miniature books, and singing show tunes (when she’s sure no one is around.) She is a children’s librarian and lives with her family in San Francisco.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – I’m Awesome, Just the Way I Am

Tavia Stewart is a Bay Area writer, immersive storyteller, creative placemaker, and two-time literary nonprofit founder. She is the co-author of Ready, Set, Novel (Chronicle Books) and author of multiple novel-writing workbooks for kids and teens (NaNoWriMo’s Young Writers Program). Tavia worked at National Novel Writing Month as the COO for 10 years until 2014 then co-founded Chapter 510, an 826-inspired writing, publishing, and bookmaking center in Oakland, CA. She is also the creator and Creative Director for Chapter 510’s magical bureaucracy (interactive retail storefront) the Dept. of Make / Believe.

She has worked for and with McSweeney’s, 826 Valencia, ZYZZYVA, and Watchword Press, with whom she curated Whole Story, a series of immersive experiences based on selected short stories. She has been published in Smokelong Quarterly.

Currently, Tavia works as a nonprofit consultant and co-founder of the Flash Fiction Institute (launching summer 2025), and is a proud board member of the Open Architecture Collaborative.

Elisa Stone Leahy is a queer, Peruvian American children’s author who lives with her husband and kids in Columbus, Ohio. Whether creating award-winning documentary films or connecting readers to books through her work at the Columbus Metropolitan Library, Elisa has always surrounded herself with stories. She is the author of Tethered to Other Stars and Mallory in Full Color.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Finding Your Place in Middle Grade

Elaine Tai (she/her) is a librarian with strong interests in social justice and lifelong learning, and has been lucky to engage with wonderful authors, artists, activists, and others because of the reach of libraries. She is often motivated to create out of frustration, but also inspired and influenced by the community around her. She lives in the SF Bay Area with her curmudgeonly cat Neko and spends her free time as a wannabe-patron-of-the-arts, [very] amateur artist, and collector of things. Yes Means Yes is her first book.

2025 Family Day 

Moderator  – Follow Your Heart to Graphic Novels

Lehua M. Taitano, familian Kabesa yan Kuetu, is a queer CHamoru writer and interdisciplinary artist from Yigu, Guåhan (Guam) and co-founder of Art 25: Art in the Twenty-fifth Century. She is the author of two volumes of poetry—Inside Me an Island and A Bell Made of Stones.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Bringing our Youth Back to the Land

J.P. Takahashi was born in New York City and raised by a family of readers in the United States and Japan. She loves a good adventure in real life and in her imagination—especially when it’s as scary as it is magical.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Moving House, Moving Place, and Opening Our Minds

Betty C. Tang is the creator of the graphic novel Parachute Kids, a 2023 National Book Award Longlist selection an ALA Asian/Pacific American Award Honor Book, and an instant Indie bestseller. She has also illustrated the New York Times bestselling Jacky Ha-Ha series of graphic novels by James Patterson and Chris Grabenstein. Before becoming a fulltime graphic novelist, Betty worked for various Hollywood animation studios, including Disney and DreamWorks Animation, and codirected an animated feature called Where’s the Dragon? Betty is a fourth-degree black belt in aikido. She immigrated to California as a parachute kid when she was ten and currently lives in Los Angeles.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Healing and Resistance

My name is Taylor Sky, and I’m from West Oakland. Activism has always been a part of my life, even before I fully understood what it meant. From a young age, I found myself participating in community efforts — feeding the homeless, speaking at City Hall, and witnessing firsthand the power of using your voice to create change. These experiences shaped my understanding of the impact a community can have when it comes together for a cause.

Growing up, my connection to activism was further strengthened by my mother’s nonprofit work, the activism within my family, and Oakland’s rich culture of advocacy. I’ve also participated in abortion rights protests in Washington, D.C., alongside my mom, deepening my commitment to standing up for what I believe in.

My mom’s work as a trained doula has given me valuable insight into body positivity, body education, and the importance of understanding and protecting personal rights. These lessons have fueled my passion for advocating for reproductive rights and empowering others through knowledge.

For the past three years, I’ve been a proud member of Cinnamon Girl, where I’ve continued to grow, learn, and connect with other young women dedicated to leadership and social impact.

2025 Family Day 

Moderator  – All Bodies All Selves

Mimi Tempestt (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and daughter of California. She has a MA in Literature from Mills College, and is currently a doctoral candidate in the Creative/Critical PhD in Literature at UC Santa Cruz. Her first book, the monumental misrememberings, is published with Co-Conspirator Press//The Feminist Center for Creative Work (2020). She was selected for participation in the Lambda Literary Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices & writers in 2021. Her second book, The Delicacy of Embracing Spirals, is published with City Lights (2023). Her works can be found in Foglifter, Interim Poetics, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Studio Museum in Harlem.

2025 Bookworm Blockparty

Speaker  – Wound is the Portal: Healing into the Future

Brook M. Thompson is a part of the Yurok and Karuk Tribes. She is a neurodivergent and Two-Spirit author with dyslexia. She has a BS in civil engineering from Portland State University and an MS in environmental engineering from Stanford University, and she will soon have a PhD in environmental studies from University of California, Santa Cruz, where she studies water, politics, restoration, and salmon.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Healing and Resistance
Speaker  – Fighting for What You Love

Lynne Thompson served as Los Angeles Poet Laureate, 2021-2022. Thompson is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently, Blue on a Blue Palette (2024). The recipient of multiple awards, Thompson serves on the Boards of Scripps College, The Poetry Foundation, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is the President of the Cave Canem Foundation.

2025 Bookworm Blockparty

Speaker  – Women, Cyborgs, Revolutionary Petunias, and Other Creatures

Tamika Thompson is author of The Curse of Hester Gardens (Erewhon/Kensington 2026). A former journalist and producer, she is also author of Salamander Justice (Madness Heart Press), and Unshod,Cackling, and Naked (Unnerving Books), which is the 2024 Next Generation Indie Book Awards WINNER for Horror, and which Publishers Weekly calls “powerful,” “unsettling,” and “terrifying.” Her work has appeared in several speculative fiction anthologies as well as in Interzone, Prairie Schooner, The New York Times, and Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. Her long fiction tale, “Bridget Has Disappeared,” was translated to Italian for Independent Legions’ Molotov Magazine. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Columbia University and a Master of Arts in Journalism from the University of Southern California. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she hosts her own blog and newsletter, Tamika Talks Terror. 

Grayson Thompson (he/him) is a Black, Jamaican-American, queer transgender cowboy poet and therapist. He is the winner of Foglifter Press’s 2024 Start A Riot! Chapbook Prize for Sand Bodied Florida Boy (June 2025) and Write Bloody Publishing’s 2024 Jack McCarthy Book Prize Winner for A Congregation of Alligators(September 2025.) His work appears in Cathexis Northwest Press, Foglifter, Cleaver (Best of the Net nominee,) Poetry Online, and more. A wanderer, he lives in Northern California, curating salad recipes and marveling at the ocean. He chooses madness–honest and full-hearted–and hopes you find some in his poems.

2025 Bookworm Blockparty

Speaker  – Chimera Space: Monstrous, Lovely, and Liminal

2025 Writers’ Workshops 

Speaker  – Panel: We Will Not Disappear: Queer/Trans Voices in a Time of Backlash

Gianna Toboni is an Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker and journalist. Formerly a senior correspondent and producer for VICE News, Toboni has covered escalating cartel violence and political corruption in Mexico, interviewed ISIS fighters, tracked down Nigerian pirates on their illegal oil refineries, and more. She received a GLAAD Media Award for her coverage of the battle between religious and LGBTQ rights in America, a Webby Award for Best Documentary Series, and was recognized by the Newswomen’s Club of New York at the Front Page Awards for her reporting on transgender youth. Toboni was named to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list for Media, is a TEDx Speaker, and Peabody Finalist. The Volunteer is her first book.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Ghosts of Justice: Exposing the Failures and Reimagining the Future of the American Legal System

Maggie Tokuda-Hall is the author of Also an Octopus, illustrated by Benji Davies, The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea, Squad, illustrated by Lisa Sterle, and Love in the Library, illustrated by Yas Imamura. She lives in Oakland, California, with her husband, children, and objectively perfect dog.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Creators’ Collective Action

James R. Tracy is a Bay Area based author and organizer. He is the coauthor of Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels and Black Power: Interracial Solidarity in 1960s-70s New Left Organizing, No Fascist USA!: The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee and Lessons for Today’s Movements, and Dispatches Against Displacement: Field Notes From San Francisco’s Housing Wars. Tracy serves on the Coordinating Committee of the Howard Zinn Book Fair and is the Chair of the Labor and Community Studies Department at City College of San Francisco. He has worked with the Eviction Defense Network, Coalition on Homelessness, Community Housing Partnership, Jobs with Justice SF, the San Francisco Community Land Trust, and various unions.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Organized Resistance From the Ground Up

Terra Trevor is the author of We Who Walk the Seven Ways: A Memoir. (University of Nebraska Press). Her essays appear widely in anthologies, including Tending the Fire: Native Voices and Portraits (University of New Mexico Press), Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education (The University of Arizona Press), The People Who Stayed: Southeastern Indian Writing After Removal (University of Oklahoma Press), and Unpapered: Writers Consider Native American Identity and Cultural Belonging(University of Nebraska Press). She is the granddaughter of Oklahoma sharecroppers, born in the early 1950s, and raised in Compton, California. Of mixed descent, including Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca, German, her stories are steeped in themes of place and belonging, and are shaped and infused by her identity as a mixed-blood, and her connection to the landscape.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Living Legacies: Native Authors on Memoir and Memory

Josh Tuininga is an author, artist, and graphic designer based in North Bend, WA. A graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Tuininga’s artistic career has explored a variety of mediums including sequential art, animation, painting and design. In 2003, he founded an Art + Design Agency, The Medium where he continues to work as Creative Director.

Josh is the author of ‘We Are Not Strangers’ (Abrams ComicArts 2023), and two children’s books, Why Blue? & Dream On.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Drawn to Justice: Graphic Novels and the Power of Social Action

John Twaddell: “Ye’es”, is of the Tsimshian First Nations, Gitando Tribe. John is of the Gisbudwada Clan literally translated as Black Fish commonly known as Killer Whale. He was raised by his Tsimshian Ge’es (grandmother) in British Columbia Canada at a time when the then infamous Canadian Federal “Indian Act” was still enforced resulting in tens of thousands of First Nations children being torn from their cultural and family units and placed within the infamous Canadian Residential School system. His mother, Grandmother, and Great grandmother were all surviving alumni of the Coqualeetza Residential School in Sardis, British Columbia. It was his Grandmother who kept John and his brother hidden within the public schools of the lower Fraser Delta communities that kept him from that same fate. John maintains cultural identification and oral traditions through association with the California Indians Story Teller Association and the San Francisco Tlingit & Haida Community Council which he actively supports and participates as guest story teller. He has participated in Cultural Events held at Northwest Indian College, Bellingham and Tlingit & Haida Cultural celebration in the San Francisco Bay Area. John favours writing short stories and poetry and is published in several anthologies. He is currently working to publish his mother’s biography Hidden Whispers based on her personal accounts as a Residential school survivor. His favourite quote “Go Forward With Courage. When you are in doubt, be still, and wait; when doubt no longer exists for you, then go forward with courage. So long as mists envelope you, be still; be still until the sunlight pours through and dispels the mists — as it surely will. Then act with courage.” (Ponca Chief White Eagle 1800’s to 1914).

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Native Story Circle

Marian Urquilla’s creative work explores the intersections of exile, spirituality, and identity. Her poems have appeared in The Acentos Review, The Indianapolis Review, West Trestle, and the Journal of Latina Critical Feminism. She is the winner of the 2025 Writing Salon Jane Underwood Prize and Midway Journal’s Flash Prose and Poetry Contest, a finalist for the 2024 Stephen Dunn Prize at Solstice Literary Magazine, and a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee.

2025 Bookworm Blockparty

Speaker  – Wound is the Portal: Healing into the Future

José Vadi is the author of Chipped and Inter State: Essays from California. An award-winning essayist, poet, playwright and film producer, his work has been featured by the Paris Review, The Atlantic, the PBS NewsHour, Free Skate Magazine, Alta Journal of California, and the Yale Review. He lives and writes in Sacramento, California.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Essay as Form

Mượn Thị Văn is the author of many acclaimed picture books. From her debut, In a Village by the Sea (2015) to her latest, If You Want to Be a Butterfly (2023.) her books have earned many distinctions, including a California Book Award, an Irma Black Honor, and a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection. Her recent book Wishes, with Victo Ngai, won the Margaret Wise Brown Prize and was named the #1 Best Picture Book of 2021 by BookPage. Her books have been translated into multiple languages, including Vietnamese, Nepali, Sepedi, and Tamil. Mượn Thị Văn lives and works in California.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – I’m Awesome, Just the Way I Am

Maria van Lieshout was born and raised near Amsterdam, where she spent many weekends in the Museum Quarter row house where her grandparents lived with her artist aunt and metalsmith uncle. Drawing while her aunt painted, and pecking stories on a typewriter while her uncle soldered metals inspired her love for drawing, creating and writing. After high school in Leiden, Maria studied Visual Communications at GWU in DC, and worked in design and innovation at Coca-Cola. In 2000, Maria became an illustrator full-time. She has illustrated/written several picture books. Song of a Blackbird is Maria’s first graphic novel.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Drawn to Justice: Graphic Novels and the Power of Social Action

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Creators’ Collective Action

Edgar Villanueva is an award-winning author, activist, and expert on issues of race, wealth, and philanthropy, and the Founder and CEO of Decolonizing Wealth Project and its fund, Liberated Capital. His bestselling book, Decolonizing Wealth (2018, 2021), has been called a ‘wake-up call’ to philanthropy. Edgar advises a range of organizations, including national and global philanthropies, Fortune 500 companies, and entertainment on social impact strategies to advance racial equity from within and through their investment strategies. Decolonizing Wealth, offers hopeful and compelling alternatives to the dynamics of colonization in the philanthropic and social finance sectors. Edgar launched the Decolonizing Wealth Project (DWP) in late 2018. In 2019, he founded Liberated Capital, a participatory grantmaking fund directed by DWP that invites individuals and organizations to give through a reparations model that trusts and supports the leadership of those most impacted by historical and systemic racism. The fund welcomes support from all who are committed to collectively healing the wounds of colonialism and white supremacy by using money as medicine to shape an equitable future. He holds two degrees from the Gillings Global School of Public Health at The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Edgar is an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina and resides in New York City.

Justine Eva Li Villanueva traces her ancestral roots to Bukidnon, home of her paternal grandmother, Felipa Okit Apoong, of the Bukidnon tribe. She was raised in Malaybalay until she immigrated to the United States when she was sixteen years old. She is learning to belong in Davis, California, the Wintun-Patwin homeland, with her husband and two children. Justine’s creative work focuses on decolonization, indigenization, and social justice. JustineVillanueva.com

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – movement with Justine Villanueva

Ambika Vohra is an Indian American writer living in San Francisco surrounded by tiny plants and big books. A Michigan native, she spent her childhood in pumpkin patches and cider mills. When not writing, she’s making Indian-style chai with concerning levels of cardamom pods. The Sticky Note Manifesto of Aisha Agarwal is her first novel.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Love +

Kurt is a long-time moderator for the San Francisco Writer’s Workshop. He regularly contributes to LitQuake and LitCamp publications and events, and his writing has appeared in The Racket and Dragon. He will soon complete the third draft of River Time, a novel about family, trauma and LGBTQ+ struggles that runs from 1920s Berlin to modern America.

2025 Writers’ Workshops 

Speaker  – How to Find (& Create) Your Writing Community

Brooke Warner is publisher of She Writes Press and SparkPress, president of Warner Coaching Inc., and author of Write On, Sisters!, Green-light Your Book, What’s Your Book?, and three books on memoir. Brooke is a TEDx speaker and the former executive editor of Seal Press. She currently sits on the boards of the Book Industry Study Group, the Bay Area Book Festival, and the National Association of Memoir Writers. She writes a monthly column for Publishers Weekly.

2025 Writers’ Workshops 

Speaker  – Becoming an Authorpreneur

Steve Wasserman is publisher of Heyday. A 1974 graduate of UC Berkeley, he holds a degree in criminology. His past positions include being deputy editor of the op-ed page and opinion section of the Los Angeles Times; editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review; editorial director of New Republic Books; publisher and editorial director of Hill and Wang at Farrar, Straus & Giroux and of the Noonday Press; editorial director of Times Books at Random House; and editor at large for Yale University Press. A former partner of the literacy agency Kneerim & Williams, he represented many authors, including Christopher Hitchens, Linda Ronstadt, Robert Scheer, and David Thomson. He lives in Berkeley, California.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Essay as Form

Seina Wedlick is a Nigerian-American children’s book author who enjoys writing diverse stories infused with her culture and traditions. She is the author of Naming Ceremony (Abrams Kids, Spring 2023), The Night Market (Random House, Fall 2024), and Space for Everyone (Random House, Winter 2025). She believes in supporting early childhood literacy and highlighting the importance of diversity, culture, and tradition which she reflects in her books. Seina also enjoys reading to the sound of rain and considers herself an expert at pairing books with delicious snacks. When she’s not writing or working on special projects, she can be found exploring or spending time with her family.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Moving House, Moving Place, and Opening Our Minds

Stephanie Wildman, author of five children’s books, became a Professor Emerita after serving as the John A. and Elizabeth H. Sutro Chair at Santa Clara Law. She is a grandmother, mother, spouse, friend, good listener, who can sit “criss-cross apple sauce” thanks to her yoga practice. Her latest Story Power! (co-authored with Simon Wildman Chung, illustrated by Estefanía Razo) will be available in October 2025.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Moving House, Moving Place, and Opening Our Minds

Bärí A. Williams is an attorney, start-up advisor, and DEI practitioner. She currently serves as an advisor to Vera AI and an attorney for several start-ups. Her primary practice areas include emerging technology transactions, privacy and data protection, IP licensing, and terms of service. She has bylines in The New York Times, WIRED, Fortune, and Fast Company. Her previous book, Diversity in the Workplace: Eye-Opening Interviews to Jumpstart Conversations about Identity, Privilege, and Bias, was published in March 2020

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Problematic Reports from the Frontlines of Tech

Maw Shein Win’s latest full-length poetry collection is Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn, 2024). Her previous full-length collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn, 2020) was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for the PEN America Open Book Award, and shortlisted for the Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. Her work has recently been published in The American Poetry Review, The Margins, The Bangalore Review, and other journals. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA. She teaches poetry in the MFA Program at USF.

2025 Bookworm Blockparty

Speaker  – Garden of Possibilities

Gene Luen Yang writes, and sometimes draws comic books and graphic novels. He was named a National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature by the Library of Congress in 2016, and advocates for the importance of reading, especially reading diversely. His graphic novel American Born Chinese, a National Book Award finalist and Printz Award winner, has been adapted into an original series on Disney+. His two-volume graphic novel Boxers & Saints won the LA Times Book Prize and was a National Book Award Finalist. His nonfiction graphic novel, Dragon Hoops, received an Eisner award and a Printz honor. His other comics work includes Secret Coders (with Mike Holmes), The Shadow Hero (with Sonny Liew), and Superman Smashes the Klan and the Avatar: The Last Airbender series (both with Gurihiru). In 2016, he was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Follow Your Heart to Graphic Novels

Seema Yasmin is an Emmy Award-winning journalist, Pulitzer Prize finalist, standup comedian, and poet. A queer, Gujarati-Muslim writer and director, she is a fiction fellow of the Kundiman and Tin House workshops, and a playwright at Soho Theatre in London. She is the author of eight books for adults and children, including: Muslim Women Are Everything (HarperCollins, 2021), The ABCs of Queer History (Hachette, 2024), and the poetry collection, If God is a Virus (Haymarket, 2021). Her forthcoming titles include the picture book Inshallah, the middle grade series Muslim Mavericks, and the YA novel The Voices (all Simon and Schuster, 2026/27). Seema trained in medicine at the University of Cambridge, in journalism at the University of Toronto, and in clown at The Clown School in Los Angeles. She served as a disease detective in the U.S. government’s Epidemic Intelligence Service where she investigated outbreaks, and as a medical analyst for CNN from 2014-2021 where she reported on outbreaks of Ebola, Zika and Covid. She is director of the Stanford Health Communication Initiative and clinical assistant professor of medicine at Stanford University where she studies the spread of anti-science disinformation, and teaches storytelling. Seema is adapting her debut young adult novel, Unbecoming (Simon and Schuster, 2024), for the screen, and is at work on her second young adult novel which is a climate-djinn horror story. She lives in Las Vegas.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – All Bodies All Selves

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2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Problematic Reports from the Frontlines of Tech

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2025 Bookworm Blockparty

Speaker  – Garden of Possibilities

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2025 Writers’ Workshops 

Speaker  – Panel: We Will Not Disappear: Queer/Trans Voices in a Time of Backlash

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2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – So Many Stars: A Celebration of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color

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2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – So Many Stars: A Celebration of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color

Dani Burlison (she/her) is the creator/editor of All of Me: Stories of Love, Anger and the Female Body, and the author of Some Places Worth Leaving. She has been a staff writer at a Bay Area alt-weekly and a regular contributor at Yes! Magazine, Chicago Tribune, KQED, and elsewhere. Her journalism, fiction, and personal essays can also be found at Ms. Magazine, Earth Island Journal, The Rumpus, Portland Review, Hip Mama Magazine, and in various anthologies and zines. Dani teaches and lives on unceded Southern Pomo land in California.

2025 Democracy Dialogues 

Speaker  – Mutual Aid and Community Care in California

A writer of Uruguayan origins, Caro De Robertis is the author of six novels, including The Palace of Eros, Cantoras, and more.Their books have been translated into seventeen languages and have receive numerous honors, including two Stonewall Book Awards and the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, which they were the first openly nonbinary writer to receive. De Robertis is also an award-winning literary translator and a professor at San Francisco State University. They live in Oakland, California with their two children.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – So Many Stars: A Celebration of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color

Coming Soon!

2025 Family Day 

Moderator  – Bite-Sized Biographies: Picture Books of Resistance and Resilience

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2025 Inside Ideas

Moderator  – Decolonizing Wealth: Confronting Systemic Barriers, Creating Lasting Change

Coming Soon!

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Telling Our Futures: Speculative Fiction and Social Change

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2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Native Story Circle

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2025 Bookworm Blockparty

Speaker  – Incantation for Future: Closing Headliner & Portal Closing

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2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Stories of Tomorrow: Speculative Fiction

Coming Soon!