What makes Californian literature shine? Writer Kathleen Alcott suggests that the diversity of California’s landscape has gifted a unique sense of time and change to its inhabitants, who are “used to the colors out the window turning over entirely, and to stop seeing trees and to start seeing water” within a few hours’ drive. In California Rewritten, editor, author, and host of Alta‘s California Book Club John Freeman captures the evolution of the Golden State’s literary life. He traces our literary history from early myths to the arrivals and migrations chronicled by works including The Distance Between Us, Reyna Grande’s memoir about her experiences as an undocumented child immigrant from Mexico, and America is Not the Heart, Elaine Castillo’s novel about a queer war veteran’s journey from the Philippines to the insular immigrant community in Milpitas. Following building cities, exploding fantasias, and digital dystopias, Freeman then directs readers to the ruptures, the fraying connections to reality that can follow the traumatic loss of a family member, as portrayed in Venita Blackburn’s Dead in Long Beach, California. Moderated by Heyday publisher Steve Wasserman, this panel will explore the featured works individually and as part of the road map to Californian literature that can help us uncover our history, confront pressing issues that face our society, and imagine our shared future.

Industrial and technological developments increasingly threaten Earth’s precious resources, necessitating creative solutions that urgently address the current and potential damage being inflicted on our planet and our communities. Environmental law expert Ann Carlson provides a stirring success story in Smog and Sunshine, an account of the policy fights led by scientists, lawyers, community members, and public officials that transformed Los Angeles from a city known for lead poisoning in the 1980s to one with clean air. In times of unprecedented climate change and skepticism about government and science, examples like these remind us that lasting change is possible when all levels of community work together, and these principles can be applied to broader issues affecting other environmental resources. Award-winning journalist Vince Beiser’s Power Metal details the powerful ways the metals needed to fuel technology and energy are spawning environmental havoc, political upheaval, and rising violence. Around the world, businesses and governments are scrambling in an intensifying competition to find and extract minerals essential for the internet and renewable energy, at enormous cost to people and the planet. Moderated by TBD, this rousing panel raises concern and conversation about how we can minimize damage as we build this disturbing yet potentially promising new world.

There’s nothing like the arts to uncover secrets of the past and kindle buried feelings, as the romantic YA novels of this panel reveal. In Delali Adjoa’s The Free Verse Society, two teens desperate to keep their pasts hidden find fresh starts through their high school poetry club, where the power of the written word tears down the walls they’ve built around their secrets, and their hearts. Taking place at an exclusive writers’ retreat, Love on Paper by Danielle Parker features two ambitious teenage writers from rival families of the publishing world, who must fight through writer’s block, step out of their parents’ shadows, and find the courage to create their own love stories for a chance at publication. For the high school exes in Eva Des Lauriers’ I’m Gonna Get You Back, returning to their small town is their only way for one of them to get into their dream film school and the other to maintain a college scholarship, but any time people return to the mountain, drama follows…especially when an anonymous social media account starts airing everyone’s dirty laundry. Join this tender and heartfelt panel, moderated by Lauren and Tiina of Boutique Book Retreats, to explore the power of love, arts, and second chances in drawing people together.

Secrets fester in isolated communities. Corporations conceal monstrous truths. Grief curdles into vengeance. In this high-stakes thriller panel, Sarah Gailey, Jendia Gammon, Luke Goebel, and Paddy Hirsch explore conspiracy as both engine and mirror, reflecting our deepest anxieties about belonging, power, and truth. In Make Me Better, Gailey crafts an eerily seductive psychological thriller set on a remote island promising healing, transformation, and the end of suffering. As an exclusive festival draws seekers desperate for connection, the novel interrogates cult psychology, toxic self-improvement culture, and the terrifying allure of surrendering autonomy in exchange for belonging. Gammon’s Atacama, longlisted for the British Science Fiction Association Award, blends speculative horror and corporate conspiracy thriller. A researcher investigating a colleague’s suspicious death uncovers shadowy agents and an inhuman threat hiding in plain sight. The novel fuses scientific inquiry with creeping dread, asking what happens when institutions meant to foster knowledge instead weaponize it. Goebel, known for his boundary-pushing fiction and screenwriting, brings a raw, literary intensity to the thriller form in Kill Dick. In this dark and satirical collection of short stories, obsession, violence, and fractured identities blur the line between perpetrator and victim while exposing the stories we tell ourselves to survive complicity and guilt. In PRIMED, Hirsch delivers a transatlantic revenge thriller that begins with a decades-old bombing and a single photograph. As a grieving father hunts the man he believes responsible, the chase stretches from Northern Ireland to Los Angeles, unraveling into espionage, political shadows, and the devastating costs of living for vengeance. Across their work, these authors probe the architecture of conspiracy: closed communities that promise salvation, corporations that distort truth, governments that obscure accountability, and individuals whose private grief fuels public violence. Moderated by podcast host of Twisted Passages and Dark Obsessions author Marie Sutro, join us for a conversation discussing writing paranoia in an era of misinformation, sustaining suspense while deepening character psychology, and why the thriller remains one of the most urgent genres for confronting systems of power, and ourselves.

We’re honored to again present the talented youth of the annual Graton Writing Project, a series of writing workshops designed for middle and high school Native students from Sonoma County, California. The program culminates in a published anthology of their work, highlighting the students’ creativity and unique perspectives. Each year, participants collaborate with writing mentors to craft original pieces centered around a specific theme. Past themes have explored topics such as the environment/climate change, impacts of the coronavirus pandemic, preserving cultural heritage through the stories of Native American ancestors, and more broadly, their hopes for the future. This year, the students’ works will be inspired by exploring how the struggle for social justice within California Indian communities has impacted their respective families – and what responsibilities they have to ensure that any progress made is upheld moving into the future. Greg Sarris (The Forgetters,The Last Human Bear ), Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, will moderate this moving showcase, highlighting the powerful stories from the 2026 cohort. Presented by the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria.

Amidst the oppression and unregulated violence against our communities, we cannot afford to stop fighting, and the authors of this panel provide resources to do so sustainably. In The Medicine of Flow, certified qigong teacher and integrative medicine doctor Cynthia Li draws from modern science alongside time-tested methods for healing to explain embodied flow, an inner state of physiological coherence, harmony, and energy efficiency that activates the body’s peak healing capacity to overcome chronic illness, anxiety, and stress. Yoga educator, author, and practitioner Anjali Rao bridges scholarship, history, and cultural analysis to explore the relationships between caste and gender in yoga. Her book, Yoga as Embodied Resistance, offers radical ways to re-envision a yoga grounded in inquiry, discernment, and collective liberation. As professor Ronald E. Purser details in Mind Space, meditation is another practice that can be radically reimagined by letting go of goal-oriented peace and instead allowing a natural concentration and unfabricated presence to arise in every moment. Moderated by Kei Yamamoto, the Bay Area Political Organizer for the California Working Families Party, this panel will offer strategies for replenishment and remaining grounded during tumultuous times.

Fly off into epic futures where empires tremble, loyalties fracture, and the fate of entire worlds hangs in the balance. In this sweeping space opera panel, Elaine U. Cho, Millie Abecassis, and Tim Melody Pratt explore interstellar adventure not just as spectacle, but as a lens for identity, love, memory, and resistance. In Elaine Cho’s Teo’s Durumi, the cinematic conclusion to a dazzling duology, fugitives and found family collide in a Moon city haunted by history and betrayal. As conspiracies tighten and a solar system teeters on the brink, questions of loyalty, grief, capitalism, and chosen kinship drive this high-octane tale of redemption and sacrifice. Millie Abecassis‘ The Color of Time reimagines myth across planets in a story of escape, transformation, and rebellion. When a princess flees tyranny in a suit fashioned from a legendary serpent’s skin, she finds refuge and revolution in a distant world. Blending political intrigue, queer romance, and cosmic reinvention, the novel asks what it takes to break cycles of power and claim one’s own destiny. In Tim Pratt‘s Starfinder: Era of the Eclipse, galactic mystery unfolds across centuries after a catastrophic event known as the Gap wipes memories from countless minds. As scattered heroes uncover fragments of lost knowledge, rival factions vie to control the truth itself. Adventure, divine secrets, and cosmic conspiracy intertwine in a story that probes memory, history, and who gets to shape the future. Moderated by Julia Vee, whose debut book was a 2023 Golden Poppy Finalist for the Octavia E. Butler award, this conversation journeys beyond starships and interplanetary shootouts to examine the emotional gravity at the heart of the space opera genre. From lunar cities to distant galaxies, these authors remind us that even in the vastness of space, the most powerful forces remain love, loss, and the longing to belong.

From prose to verse to visual art, the powerful narratives of this panel take pride in the intersection of being queer, Latine, and unapologetically proud. Julián Delgado Lopera’s Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You depicts Bogotá’s underground queer scene, where a luminous travesti steps in as a mother figure to a listless widower’s teenage daughter, fearing that his grief and guilt-driven self-destruction may unleash a river of curses on them all. Roque Raquel Salas Rivera turns to epic poetry in Algarabía to describe the journey of Cenex, a trans being who retrospectively narrates his life while navigating the stories told on his behalf, inscribing an origin narrative for trans people in the face of their erasure from both colonial and anti-colonial literary cannons. When Language Broke Open features Afro-Indigenous poet and artist Alan Pelaez Lopez’s collection of poetry, prose, and visual art from forty-five queer and trans Black writers of Latin American descent, centering the multifaceted realities of the LGBTQ community by illustrating Blackness as a geopolitical experience that is always changing. Join us to celebrate our talented queer Latine writers in this transformative panel, moderated by Uruguayan writer, professor, and first openly nonbinary person to receive the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature Caro De Robertis.