Inside Ideas

The sonic experts of this panel will pull back the curtains for listeners wondering what it takes to create an audiobook. Ray Archie, Founder of Notes to the Soul and Chief Audio Connoisseur of Brooklyn Sound Lab, has an extensive career in audio storytelling through audiobook narration, theatrical sound design, and musical innovation. Also with a background in music is Abigail Reno, an actor, audiobook narrator, and voiceover artist with roots in opera, choral conducting, and theater. She has recorded titles for Penguin Random House, Hachette, Macmillan, Disney, Spotify, and many more. Jen Aldrich will offer insights from all parts of the production process as a freelance audiobook narrator, proofer, and prepper who is credited on over 150 titles in solo, dual, duet, and multicast audiobooks. Join us in this discussion, moderated by award-winning narrator Ann Richardson, to shine a spotlight on the backstage processes that help infuse stories with life and lyricism.

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.

The funny and heartfelt stories of this panel honor the chosen family who show up at the most unexpected, but perhaps most necessary, moments in our lives. Woodworking by Emily St. James follows a trans high school teacher from a small town in South Dakota who befriends the only other trans woman she knows: her seventeen-year-old student, the high school’s resident political dissident and Only Trans Girl. As their unlikely friendship evolves, it comes under the scrutiny of their community, and both women are forced to confront what happens if they choose to hide their true selves. Renee Swindle’s Francine’s Spectacular Crash and Burn features another unexpected encounter between a young executive assistant and aspiring photographer, whose life is upended after the sudden death of her agoraphobic mother, and the ten-year-old who keeps showing up at her doorstep after she rescues him from a group of bullies. Meeting the boy’s foster mother, who turns out to be her fiery high school crush, leads Francine to make a consecutive string of bad choices, and she is left wondering how to become the kind of person her young friend can depend on. The tumultuous journeys of self-discovery in this humorous yet moving panel, moderated by award-winning Sri Lankan American writer and educator Nayomi Munaweera, portray the power of chance, intergenerational queer friendships, and found family.

The heroines of this thrilling romantasy panel risk it all for freedom, never expecting to find romance along the way. On the high seas of Cassandra James’ Capitana, Ximena Reale offers to rescue the empire’s captured queen from a notorious pirate in exchange for a coveted spot on the Cazadores, seafaring hunters who track down pirates. With only one cloak available, she must compete with Dante, an infuriating yet handsome classmate with mysterious motives, on this dangerous quest. Bita Behzadi’s Letters from the Last Apothecary features Josephine Pinova’s fortuitous job offer from a magic apothecary and her anonymous letter exchange with a sensitive scholar as they study together for a graduate magic program. Unbeknownst to either of them, the fellow scholar just happens to be the shop’s prickly apothecarist, whom Josie must work together with to save the beloved shop against a tide of anti-magic sentiment amidst the city’s industrialization. In Angela Montoya’s Carnival Fantástico, a spectacle of magic and mischief, fortune-teller Esmeralda aims for the lead role in the Big Top Show to win freedom from her former employer, the commander of the King’s army. She makes a deal with Ignacio, the handsome boy who once broke her heart and has resurfaced at this fortuitous moment: she’ll help him expose his father’s corruption if he helps her secure the main act. Lore of the Wilds by Analeigh Sbrana features a desperate deal between a human woman and a ruthless Fae lord who trapped her village in a forested prison. Although no Fae can enter the cursed doors of an enchanted library, a human might be able to, so she navigates the hostile world outside with the help of two Fae males in an attempt to find magic of her own. Strike a deal and try your hand at this riveting panel, moderated by Danielle DeVeaux, host of the Dark Romance Book Club and Romantasy Book Club at Books Inc. San Leandro!

In this epic dark fantasy panel, three rising stars of the genre: Andrea Stewart, Madeleine Nakamura, and Evan Leikam plunge readers into worlds where power corrupts, gods wage war, and survival demands impossible choices. From grimdark assassins to divine battlefields to queer magic under siege, these stories ask: what does it cost to defy a king, or a god? Moderated by Flight of the Fallen fantasy author Hana Lee, the conversation will explore morally complex heroes, ruthless magic, and the shadowed spaces where crowns are claimed and shattered. In Anji Kills a King, Evan Leikam delivers a brutal, high-velocity debut in which a servant assassinates a king and becomes the target of legendary, magic-wielding mercenaries. As the hunt intensifies, alliances shift and a kingdom’s future hangs in the balance. Angel Eye by Madeleine Nakamura returns to a world of inquisitors, forbidden magic, and psychological peril. A string of murders ignites suspicion and witch hunts, forcing a traumatized scholar of magic to confront both external threats and his own unraveling mind. In The War Beyond, bestselling author Andrea Stewart escalates a divine conflict as sisters stand on opposing sides of a war between gods. Faith, loyalty, and destiny collide in a sweeping tale of rebellion and sacrifice.

From exam rooms to operating theaters to medical schools, racism is not an aberration in American healthcare, it is embedded in its foundations. In this urgent and illuminating panel, physician-activist Dr. Vanessa Grubbs, Public Law Professor at UC Berkeley School of Law Dr. Khiara M. Bridges, and award-winning investigative journalist and professor Nicole Carr confront the structures that continue to endanger Black lives. In Negligent by Design, Dr. Grubbs argues that anti-Blackness in medicine is not accidental but systemic, woven into diagnostic tools, training, and institutional culture. She challenges healthcare professionals to move beyond symbolic gestures and commit to structural change. In Expecting Inequity, Bridges exposes the persistence of racism in maternal healthcare, revealing that even affluent Black women face disproportionate risk in pregnancy and childbirth. Drawing on in-depth research, Bridges shows how class privilege cannot shield patients from racialized neglect. In The Price of Exclusion, Carr uncovers the hidden history of Black medical pioneers and the deliberate policies that excluded them from power. Through investigative reporting and personal history, she traces how that legacy fuels today’s health disparities. Together, these authors explore how medical racism is reproduced across generations and what it will take to dismantle it. Join us for a powerful conversation moderated by University of San Francisco sociologist and bioethics scholar Dr. Jennifer James, author of the much cited, “Reproductive Justice and Abolition: Important Lessons Black Feminists Have Been Teaching Us for Years”. This discussion calls for more than awareness, it demands transformation, centering accountability, justice, professional responsibility, and the urgent work of building a healthcare system that truly values every life.

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.

From sequoias to salt lakes, deserts to deep connections, the natural world serves as inspiration for the writers of this panel, who place nature’s breathtaking landscapes not as a backdrop to, but at the center of their stories. In his 2025 Banff Mountain Book Competition Finalist graphic memoir, Eventually a Sequoia: Stories of Art, Adventure & the Wisdom of Giants, Jeremy Collins documents the people living in the endangered corners of the world whose small seeds produce enormous results. Switching the lens to the American West, flash-fiction master Grant Faulkner’s Something Out There in the Distance features edge-of-the-world images by punk photographer Gail Butensky alongside stories about two lovers taking a reckless, searching road trip in the achingly familiar desert landscape. Hidden in remote desert valleys are the uncanny, shimmering ecosystems of salt lakes, whose rapid decline is a harbinger of rising sea levels, life-threatening dust storms, and environmental collapse. Caroline Tracey parallels this environmental journey to her personal story of finding queer love and building a home amidst ecological crises in her book Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History, which blends travel writing, memoir, and reportage in an inspiring call to fight for all that is fragile in our lives. Moderated by Rue Mapp, Founder and CEO of Outdoor Afro, the nation’s foremost non-profit organization inspiring Black leadership and connections in nature, this panel will provide a glimpse into the wondrous and nurturing beauty of our natural world worth protecting.