Nonfiction

When trauma and unpredictable life changes demand difficult sacrifices, the inspiring authors and characters of this panel choose to take any risk necessary to preserve the tenderness and creativity of humanity, and the humanities. Inspired by journalists Christiane Amanpour and Sylvia Poggioli, Midnight, at the War is Devi Laskar’s novel about a foreign correspondent who leaves New York for the war-torn Middle East after learning she is pregnant, an assignment that forces her to grapple with the physical and emotional tolls of her pregnant body and a turbulent region. A renowned dancer faces a career-ending neurologic disorder and a strained marriage in The Edge of Yesterday by Rita Woods, and she is offered an escape from the sorrow of her “real life” when she stumbles through a vortex that transports her from 2025 back into 1925 Detroit, where she meets a handsome, charming doctor. In her book Sacrament, Susan Straight highlights the quiet heroism and extraordinary bravery of a group of ICU nurses living in a makeshift RV camp close to the hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic, facing personal and professional challenges as they care for strangers. When big changes blow up our lives, it takes courage to create from the empty space left behind, and life coach Naomi Vladeck’s Braving Creativity provides women with creative tools needed to flourish in work and in life, inspiring creatives to ignite their courage to face the unknown path ahead. Moderated by Seema Vennam, this inspiring panel uplifts women’s stories about using change as a catalyst for taking the necessary risks to be their creative and human selves.

What kinds of futures unfurl when we stop acquiescing to what we’ve inherited and start building spaces with intention? In this forward-looking conversation, Shizue Seigel (Courting A Man Who Doesn’t Talk; Uncommon Ground: BIPOC Journeys to Creative Activism), Kimi Sugioka (Wile & Wing), Kelechi Ubozoh (We’ve Been Too Patient), and Andre Le Monte Wilson (Hauntings) gather to talk about how writers and artists of color are imagining and making creative spaces that feel livable and can grow with us.

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.

Blurring the lines between journalism and memoir, the indigenous writers of this panel look outward at the people, cultures, and history around them to form a personal understanding of what it means to be a world citizen today. Terria Smith, who longed for adventure growing up on the Torres Martinez Reservation in Southern California, observed that travel is deeply rooted in Native traditions of reciprocity, risk-taking, bridging, and holding differences, but there remains a lack of Indigenous voices in the travel writing space. Her memoir, I Love You So Many, recounts Smith’s stories from her ancestral homelands to Cuba, Iceland, and Guyana with humor and exuberance, an irresistible tribute to getting out and living a life in full. For journalist and Oscar-nominated filmmaker Julian Brave Noisecat, correcting the erasure, invisibility, and misconceptions surrounding the First Peoples of this land compelled him to travel across the continent. Translated from “tscwinúcw-k,” a traditional Secwépemc morning greeting, We Survived the Night paints a portrait of contemporary Indigenous life by blending history, memoir, and reportage in the style of a “Coyote Story,” a legend about the trickster who was revered for his wit and mocked for his tendency to self-destruct. Traverse the roads connecting past, present, and future with the authors of this dazzling panel, moderated by queer Indigenous artist, poet, and curator Viola LeBeau.

As women’s rights are increasingly violated in the US, the historical narratives and personal accounts of this crucial panel discussion will remind us of the work we’ve already done and inspire us to continue pursuing a world where women are truly free. Just Pills: The Extraordinary Story of A Revolution in Abortion Care documents journalist Rebecca Kelliher’s research into the little-known history of mifepristone and misoprostol, better known as the abortion pills, which are safe, cheap, and clinic-less means of ending a pregnancy that are already changing the fight for abortion access as we understand it. Prior to the approval of abortion pills in the 1990s and 2000s, however, women’s options were severely limited. In her historical novel Where the Girls Were,Kate Schatz writes about a pregnant teenager’s struggle with agency after being sent to a home for unwed mothers in 1960s San Francisco. Shame, faith, and morality all shape a woman’s choice to abort or carry to term, and Judy Juanita reflects on self-induced abortion and California’s Therapeutic Abortion Act of 1967 through the poetry, fiction, essays, and creative nonfiction in Abortion (or Woman As Threefold Murderess) which reveal that choosing to abort is not simply a political or moral issue of right and wrong, but one tied to safety, survival, and the meaning of life itself. Moreover, abortion care is ethical care, grounded in competence, compassion, sensitivity, as exemplified by Shelley Sella, a board-certified OB-GYN and the first woman to openly practice third-trimester abortion care in the US. In her book Beyond Limits: Stories of Third Trimester Abortion Care, Dr. Sella challenges preconceived notions of who gets abortions and why, inviting readers into a typical week at her clinic to demystify third-trimester abortion, which is still often stigmatized and misunderstood within both the anti-abortion and pro-choice movements. Carole Joffe, professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive sciences and author of After Dobbs: How the Supreme Court Ended Roe But Not Abortion, will moderate this panel honoring the women affected by abortion and pregnancy, the hard-working individuals who have kept abortion afloat in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s destruction, and the continued help urgently needed if we want to sustain our right to abortion care.

In 2018, only 12% of San Francisco’s street names, statues, parks, and public art honored women, but not because they didn’t exist. How many notable women who deserve public recognition have been written out of the history of our region? Drawn from award-winning journalist Rae Alexandra’s KQED Arts & Culture series “Rebel Girls From Bay Area History,” Unsung Heroines: 35 Women Who Changed the Bay Area is a collection of 35 short profiles honoring the contributions of a diverse group of women from San Francisco, the East Bay, and the greater Bay Area, from the very first years of the founding of San Francisco to the present day. Together, their stories constitute a new telling of the history of Northern California from the vantage point of women who made a difference. Joining Alexandra to discuss the process of uncovering and writing about these stories is the visionary Jewelle Gomez, activist and author of the double Lambda Award-winning novel, The Gilda Stories. She has served on literature panels for the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, and the California Arts Council, and is currently Playwright in Residence at New Conservatory Theatre Center. This triumphant conversation will permanently alter readers’ perspective with the realization of just how many untold stories have been lost to time, encouraging them to scan their own environment for traces of women whose stories deserve to be recovered and told. Moderated by author of Where the Girls Were and Rad American Women A-Z Kate Schatz this panel will be, as Gomez declares, “a real celebration of these daring human rights activists who cross boundaries of time, ethnicity, and class and invite us all to join in.”

When Antoni Gaudí, son of a Catalan blacksmith, was first starting out, many people called his unusual ideas eccentric or even crazy. But his inventive, daring, and flamboyant style eventually made him a world-famous architect! Today, Barcelona shines with Gaudí’s colorful mosaics, playful flowing forms, and imaginative facades. Listen to this inspiring biography at Susan B. Katz’s read-aloud of Gaudí: Architect of Imagination!

Eighty years of lessons from the Black freedom struggle, labor movements, and internationalism illuminate the path forward in our fight for democracy and never-ending commitment to building a better world. In a multi-generational conversation, legendary Civil Rights organizer Walter Riley andcommunity organizer, musician, and journalist Jesse Strauss will offer insights from their book, Civil Rights and Structural Attacks, drawing parallels between past movements and present injustices. Raised among the entrails of chattel slavery in Durham, North Carolina, Riley brings decades of movement experience from mobilizations against Jim Crow apartheid laws, to student and labor organizing with early Black Panther formations, to organizing against South Africa’s apartheid system as a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer. His more recent work involves supporting infrastructure for Haitian movement-building and confronting police violence in Oakland. Strauss is the co-creator of the first-ever daily abolitionist radio show Law & Disorder andan anti-imperialist and abolitionist cultural worker who was raised in Oakland and Berkeley (unceded Ohlone/Chochenyo land). He was also a producer for Al Jazeera during the so-called “Arab Spring” and “Occupy” movements, and together with Riley, they will reflect on the importance of political action as the primary venue for learning and reflection in this insightful and vital conversation moderated by writer, director, and musician Boots Riley.

This powerful session celebrates two of Berkeley’s own creators sharing powerful stories through art and writing. Deeply poignant and relevant, A Time to Hide is Marion Seidemann Fredman and her family’s courageous story of surviving the Holocaust told through personal testimony, historical photographs, and evocative illustrations including those by Bay Area author and illustrator Elisa Kleven. Together, they will converse about Marion’s experiences as a child born to parents forced into hiding in a Dutch attic, and who is now sharing her family’s story with young readers. Moderated by author and activist Rachel Sarah, this illuminating read-aloud and discussion will honor memory, teach history, and help ensure the next generation understands and remembers this powerful legacy of survival.