Queer Voices

In Future Myths: Blood and Chosen Kin three poets explore the shifting terrain of kinship: the families we inherit, the ones we lose, and the ones we build along the way. If blood once defined belonging, these writers ask what else might hold us together as we imagine the futures still forming.

Pretti Vanghni writes with a mythic sensibility, weaving ancestry, cultural memory, and spiritual imagination into poems that feel both ancient and newly born. Achy Obejas brings her luminous clarity to the intertwined questions of exile, language, and queer belonging, reminding us that chosen kinship has long been a survival practice. Ally Ang’s work moves through intimacy and rupture, tracing how care and solidarity can grow in the spaces where traditional structures fall away.

Together, these poets reimagine kinship as something living and unfinished. Blood may tell one story. Chosen family tells another, one written in acts of care, resistance, and possibility.

In Conjuring & Conjugating: Siguanabas in Future Tense, four community-engaged writers of the Central American Diaspora discuss Indigenous mythologies as vessels for embodiment and transformation. Navigating legacies of violence, they reclaim the right to name themselves—writing into futures beyond the erasure of the colonial gaze.

Taking the figure of La Siguanaba as both provocation and portal, these poets ask what happens when we listen again. What wisdom was hidden inside the warnings? What truths were transformed into myth—and what futures might emerge when those truths are spoken aloud once more?

Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta explores identity, lineage, and resistance through a poetics attentive to the long reach of colonial histories, MK Chavez’s writes at the crossroads of myth, ecology, and diaspora, exploring how ancestral figures continue to haunt and guide the present, and Neida Chavez Solórzano writes with luminous attention to migration, history, and the enduring presence of land and spirit. Leticia Hernandez Linares brings a community-rooted voice to questions of memory, storytelling, and cultural survival and will share work and lead this panel that explores the myth not as relic, but as a tense we are still learning to speak. To conjure is to call something back into the world. To conjugate is to shift its time.

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.

Some futures arrive already mapped. Others must be spoken into being.

In The Future Is Unsettled: Decolonial Poetics, poets bring language that questions the stories we’ve been told about land, power, and belonging. Their work moves through memory, migration, and resistance, pushing against inherited narratives and opening space for other ways of seeing.

Dena Rod emcees, bringing their fierce poetic voice and deep commitment to community-centered art to the stage, setting the tone for a reading where the poems refuse easy answers and lean into the unsettled work of imagining otherwise.

Danielle P. Williams writes with lyrical clarity about land, memory, and the histories still shaping the present. Osmani Ochoa’s work moves through diaspora and identity, revealing how language carries both rupture and resilience. Logan Phillips faces his past in a hybrid memoir that transcends genre and creates a roadmap for others to follow. Jason Bayani brings urgency and vulnerability to the page, confronting migration, masculinity, and the restless search for belonging.

These poets remind us that the future isn’t a finished story. It’s something we’re still writing, line by line.

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. 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.

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 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 their 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.

As both a means of empowerment and a magnet for policing, Black dance music has transformed not only Oakland’s nightlife, but also its streets, parks, and neighborhoods. From the mobilization of funk music and boogaloo dance during Black Power to the policing of the Hyphy movement in the 2000s, Black dance music is not merely a soundtrack to or record of urban resistance, argues geographer, DJ, and housing justice advocate Alex Werth in On Loop: Black Sonic Politics in Oakland. Rather, its very sound waves have animated looping clashes over development, dispossession, and Black freedom. Through studies of downtown nightclubs, Lake Merritt, and the Eastmont Mall—geographies rarely considered, yet critical to Oakland’s culture and politics—Werth reveals how the liberatory sonic politics of funk, hip-hop, and hyphy rap have been met with a repetitive “war on nuisance.” Joining him is Yakpasua Zazaboi, filmmaker, who is featured in the book .The Oaklandside’s arts and community reporter Azucena Rasilla will moderate this discussion about studies of the geographies that are rarely considered, yet critical to Oakland’s culture and politics, and how struggles over Black sound have shaped Oakland’s culture, politics, and geography.