Reckoning: Falling, Femicide, and Dreaming the New World: A Conversation with Award-Winning Playwright and Activist V (formerly Eve Ensler)
Perhaps you're most familiar with V as the Tony Award-winning playwright (often under her former name Eve Ensler) of groundbreaking works such as The Vagina Monologues. Or maybe you've been inspired by V's global activist movement, launched…
Fiction: Mothers & Daughters
Relationships between mothers and daughters can be fraught or fruitful—especially for fiction writers. In Margaret Wilkerson Sexton's gloriously evocative On the Rooftop, set in 1953 amid the jazz and R&B clubs in San Francisco's Fillmore…
Poetry and Fiction: The Artist’s Influence
The first time most American readers heard Selby Schwartz's name was when her debut novel After Sappho was nominated for the 2022 Booker Prize. How lucky are we to have her living right here in California? Schwartz's paean to early twentieth-century…
Cinnamongirl: Write Your Story
Now in its third year, Write Your Story is an exciting year-long program that brings creative writing masterclasses and artistic mentorship to young women of color, ages 12 to 18, through the organization Cinnamongirl, Inc. Once again this year,…
Mother, Daughter, Collaborators (Plus the Book That Changed the World of Food): The Lappés
Extraordinary mothers, extraordinary daughters: together, they can change the world. Frances and Anna Lappé prove that, when it comes to visionary thought and action, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Frances “changed how we eat”…
“We Read in Order to Come to Life”: Grief, Joy, and the Magic of Literary Form
How do writers assemble words in a way that lifts them beyond their literal meaning to speak what can’t really be said? These three writers are masters. In her novel Checkout 19, Claire-Louise Bennett (whose words are quoted in this program’s…
The Secrets of Being an Extraordinary Woman: Three Authors on Ambition, Adventure, and Equality
Who says women can’t have it all? Get inspired by a powerful trio from Finland, Iceland, and the United States whose new books radically redefine pathways to happiness and a better society. In her research-based book, Lara Bazelon liberates…
Let Her Tell It: Black Women Writing on the Body and Mind
Many Black women have a complex relationship with their bodies. Historically their bodies have been racialized, hypersexualized, exoticized, abused, exploited for labor and othered. Stressors in their lives affects physical and mental health.…
Picturing a Life: Graphic Memoirs
Blockbuster works like Fun Home, Maus, and Persepolis have made it clear that graphic memoirs are a game-changer in the world of literature. What makes this literary genre–-blending the disciplines of cinema, writing, and visual art—so gripping?…
Talking Single Motherhood, Community, and Black Girl Magic with Novelist Jayne Allen
Single mothers: they’ve been stigmatized, sidelined, and called superheroes and saints—sometimes in the same breath. Novelist Jayne Allen, with Black Girls Must be Magic, gives us a portrait of single motherhood by choice that upends all…