Writing & Publishing

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.

In this visionary speculative fiction panel, Charlie Jane Anders, Syr Hayarti Beker, and Annalee Newitz explore the craft and theory of queer worldbuilding imagining futures and fantastical realms where queer characters and communities are not exceptions, but the norm. Across their work, queerness is foundational to how magic systems function, how technology evolves, and how societies are structured. In Lessons in Magic, Charlie Jane Anders continues her tradition of expansive, emotionally rich storytelling, building transformative worlds shaped by fluid identity and chosen connection. In What a Fish Looks Like, Syr Hayarti Beker reimagines fairy tale and climate narrative through mutated, lyrical forms that center queer embodiment and ecological intimacy. In Automatic Noodle, Annalee Newitz envisions near-future solidarity between humans and robots, crafting communities that challenge capitalism while foregrounding queer belonging.

Moderated by Kristina M. Canales, a queer Puerto Rican author and community builder with the LGBTQIA+ Lit Collective, this conversation will dive into craft, theory, and possibility. How do writers construct queer-norm worlds without replicating oppressive structures? What narrative tools allow authors to center fluidity, chosen family, and collective liberation? And how can speculative fiction create blueprints for futures rooted in care, resilience, and radical imagination? Join us for a dynamic discussion about building worlds where queerness shapes the rules of magic, technology, and society itself.

Find out more about our Affinity Lit Collectives

Providing stellar examples of excellence in youth literature, the acclaimed authors of this panel pave the way for Native youth readers to see their own cultures reflected in stories that are written by authors with similar backgrounds. In her picture book I Love Salmon and Lampreys, Brook M. Thompson draws from her experiences growing up in the Yurok and Karuk Tribes to tell an inspiring story about a river, a successful Native-led movement for environmental justice, and the making of a scientist. Ojibwe and Lakota author Byron Graves’ young adult novel Medicine Wheels tells the unforgettable story of a gifted young Ojibwe learning to ride in his father’s footsteps while practicing for a skateboarding championship. Printz Award-winning Legendary Fry Bread Drive-In, edited by Cynthia Leitich-Smith, features the voices of both new and acclaimed Indigenous writers in a collection of interconnected stories about laughter, love, Native pride, and the world’s best frybread. The future of youth literature is brightly paved by the remarkable authors of this panel moderated by TBD, and there is no doubt that they will continue to enhance and expand the worldviews of young readers.

To write an inclusive future, we must publish diverse voices who represent our collective interests and stories. The publishers and imprints represented in this headliner panel will discuss the implications of the current political climate on the future of publishing and put forward creative solutions to the lack of opportunities for publishing underrepresented stories. Tiny Reparations Press, founded by standup comedian, bestselling author, producer, and actress Phoebe Robinson, is a highly curated imprint dedicated to fiction and nonfiction that pushes the conversation forward. HeartDrum, an acclaimed imprint of HarperChildren’s featuring stories that emphasize the present and future of Native peoples and the strength of young Indigenous heroes, will be represented by its author-curator and award-winning writer Cynthia Leitich Smith. Turning the page to publishers, Palestinian American author and book worker Hannah Moushabeck runs Interlink Publishing alongside her family, the only Palestinian-owned independent publishing house in the United States offering global perspectives to readers through works of literature-in-translation, history, activism, politics, art, cultural guides, award-winning cookbooks, and illustrated children’s books. Through publishing talented writers whose works have been overlooked by large-scale publishers, co-founder Kate Gale of Red Hen Press fosters diversity, promotes literacy in local schools, and supports the Greater Los Angeles Area and international communities with arts-based events and literary advocacy. Moderated by acting Co-CEO of the intersectional, feminist press Aunt Lute, María Mínguez Arias, this inspiring panel is a celebration of the innovative and diverse members of the publishing industry dedicated to creatively curating and publishing the voices of our future.

Introductory live music performance by Bushwick Book Club Oakland

In this workshop, we will focus on setting development which plays a crucial role in situating your reader as well as invigorating and enriching your prose. Participants will leave with a better understanding of the setting’s impact on their writing through reading examples, conversation, and generative writing prompts. Exercises and readings will focus on Bay Area locales. This session is designed to help writers of all levels explore how setting can be a powerful element in their storytelling.

In a time when our stories—and our futures—face increasing attempts at erasure, Chismes Con Safos: Speculative Storytelling as Collective Resistance invites participants into a vibrant creative space where community-rooted narratives become tools for liberation. Guided by Rosanna Alvarez—Chicana writer, scholar-artist, and founder of Ocote Libre Press—this workshop blends culturally grounded storytelling practices with speculative worldbuilding.

Participants will explore how personal memory, cultural knowledge, and everyday conversations—our chismes, our cuentos, our testimonios—hold the seeds of radical imagination. Through guided prompts, reflective writing, and gentle community dialogue, attendees will practice transforming lived experience into visionary narratives that challenge authoritarianism and reimagine what justice, belonging, and liberation could look like in the futures we are actively shaping together.

This is the space at this year’s festival for teens looking to write and share and connect with other young poets from throughout the Bay. Come through to this generative poetry writing workshop especially for you. Led by the SPOKES youth advisory board from Youth Speaks, you will be guided through a fun series of writing prompts and activities to help you practice putting pen to page and saying something meaningful about the world around you. Do you want to share your work on stage? All participants at this workshop will get first choice preference to sign up to perform at the Youth Poetry Open Mic happening 1:45pm-3:45pm Sunday, May 31st at the Downtown Berkeley BART Plaza Stage. All experience levels are welcome! Just bring your favorite writing utensils and we’ve got the rest. This workshop is only open to teens age 13-19 years old.

If you are a new writer looking for tips on how to live a writer’s life in service to your community, this is the panel for you. Join three working poets and organizers doing exciting things in the fields of music, publishing, activism, arts education, and beyond for a discussion on ways new authors can apply their craft in impactful ways once they’ve chosen the writer’s life. Walk away inspired and with a clearer sense of direction as authors Giovanna Lomanto (Game Over Books), Aleah Bradshaw (aka Nyfe of musical duo “Closegood,” Youth Speaks), and Daniel Summerhill (Divine, Divine, Divine and Mausoleum of Flowers) share advice from each of their unique paths through the literary world beginning as alums of youth and college writing programs. This panel discussion is open to all, especially alums of the Bay’s rich tapestry of youth literary arts organizations and emerging artists looking for advice on what’s next.

Maker, Mentor, Muse is an online teaching platform founded in 2022 by Dawn Angelicca Barcelona, Mary Volmer, and Maw Shein Win. Hailing from three distinct backgrounds, generations, and spiritual traditions we believe community is essential to building a satisfying and sustainable literary life and that true success requires balancing all three artistic roles: maker, mentor, muse. In this free one-hour workshop, we offer guided writing experiments for poetry and prose that invites participants to explore how their sacred traditions, rituals, and belief systems inform and inspire their writing processes. Join us! Maker, Mentor, Muse

Overview

How do we write futures that don’t yet exist? How do we map territories we’re still dreaming and discovering?

In this hands-on, generative workshop, participants will create new work across three experimental approaches—speculative memoir, multilingual poetry, and hybrid forms. Designed as a space for exploration rather than mastery, the workshop invites writers to take creative risks, work across boundaries, and imagine new literary possibilities together.

Through guided exercises and creative constraints, writers will produce fresh pieces that break conventional forms and chart unknown terrain. Led by three writers whose practices are rooted in experimentation, collaboration, and cross-disciplinary thinking, the session offers prompts, models, and frameworks for writing into the unknown.

Opening Conversation (20 minutes)

A brief panel discussion exploring how experimentation in form, language, and genre can open pathways to futures that traditional narratives cannot reach. Faculty will share generative techniques from their own work before participants choose a breakout workshop.

Three Breakout Mini-Workshops (40 minutes each)

1. Speculative Memoir: Writing Your Alternative Futures
   Led by Aimee Phan
   Participants will write new memoir pieces that blend memory with speculation—generating parallel narratives, alternative outcomes, or projected futures from lived experience. Through prompts that ask “what if?” alongside “what happened?”, writers will explore how speculation can deepen truth rather than abandon it. Leave with a draft that reimagines a pivotal moment from your life through multiple possible timelines.
2. Tongues of the Future: Multilingual & Diasporic Poetry
   Led by Zeina Hashem Beck
   Writers will create poems that incorporate multiple languages, experiment with code-switching, or use linguistic hybridity as a generative constraint. Drawing on models from contemporary translingual poets and adapted traditional forms, participants will write pieces that reflect how we actually speak, think, and imagine across cultures. Generate new work that envisions futures where such mixing is not marginal but central.
3. Hybrid Forms for a Digital Age
   Led by Eric Olson
   Participants will produce experimental pieces using constraints, collage, and unconventional structures that respond to our fragmented, multimedia contemporary moment. Through timed writing exercises and formal experiments influenced by visual art and digital culture, writers will generate work that resists traditional narrative expectations and invents new shapes for new realities.

What You’ll Take Away

All participants will leave with new drafts, fresh techniques, and concrete generative methods to continue experimenting in their own practice. This session is especially well-suited for writers drawn to risk-taking, cross-genre work, and expansive notions of voice, form, and belonging.