At 62, debut novelist Alka Joshi shattered literary glass ceilings with The Henna Artist, the “eloquent and moving” (Publishers Weekly) story of a 17-year-old girl who, after fleeing a dark past, finds herself a highly coveted henna artist (and secret confessor) to the wealthy upper-caste women of 1950s Jaipur.  A New York Times bestseller and instant book-club favorite, this tale lifts the veil on a rarefied, fascinating world, fraught with more intrigue and whisper campaigns than the court of Versailles, with a heroine whose shrewdness and vulnerability are poignantly relatable.  Said actress and bibliophile Reese Witherspoon, who chose it for her book club, The Henna Artist “captivated me from the first chapter to the final page.”

Women Lit is presenting this exciting first-time novelist and her hypnotic debut with the Sausalito Woman’s Club and Sausalito Books by the Bay for an exclusive, members-only opportunity. If you’re not yet a Women Lit member, sign up below and don’t miss your chance to ask Joshi about crafting a remarkable world, the surprise of taking the book world by storm with her first novel, and making compulsively readable literary magic.

Event Details

Each ticket includes private access to the event recording for 10 days following the live event. All copies will be shipped by Sausalito Books by the Bay starting April 6. Signed bookplate copies are limited and we can only accept book orders that ship within the United States.

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It’s never too soon to be a boss. Come listen in while Quinn Boyd-Roberts,14, aspiring entrepreneur and avid reader, picks the brains of Simone Bridges, 15, and Adelle Pritchard, 17, two young dream-weavers who are taking charge and killing it in the business world. This trio of magnates-in-the-making will be joined by Brian Weisfeld, author of The Startup Squad (a middle-grade series hailed as “The Baby-sitters Club for the next generation”) and founder of the organization of the same name that empowers young girls to follow their passions and reach their potential through entrepreneurship.

From a difficult upbringing in the Bronx and Nigeria to Top Chef stardom and a place on Food & Wine’s “best new chef” list, Kwame Onwuachi’s muse and first love has always been food. His memoir Notes From a Young Black Chef takes us through the rollercoaster journey that led him to presiding over a raved-about menu, at Washington DC’s Kith and Kin, that “honors my ancestors,” and to running a high-end kitchen that prioritizes diversity in its staff. With his acclaimed book now adapted for young-adult readers, Kwame’s joining two young foodies, Cinnamongirl’s Chariot Waddell, 15, and Jolie Wilson, 15, in the kitchen to share challenges, victories, and, of course, a cooking tip or two.

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Wattpad Books turns the digital stories its community loves into published books. The result? Stories you can’t find anywhere else, by young writers from all over the world. Come listen to these two magnificent young authors as they tell the stories of their lives, their writing, and how their dreams came true through Wattpad and a mountain of talent. Daven McQueen won the Watty Award for Science Fiction and is the author of The Invincible Summer of Juniper Jones. Mexican-born Shay Bravo, who won the 2019 Watty Awards, is the author of Historically Inaccurate. Together the authors garnered more than a million reads on Wattpad. Daven and Shay will be in conversation with Mariah McCoy, one of the dynamic young writers of Write Your Story, the Fest’s immersive creative writing and mentorship program for girls of color in partnership with Cinnamongirl, Inc.

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Hip-Hop, one of America’s most influential and constantly evolving musical genres, is about so much more than infectious beats, and you’re about to get schooled by the experts! Cinnamongirl Madison Harvey, 15, leads this electrifying conversation with Jeff Chang, whose award-winning hip-hop history, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, has just been adapted for young adult readers; and Dave ‘Davey D’ Cook, syndicated radio personality and hip-hop journalism pioneer. Learn about the fascinating roots and exciting future of the hip-hop generation…it’ll move your feet and your heart.

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In a heartstopping scene from Orville Schell’s My Old Home, trained musician Li Tongshu sits at his piano, eyes closed, playing “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” as Red Guards storm his home. They’re there to arrest him as a bourgeois traitor, but what they don’t know is that the legacy of Li’s music, and the loyalty of his young son, Little Li, is not easily snuffed out.  A journalist and renowned expert on China, Schell has penned his first novel, drawing not only on his deep knowledge of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution but on his conviction that art and love can outlive brutality.

Joining him is MacArthur “genius” and award-winning writer Yiyun Li, who came of age during the bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown, emigrated to the U.S. at 23 as a young scientist, and eventually took the literary world by storm with her fiction, memoir and essays. Li regularly turned to reading Tolstoy for solace during tough times in her own life, so in the early days of the pandemic she collaborated with A Public Space—the literary magazine, publisher, and academy—to lead a free virtual book club where thousands of people, isolated under shelter-in-place, read War and Peace together over three months. The project, which garnered worldwide attention, now has been made into a book, Tolstoy Together, a guided experience for past and new readers.

This “Writer to Writer” conversation—moderated by award-winning journalist, historian, and author Adam Hochschild, a lifelong friend of Orville’s and a Russian-speaking Tolstoy fan—will explore how art truly can light a lamp in the dark.

When Trevor Noah of The Daily Show asked Charles Yu why he wrote his National Book Award-winning novel, the devastating “parable for outcasts” (Kirkus) Interior Chinatown, in the form of a screenplay, Yu deadpanned, “I work in Hollywood, so I already had the software.” A veteran of several TV series (including HBO’S Westworld), Yu honed his hilarious, convention-defying masterwork with an insider’s insight and an outlier’s genius. Yu found an oasis in the writer’s room of fellow novelist Jim Gavin’s (Middle Men) AMC cult-favorite series Lodge 49, an underdog’s hymn that channels Thomas Pynchon, counts Patton Oswalt and Tom Hanks as diehard fans, and “makes as good an argument for the existence of a kind of shabby everyday magic as you’ll find anywhere” (NPR).

Belly up to the bar and raise a drink with these two friends and fellow-travelers as they toast to creating worlds for page and screen, making the ordinary extraordinary, and finding strength—and hilarity—in difference and struggle.

More than 150 years ago, long before intimations of a warming planet had begun, Ralph Waldo Emerson made a prescient statement: “The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.” While some of us might not consider our current culture to be terribly civilized, one thing is clear: we’ve been propelling our own species, along with millions of other life forms, toward extinction as a result of human-generated climate change.

To probe our own “end times,” we’ve brought together two highly respected journalists who also happen to be speculative fiction writers. Annalee Newitz is an award-winning novelist (The Future of Another Timeline) and a science, technology and culture writer whose fascinating new book, Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age, explores the rise and fall of four urban-centered civilizations, from medieval Angkor in Cambodia to the indigenous metropolis Cahokia in present-day Missouri.

Fast forward from ancient times to 2018, when the New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to journalist Nathaniel Rich’s chronicle of the world’s failures to listen to scientists who began seriously sounding the alarm about climate change in 1979. That article became the book Losing Earth, which Rich has now followed up with the deeply reported, riveting Second Nature: Scenes from a World Remade. Where do we go from here? Scientists are no longer asking how we can return to the world we’ve lost—we’ve irrevocably changed every inch of our planet—but what we can create in its place in order to survive. Their answers rival the wildest science fiction.

Albert Camus (The Plague) wrote, “the purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” Moderated by Bonnie Tsui, author of Why We Swim, this conversation with two leading writers will give you a blast from the (long lost) past along with a staggering vision of the future.

Douglas Stuart enraptured readers worldwide in 2020 when his heart-stopping debut novel, Shuggie Bain, took the world’s top literary award, the Booker Prize. While Stuart may have seemed like an overnight success, Shuggie Bain was a labor of love that drew from his own history of childhood poverty, hardship, and devotion to a mother whose addiction struggles were intensified by a broken system. This tender and wrenching story has been compared to Angela’s Ashes in its emotional power and mesmerizing writing style. Shuggie Bain may have been translated into over 20 languages, but it’s the author’s own Glasgowian dialect—immediate, accessible, hypnotic—that’ll take up residence in your mind forever.

Stuart is interviewed by Casey Gerald, who gained fame with a viral TED talk, “The Gospel of Doubt.” Like Stuart, Gerald grew up queer, shaped by poverty and parental addiction. He’s another “success story,” having made his way through Yale and Harvard Business School, but his memoir There Will Be No Miracles Here, praised by Marlon James as “the most urgently political, most deeply personal, and most engagingly spiritual statement of our time,” refuses to reduce his story to an “American dream” parable. This conversation between two rare souls will question myths, mine deep emotional territory, and examine how we break old cycles while still honoring where we came from.

Forget the new normal. What we need right now is literature that turns the whole concept of “normal” on its head, building worlds that put the status quo in the rearview mirror. Fantasy and sci-fi, once relegated to “niche” status in the book world, have become leading and widely-read literary genres that meet the historic moment we’re in, centering diversity and disrupting complacency in ways no other form can do. If you haven’t read much in this genre, there’s never been a better time to discover it.

At the helm of this brave new era is novelist and Marvel Comics scribe Nnedi Okorafor, whose groundbreaking Africanfuturism—including her latest novel, Remote Control—demands big-screen renderings (fittingly, two of her books are currently being adapted as series by HBO and Hulu). Nebula Award winner Jeff VanderMeer (Hummingbird Salamander), author of the bestselling Southern Reach trilogy that was adapted into the film Annihilation, also is no stranger to meeting (and even anticipating) the moment: Esquire called him “the prophet of climate fiction.” In this “Writer to Writer” conversation, you’ll meet two literary pioneers we need now: subversive, audaciously imaginative, and unafraid to steer us into uncharted territory.

All kids and teens should be able to see themselves in the pages of the books they love. And who better to help than your friendly neighborhood librarian? In a conversation that couldn’t be more timely and important, Bay Area librarian Joanne Marple interviews two exciting voices on the vanguard of this topic: Ellen Oh, CEO of the grassroots nonprofit We Need Diverse Books, and Kelly Starling Lyons, member of The Brown Bookshelf, an organization championing Black-authored books for young readers, on how to dismantle barriers in children’s and young adult literature and embrace the tools to diversify our bookshelves.

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Summer 2020 marked the start of Write Your Story, an exciting year-long collaboration with Cinnamongirl, Inc, that brought creative-writing workshops and artistic mentorship to young women of color, ages 12 to 18. Our amazing inaugural cohort of girls spent the year honing their voices and their visions, with encouragement and instruction from a wonderful faculty of women authors of color, and now they’re ready to present their original work in a published anthology and reading at the Bay Area Book Festival. Celebrate these new rising literary stars and one of their instructors, award-winning YA author Misa Sugiura, as they share stories, insights, and nuggets of inspiration.

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The iconic Lawrence Ferlinghetti, revered poet and co-founder of San Francisco’s City Lights Books, famously claimed, “Printer’s ink is the greater explosive.” Ferlinghetti died at age 101 just a couple of months ago, but his spirit lives on in poets such as the literary revolutionaries featured in our Saturday night headliner event. The power of words to spark change and detonate oppression has never been more needed than it is today.

Pulitzer winner and former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith and literary critic and author John Freeman invited some of America’s most socially engaged and beloved writers to pen letters, essays, poems, lamentations, and exhortations in response to our tumultuous time in history. There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love is an “eloquent and urgent” (Kirkus) distillation of what we’re living through as a country, a transcription “from the inner chambers of the heart” (Literary Hub). The writers express grief, seek hope, and demand total transformation of society after this plague year when so many people literally have struggled to breathe, whether from a policeman’s knee on their neck or virus in their lungs, not to mention the truly “breathtaking” display of dysfunction in government. Smith envisions that the book may “serve a use for you like that of a road map for a nation that is no longer idling.”

Stepping off the table of contents and into our living rooms are Smith herself; criminal justice reform advocate, Obama appointee, and award-winning poet Reginald Dwayne Betts; and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Camille Dungy. Guiding the conversation is Ismail Muhummad, story editor for the New York Times Magazine and a member of the Festival’s program committee. Show up as an ally, a citizen, and a fellow survivor of an unprecedented and explosive year.

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“Mourning is the price we pay for having the courage to love others,” opens the extraordinary memoir by renowned psychiatrist Irvin Yalom (Love’s Executioner) and his late wife, Marilyn Yalom, the esteemed feminist scholar and writer. Exploring universal questions of intimacy, love, and grief, A Matter of Death and Life recounts the final months of the couple’s 65-year marriage after Marilyn’s cancer diagnosis. The book is written in alternating sections until Marilyn’s death, after which Irv, the “therapists’ therapist,” revisits his decades’ worth of writings as a way to cope with his own grief.

There could be no better partner for this conversation than Joyce Carol Oates, one of the most honored authors in American letters, whose more than 100 books­­—fiction, memoir, essays, poetry and more­­—masterfully delve into love, loss, mortality, and other core human experiences. Her memoir A Widow’s Story (2011) depicts her own struggles after the loss of her husband of 47 years. Both of her latest books, the poetry collection American Melancholy and short story collection The (Other) You, explore how circumstances and choices indelibly shape how we live and find meaning.

We present this conversation on Mother’s Day, after a year that taught us all to cherish human connection more than ever. Today we pay tribute to the women we love, but also to the many people this year who have cared for us (since mothering comes in many forms).

If you’re a mom, a professional caretaker, or an essential worker—or if you’ve just now decided to tell your loved ones afresh how much they mean to you—we invite you to use the code CARE in checkout to get 50% off the ticket price for this event. Please also consider getting a ticket for a loved one and buying Irv’s and Joyce’s books—you’ll be glad you did!

Learn how to save the world like a girl! Shreya Ramachandran, 17, Lilly Platt, 12, and Haven Coleman, 14, three phenomenal young women of Girl Warriors, bring us on their fearless climate-activism journey. From leading climate strikes to suing their governments, these inspiring eco-advocates will not back down until we have a planet that’s sustainable, healthy, and hospitable to all. Their stories are brought to life by Rachel Sarah in her book GIRL WARRIORS: How 25 Young Activists Are Saving the Earth, and they’re joining her for a spirited look at how we can all be warriors for justice and a better world.

This event is also part of the Festival’s Women Lit series

Newbery Medalist Meg Medina’s new book, Merci Suárez Can’t Dance (a Kirkus “Most Anticipated Book of 2021”), re-introduces us to her touching, funny titular character, now a seventh-grader. Joining her in conversation is celebrated author Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich with It Doesn’t Take a Genius, a hilarious and moving coming-of-age tale about a young boy’s self-actualizing journey at a historic Black summer camp. These two popular authors are interviewed by Mariah McCoy, 14, and Giselle Caban, 15, two writers who are part of the inaugural cohort of Write Your Story, a yearlong creative-writing workshop for young girls of color in partnership with Cinnamongirl, Inc. Tune in for a warm and intimate discussion of new books, the creative process, and the necessity of anchoring and nurturing diverse voices in literature.

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In 1968, poet Muriel Rukeyser famously wrote, “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” More than half a century later, women themselves feel split into a million pieces. This past year has been especially challenging for women, typically society’s primary caretakers. Indeed, mothers have been carrying an especially heavy load. Speaking one’s truth is hard when you’re totally exhausted.

So what better Mother’s Day gift for women (and all who love them) to spend an hour, free of charge, with three brilliant female authors, writing from and about multiple corners of the globe—India, the Middle East, North Africa, South America, the United States—with woman-focused stories? And these aren’t just any stories: the work of all three novelists was shortlisted for the Booker Prize or the Booker International Prize, the most prestigious literary awards in the world.

In Burnt Sugar, Dubai-based Indian author Avni Doshi explores the intimate dynamics of mother-daughter conflict and postpartum depression with an ambivalence and caustic wit that ruffled some feathers. It’s that fearless artistry that landed her on the 2020 Booker Prize shortlist with Ethiopian-American novelist Maaza Mengiste, whose novel The Shadow King (“a masterpiece,” said the Washington Post) features a female soldier fighting fascism during Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia. The story is inspired by the author’s great-grandmother, one of those women who, in Mengiste’s words, “stepped forward out of the shadows and made themselves known.” Chilean author Alia Trabucco Zerán, trained as a human rights lawyer before turning to literary work, wrote The Remainder, a finalist for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize, to delve into the legacy of Chile’s military dictatorship. Her new novel, Las Homicidas, to appear in English translation in 2021, explores an arguably even more dangerous topic: how rage against injustice can be so profound that it drives some women to kill, and how that rage, as with the frustrated anger of any oppressed group, is often minimized and deflected.

This conversation offers a Mother’s Day like no other! The event is co-presented by Words Without Borders and moderated by Karen Phillips, its executive director. Words Without Borders expands cultural understanding through the translation, publication, and promotion of the finest contemporary international literature.

Free of charge, but you must register to receive the viewing link.

This event is also part of the Festival’s Women Lit series

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