Gina Frangello’s new memoir, Blow Your House Down, has been met with wide acclaim, impassioned support, and also the kind of judgments and criticisms that people love to lob at women who write about their authentic, messy lives. Frangello’s book is honest to a fault. She dares to write about her desires, her indiscretions, her fantasies, her deep flaws. She’s unflinching, definitely imperfect, not a good girl and seemingly unconcerned with being read as “nice” or “sympathetic.“ She doesn’t fit into other people’s boxes of what a good wife or mother should look like. She writes about adultery, a longtime affair, and eventually breaking up her family, with repercussions to all concerned, including her children.

For readers, the experience of reading Blow your House Down is a paradox. You want to look and you want to turn away. You relate to every word and you want to distance yourself from that truth. You will question the author. You will question yourself. You will finish feeling unsettled, mulling over your own life choices. For memoirists and aspiring memoirists, this book raises the bar, perhaps uncomfortably, around expectations for how much you’re “supposed” to say, or allowed to tell.

At the center of this conversation, moderated by Brooke Warner of She Writes Press, are questions about how women are encouraged to be silent, or get silenced; the double standards that run rampant throughout the world of book publishing, but especially between male and female writers of memoir; and the very real fallout for women writers who dare to tell the truth on the page. Nothing will be off-limits. Writers and readers of memoir won’t want to miss this conversation between Gina Frangello, an author who’s broken the mold and dared to show everything, and Brooke Warner, a memoir advocate who believes that women telling their stories in all their messy glory is how we create a more expansive culture for women’s full range of experience and expression.

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Live virtual event!

“Keenan Norris is simply one of the most talented young writers around.”—Victor LaValle

How to describe The Confession of Copeland Cane, the explosive new novel by Oakland-based author Keenan Norris? According to MacArthur Fellow Mike Davis, like “Thomas Pynchon, Nathaniel West and Ralph Ellison going into a bar where they decide to write a novel about the gentrification wars in the East Bay.” And yet Keenan Norris’s prose is all his own: dexterously lyrical, sharp, and skillful in reflecting our own moment.

The Bay Area Book Festival is delighted to partner with the Museum of the African Diaspora to celebrate the publication of The Confession of Copeland Cane. We hope you’ll join us for Keenan Norris’s conversation with polymath Dr. Michael Datcher, who penned the New York Times bestselling novel Raising Fences: A Black Man’s Love Story. Together they’ll discuss the state of cities and American letters, and, of course, will field a question or two from the audience.

About the Book

Set in East Oakland in a very near future, Keenan Norris’s The Confession of Copeland Cane is a vital dispatch to our present times. Copeland Cane V is a teenager with a predilection for flip phones, a finely developed sense of the absurd, and a spot at the nearby prep school even as he and his folks face eviction from their apartment. Meanwhile, property developers are waging war across Oakland, and the state has merged with the Soclear Broadcasting conglomerate to surveil and harass Cope’s neighborhood in the name of anti-terrorism. And in the aftermath of a protest rally against police violence, everything changes, and Cope finds himself a wanted man without a clear past or future. One boy’s coming of age story converges with an American history that has not yet occurred—but that all too easily could.

The Confession of Copeland Cane is available for purchase at the MoAD Bookstore.

Event Details

Free admission, but you must register to receive the watch link. Each ticket includes private access to the event recording for 10 days following the live event. Purchase your copy of The Confession of Copeland Cane here. All copies will be shipped by the MoAD Bookstore starting June 15.

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“Despair is always rational, but hope is human.” — Richard Flanagan on his new novel

Richard Flanagan is one of our greatest living writers. He’s also a joy to encounter in person: he’s warm, witty, accessible, and wise. We’re thrilled to bring Richard to you, live from his home in Tasmania, to celebrate the publication of his astonishing new novel, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams.

The Guardian called the novel a “magical realist tale of ecological anguish … [that is] also playful… at its heart, hopeful.” It is about our vanishing world — about species and ecosystems being lost (he wrote this book as fires raged across Australia), about losses of love and connection with each other in our rushed, social-media obsessed world — and, finally, about the possibility of finding our way back.

Set in Tasmania, the central story unfolds as Anna, a hyper-competent professional and the main character, and her two siblings refuse to allow the death of their aged, suffering mother, who is ready to die. At the same time, as fires darken the skies and other horror stories fill the news feeds that Anna compulsively checks on her phone, she begins to have her body parts vanish. Only some people can see what is missing. The novel’s use of stunning, fractured language embodies both the pace of modern life and our stuttering fears, our inabilities to slow down and stop consuming, stop escaping, stop avoiding the beauty before our eyes — the beauty of the natural world and the genuine love and empathy that is available to us, if only we let ourselves see it. This book will stun you with the horror of losses we’ve caused and, as we finally allow ourselves to feel the depths of this grief, with real hope for the restoration of both natural and human worlds.

Flanagan will be in conversation with internationally renowned poet Jane Hirshfield, whose most recent collection, Ledger, is a pivotal book of personal, ecological, and political reckoning. Ledger’s opening lines, invoking human responsibility and willing denial, intersect in uncanny ways with Flanagan’s novel: “Let them not say: we did not see it. / We saw.” The poetry collection, Hirshfield says, “was written in grief and into my bewilderment at our human inaction” at environmental devastation, which The Living Sea of Waking Dreams explores in prose. She writes, “Some breakage can barely be named, hardly be spoken,” but these two writers do speak it — wholly, beautifully, profoundly. Don’t miss this once-in-a-lifetime conversation.

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.

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

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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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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

“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!

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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.

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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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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