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

Sponsored by

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.

From the Barbary Coast to the Summer of Love to the tech takeover, San Francisco has always been a city in flux, a writer’s dream, and a favorite setting for literature. Its boom-and-bust drama and breathtaking beauty also make it a perfect backdrop for coming-of-age stories: especially ones about girls who can’t be pigeonholed.

Who better to chronicle the city’s growing pains—and those of two unforgettable teenage women—than two leading ladies of the Bay Area literary scene? Carol Edgarian, publisher of Narrative Magazine, has delivered “that rare novel you’ll want to buy for loved ones” (Andre Dubus III) with Vera, a pulse-pounding, often hilarious saga of a fierce 15-year-old, the daughter of a bordello owner, amidst the 1906 earthquake and fires. (Nob Hill, Pacific Heights, Market Street, the longed-for “fire escape” ferry to Oakland—they’re all here.)

We wonder what Vera would have to say to Eulabee, the protagonist of Vendela Vida’s funny, poignant We Run the Tides, who comes of age during the pre-tech-boom days of the 1990s (Eulabee haunts “Sea Cliff,” China Beach, the Haight). Vida, co-founder of The Believer magazine, 826 Valencia, and other Bay Area literary institutions, puts Eulabee squarely in the middle of a web of lies instigated by her fabulously-named friend Maria Fabiola, a social climber (also very San Francisco).

Whether you know San Francisco or not, whether you long for its “good old days” or still find it magical, these stories and this conversation, part of the Festival’s “Writer to Writer” series, will hit home for anyone who has undergone the harrowing journey of growing up.

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This is the book we have been waiting for. It calls us up and calls us into the hard and necessary work to heal our wounds and reimagine the world. —Van Jones

The Festival’s opening event, free to all, is a clarion call to heal America and our own hearts. The United States, lauded in its national anthem as “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” continues to be plagued by endless gun violence, police murders of unarmed Black people, threats to democracy, and hatred of “the other”… with an alarming increase in targeted anti-Asian attacks in the past year, too. Ever since her Sikh family friend was shot after 9/11, attorney and activist Valarie Kaur, the daughter of Sikh farmers in Central California, has achieved crucial policy change on multiple fronts, including hate crimes, racial profiling, immigration detention, and solitary confinement. Now she targets hatred itself. Her TED Talk on that topic has garnered more than three million views.

You can see Valarie live, and ask your questions, as she’s interviewed by Mother Jones race and justice reporter Jamilah King about Kaur’s book See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love, that expands on that blockbuster TED talk. The book has been praised by visionaries across the progressive spectrum, from Eve Ensler to Reza Aslan. The New Jim Crow author Michelle Alexander called it “inspirational, radical…  a reliable moral compass.” What is this “revolutionary love”? It’s far “more than a rush of feeling,” Kaur says. “Love is fierce labor.” Discover just what this kind of love is and how you too can “be the change you want to see,” as Gandhi, and now this powerful woman, call us to do.

You can submit questions when you register, and we’ll also take questions live during the event.

Sponsored by

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

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.

In association with

When things come together so beautifully that one cannot imagine a world without it, a word adopted by Rastafarians wisdom speakers comes to mind, “fruition”, or better still, “fru-i-shon”. Calabash has become, by its existence and its persistence, exactly such a fruition – a project which has come to be the enactment of years of creative struggle, of apprenticeship, of labour and invention. Each of the writers celebrated in this event can speak to their emergence as voices carrying on the legacy of liberation, invention and imagination which has been at the core of the Jamaican character and spirit at its best. It is our delight to welcome you to just a hint of the bounty which is our fruition as a festival and as a nation. Meet Ann Margaret Lim, Opal Palmer Adisa, Tanya Shirley, Diana McCauley, Earl McKenzie, Millicent A A Graham, Mutabarika, Ella Brodber and Olive Senior.

Whether it be poetry written for the page, the silver screen, the poetry slam or the melody, every poet plays with language to reveal the inexpressible. The Toronto International Festival of Authors and JAYU present the new generation of Canadian poetry which is pushing the possibilities and playing with the rules. Tune into four distinguished Canadian poets who will take us on a journey through the physical, vocal and material elements of their poems. Featuring Jillian Christmas (Vancouver) Tawhida Tanya Evanson (Montreal), and Motion (Toronto). Emcee for the evening is poet Britta B (Toronto).

From the Beat poets of the 1950s to Summer of Love musicians and Silicon Valley innovators, California’s San Francisco Bay Area is renowned for bold and often irreverent pioneers. The region’s contemporary literary scene is no exception. Once largely ignored by the East Coast establishment, California authors are now in the vanguard of the nation’s literature – radically shaping aesthetics and redefining who can be an author and what stories can be told. The two featured authors, Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, are a married couple at the epicentre of this transformation. Their own award-winning literary work ranges from novels to memoirs, children’s books and screenplays, set all over the world. They have also built a thriving literary ecosystem which includes book imprints (such as the San Francisco-based McSweeney’s and its human-rights-focused Voices of Witness series), multiple magazines and journals (such as The Believer, which has also spawned a festival), and the hugely successful 826 National network (the largest youth writing network in the country). Join us to hear their inspiring story, to celebrate Vendela’s just-published sixth novel (We Run the Tides, set in San Francisco), and to discover just how a pirate store fits in.

In conversation with their friend, colleague, and fellow author Daniel Gumbiner, and introduced by host Cherilyn Parsons, founder and executive director of the Bay Area Book Festival.

This is a public rebroadcast of a live event for Women Lit members. To join Women Lit or to learn more, click here.

Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Jane Smiley (A Thousand Acres), whose books have sold over a million copies in the U.S. alone, was bound and determined to release her latest novel in 2020. Why? She knew we all could use a pleasurable escape. And Perestroika in Paris is just that: a beguiling fairytale for adults, praised by Publishers Weekly as “the perfect book for those for whom the real world, wracked with pandemic and politics, has become something to avoid.” Imagine a Parisian version of Roman Holiday, starring a runaway racehorse who finds friendship and freedom in getting splendidly off-track in the City of Light. In an enlightening conversation with Brooke Warner of She Writes Press, the incomparable Smiley welcomes us into another world: one in which the glitter of city lights pales in comparison to the bond all creatures share in their yearning to find kinship and be free.

Helen Macdonald’s bestselling memoir H Is For Hawk, a transcendent meditation on grief, relationships, and falconry, established her as one of the world’s foremost nature and culture writers. She’s setting our imaginations soaring again with Vesper Flights, a collection of her best-loved essays, illuminating everything from mushroom-hunting to the poignant particulars of birds’ nests. As Helen wrote, “animals don’t exist in order to teach us things,” but her live conversation with American Book Award-winning poet Camille T. Dungy will show us how much we can learn by letting nature keep its secrets.

This is a public rebroadcast of a live event for Women Lit members. To join Women Lit or to learn more, click here.