One of the oldest and most prolific literary festivals will be hosted in several locations in our neighborhood. Read below for information on the events right in your front yard and how to get tickets.
Friday, October 8th
Word/Jazz, 7:00pm – 9:00pm, Local Edition (691 Market St)
Sponsored by Yerba Buena Community Benefit District
Co-presented by Healdsburg Jazz Festival
In the great tradition of San Francisco jazz and spoken-word basement readings first forged by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Rexroth, and Bob Kaufman, Litquake is proud to bring back this festival favorite, showcasing world-class poets accompanied by improvised music created on the spot. With Genny Lim, devorah major, Paul S. Flores, and Brontez Purnell. Music by the Marcus Shelby Trio. Doors at 5pm for cocktails, show 7-9pm. $20 adv / $22 door. More event info available here.
Register here — https://www.eventbrite.com/e/169184530485
Walk-up tickets must be purchased via Venmo or PayPal.
Saturday, October 9th
World (Re) Building: The Art of the Novel, 11:30am – 12:45pm, Contemporary Jewish Museum (736 Mission St)
Sponsored by Yerba Buena Community Benefit District
Co-presented by California College of the Arts
“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.” – Jane Austen. How do novelists structure their writing and their writing day? How do they research their ideas? Must you only write about what you know? How do they find a community of fellow authors who can act as sounding boards during the process? Five novelists will join moderator Nayomi Munaweera to discuss their art and craft. $12 adv / $15 door. More event info available here.
Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/169185246627
Walk-up tickets must be purchased via Venmo or PayPal.
Distilling Emotion: The Art of the Short Story, 1:15pm – 2:30pm, Contemporary Jewish Museum (736 Mission St)
Sponsored by Yerba Buena Community Benefit District
Co-presented by California College of the Arts
“In a rough way the short story writer is to the novelist as a cabinetmaker is to a house carpenter.” – Annie Proulx. How does writing a short story differ from writing a novel? Where do short story writers get their inspiration? How does writing short stories differ from writing longer works? What about short short stories? Four short story writers, moderated by Olga Zilberbourg, will talk about their art and craft. $12 adv / $15 door. More event info available here.
Register here: www.eventbrite.com/e/169185633785
Walk-up tickets must be purchased via Venmo or PayPal.
Blood is Thicker Than Ink: Memoir Panel, 3:00pm – 4:15pm, Contemporary Jewish Museum (736 Mission St)
Sponsored by Yerba Buena Community Benefit District
Co-presented by California College of the Arts
Many of the most beloved and resonant memoirs focus on complicated families. When the subject is close to home, writers must navigate minefields of intense personalities, secrets and lies, conflicting memories, old fights, and the occasional lawsuit. This panel of acclaimed memoirists will discuss the unique challenges and rewards of writing honestly about family. $12 adv / $15 door. More event info available here.
Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/169185948727
Walk-up tickets must be purchased via Venmo or PayPal.
Sunday, October 10th
Into the Sh*tstorm: Debut Authors Dish on the Weirdest Pub Season Ever, 11:30am – 12:45pm, Contemporary Jewish Museum (736 Mission St)
Sponsored by Yerba Buena Community Benefit District
Litquake’s debut panel is back—only this time it’s burly! Launching a book is always tricky, but what if your debut takes place during a global pandemic and political maelstrom? Having survived cancelled book tours, explosive politics, and 9,000 Zoom events, this panel of 2020-21 authors will have plenty to say about resilience, ingenuity, and grit. $12 adv / $15 door. More event info available here.
Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/169187031967
Walk-up tickets must be purchased via Venmo or PayPal.
The ABCs of Literary Journals, 1:15pm – 2:30pm, Contemporary Jewish Museum (736 Mission St)
Sponsored by Yerba Buena Community Benefit District
Want to break into the exclusive club of writers whose work is accepted by a high-brow lit journal? Bring your questions to this panel of editors representing The Believer, Zyzzyva, Poetry Flash and 14 Hills. $12 adv / $15 door. More event info available here.
Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/169187076099
Walk-up tickets must be purchased via Venmo or PayPal.
The Pros and Cons of MFAs, 3:00pm – 4:15pm, Contemporary Jewish Museum (736 Mission St)
Sponsored by Yerba Buena Community Benefit District
With the proliferation of graduate programs in creative writing, those in pursuit of careers in wordsmithery have to decide for themselves whether grad school is worth the rigor and expense. Here to discuss the pros and cons of MFA programs will be bestselling authors and faculty members from both sides of the debate. $12 adv / $15 door. More event info available here.
Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/169187242597
Walk-up tickets must be purchased via Venmo or PayPal.
Tuesday, October 12th
Alternative Histories, 7:00pm – 8:30pm, American Bookbinders Museum (355 Clementina St)
Sponsored by Yerba Buena Community Benefit District
Co-presented by The National Book Critics Circle
Co-presented by American Bookbinders Museum
Join author Ricco Villanueva Siasoco in a conversation with three debut novelists about the process of building alternative histories of the American West, from the Gold Rush through World War I. Patty Enrado’s A Village in the Fields highlights a compelling but buried piece of American history: the Filipino-American contribution to the farm labor movement; Rishi Reddi’s epic Passage West, Los Angeles Times’ Best California Book of 2020, explores a Punjabi sharecropper family in California during World War I, as they work and live alongside their Mexican in-laws and Japanese neighbors; while Tom Lin’s debut novel The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu, transforms the genre of the Western in a story of revenge for forced labor in the American railroad’s expansion. FREE, $5-10 suggested donation (pre-registration required). More event info available here.
Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/169190444173
Wednesday, October 13th
The Tarnished Side of the Golden Gate: New Novels, 7:00pm – 8:30pm, American Bookbinders Museum (355 Clementina St)
Sponsored by Yerba Buena Community Benefit District
Co-presented by American Bookbinders Museum
The Bay Area has seen a few gold rushes but none like the most recent boom, which has created a new class of instant millionaires but also changed the cultural landscape, leaving many people at a loss. This trio of new novels will explore the lengths one-percenters will go to to see their children advance, how former hipsters find themselves alienated in the Silicon Valley monoculture, and how a tribe of homeless young people in Golden Gate Park learn to survive as cultural outcasts. FREE, $5-10 donation (pre-registration required). More event info available here.
Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/169190887499
Friday, October 15th
Poison for Breakfast with Daniel Handler and Andrew Sean Greer, 7:00pm – 8:30pm, American Bookbinders Museum (355 Clementina St)
Sponsored by Yerba Buena Community Benefit District
Co-presented by American Bookbinders Museum
Lemony Snicket returns! Back with his first book in more than a decade—this one appealing to both children and adults—Snicket finds himself investigating a death: his own. As he describes it, “the clues in this investigation include a suspicious stranger, an upsetting supermarket, the strange way literature is made, painful embarrassment, long songs, improperly prepared eggs, and other things which I happen to think are important.” In conversation with Lemony/Daniel will be the charming and frequently hilarious Andrew Sean Greer, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Less. FREE, $5-10 donation (pre-registration required). More event info available here.
Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/169192191399
Saturday, October 16th
The Hydra: A Series for Black and Brown Experimental, Flash, Sci-Fi, and Horror Writers and the People Who Love Them, 1:15pm – 2:15pm, Yerba Buena Gardens Esplanade (750 Howard St)
Sponsored by Yerba Buena Community Benefit District
The Hydra returns for Litquake Out Loud to call forth five brave writers to read their works with the hopes of lulling the Hydra, which lives beneath Mt. Diablo, back to sleep. If you like to speculate whether monsters really exist, then this is the reading for you. FREE, $5-10 suggested donation. More event info available here.
Register now: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/169193210447
Three Voices, Three Worlds, 2:30pm – 3:30pm, Yerba Buena Gardens Esplanade (750 Howard St)
Sponsored by Yerba Buena Community Benefit District
Join us at Litquake Out Loud stage as three award-winning writers of diverse origins and methods, Achy Obejas, Carolina de Robertis and Ingrid Rojas Contreras, read from works, new and forthcoming. Achy Obejas presents Boomerang/Bumerán, a unique and inspiring bilingual collection of lyrical poetry written in a bold, mostly gender-free English and Spanish that address immigration, displacement, love and activism. Contreras presents a new work of non-fiction, a family memoir about her grandfather, a curandero from Colombia who it was said had the power to move clouds, forthcoming from Doubleday in Summer of 2022. Carolina presents The President and The Frog, an incandescent novel—political, mystical, timely, and heartening—about the power of memory, and the pursuit of justice, from the acclaimed author of Cantoras. FREE, $5-10 suggested donation. More event info available here.
Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/169193439131
Naming Our Ancestors: A Reading, 3:45pm – 4:45pm, Yerba Buena Gardens Esplanade (750 Howard St)
Sponsored by Yerba Buena Community Benefit District
Literary ancestors inspire and provoke, point the way forward, pull us into conversation. They might inspire imitation or rebellion—or both. Ultimately, a literary ancestor is one who helps call the writer home to herself. Join curator Shruti Swamy and authors Meng Jin, Yalitza Ferreras, Mimi Lok, and Claire Calderón on the Litquake Out Loud stage as they reflect on their own writer-ancestors, and share work that bears the influence of that relationship. FREE, $5-10 suggested donation. More event info available here.
Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/169192692899
Sunday, October 17th
Debut Poetry in COVID, 12:00pm – 12:45pm, Yerba Buena Gardens Esplanade (750 Howard St)
Sponsored by Yerba Buena Community Benefit District
From contest fees to rejections, the path to publishing a first poetry collection is riddled with challenges. The past two years have been particularly difficult amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Hear from six Bay Area poets who nevertheless persevered to publish debut full-length books through a range of trade, university, and independent presses. From different backgrounds, professions, styles, ages, and interests, this diverse group of poets will present their work. FREE, $5-10 suggested donation. More event info available here.
Register now: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/169341824957
Philippine American Writers and Artists, 1:00pm – 1:45pm, Yerba Buena Gardens Esplanade (750 Howard St)
Sponsored by Yerba Buena Community Benefit District
The main goal of Philippine American Writers and Artists (PAWA) is to create and encourage literature and arts for the preservation and enrichment of Filipino and Filipino American historical, cultural and spiritual values. Our organization is invested in creating venues for Filipino American artists, and has worked to grow our community across ethnic and aesthetic boundaries. We believe it is important to provide access, and opportunity, and to bring Filipino culture to multiple audiences. FREE, $5-10 suggested donation. More event info available here.
Register now: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/169342424751
Black Freighter Press, 2:00pm – 2:45pm, Yerba Buena Gardens Esplanade (750 Howard St)
Sponsored by Yerba Buena Community Benefit District
Black Freighter Press publishes revolutionary books. We are committed to the exploration of liberation, using art to transform consciousness. A platform for Black and Brown writers to honor ancestry and propel radical imagination. We aim to create a world where the collective determines cultural reality. Hosted by Alie Jones and San Francisco Poet Laureate Tongo Eisen-Martin. FREE, $5-10 suggested donation. More event info available here.
Register now: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/169342639393
Patrice Lumumba: An Anthology of Writers on Black Liberation with MoAD x Nomadic Press, 3:00pm – 3:45pm, Yerba Buena Gardens Esplanade (750 Howard St)
Sponsored by Yerba Buena Community Benefit District
Co-presented by Nomadic Press and Museum of the African Diaspora
The new poetry collection Patrice Lumumba: An Anthology of Writers on Black Liberation (Nomadic Press) collects the liberatory words of 24 authors—explorations of contemporary colonization, the racial/physical/mental/physic abuses of power, locations of home, alternative modes of work, the health profession, and the healing powers of history. FREE, $5-10 suggested donation. More event info available here.
Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/169342850023
Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network, 4:00pm – 4:45pm, Yerba Buena Gardens Esplanade (750 Howard St)
Sponsored by Yerba Buena Community Benefit District
The Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN) believes that the stories and creativity of a thriving Vietnamese diaspora can connect our global community. DVAN promotes nonfiction, fiction, and poetry to empower Vietnamese artists in the diaspora and to inspire understanding and dialogue within our community, and with others. Our complex and diverse stories must be championed and passed on to current and future generations. We are refugees, immigrants, survivors, and descendants, and our stories must be heard. FREE, $5-10 suggested donation. More event info available here.
Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/169343086731
Tuesday, October 19th
The California Palimpset: Jaime Cortez & José Vada, 7:00pm – 8:30pm, California Historical Society (678 Mission St)
Sponsored by Yerba Buena Community Benefit District
From Jaime Cortez’s intimate view of 1970’s migrant camp near Watsonville through a preteen’s eyes (Gordo) to José Vadi’s cinematic and impassioned examination of California’s layered histories (Inter State: Essays from California), we are rooted inside necessary stories and places lost in our ever-changing, selectively golden state. Join these two writers as they read from new essays and short stories that uncover with warmth, hilarity, and style the essential questions—What is this place we call home? And what do we imagine it can become? Discussion moderated by ZYZZYVA’s Oscar Villalon. FREE, $5-10 suggested donation (pre-registration required). More event info available here.
Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/169344286319
Wednesday, October 20th
The Relic Report: San Francisco’s Monuments, 7:00pm – 8:00pm, California Historical Society (678 Mission St)
Sponsored by Yerba Buena Community Benefit District
Co-presented by Goethe-Institut San Francisco and New Monuments Taskforce
The Relic Report is an unofficial municipal study of San Francisco’s monuments and memorials and their intersection with our country’s racist history. The two-part publication documents a playful investigation of monuments in the city’s civic art collection, and reflects on what to do next. A research guide of sorts, part one intends to provide fodder for critical conversations, and part two includes a creative culmination of participants’ reflections as well as recommendations from the New Monuments Taskforce. Relic Report author Cheyenne Concepcion and NMT’s Anna Lisa Escobedo discuss and present slides. FREE, $5-10 suggested donation (pre-registration required). More event info available here.
Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/169354314313
Concepción: An Immigrant Family’s Fortunes with Albert Samaha and Jason Bayani, 7:00pm – 8:30pm, American Bookbinders Museum (355 Clementina St)
Sponsored by Yerba Buena Community Benefit District
Co-presented by American Bookbinders Museum
Co-presented by Philippine American Writers and Artists
Nearing the age at which his mother had migrated to the US, part of the wave of non-Europeans who arrived after immigration quotas were relaxed in 1965, Albert Samaha began to question the ironclad belief in a better future that had inspired her family to uproot themselves from their birthplace. Tracing his family’s history through the Philippine’s unique geopolitical roots in Spanish colonialism, American intervention, and Japanese occupation, Samaha fits their arc into an ambitious, intimate, and incisive exploration of what it might means to reckon with the unjust legacy of imperialism, to live with contradiction and hope, to fight for the unrealized ideals of an inherited homeland. In conversation with Kearny Street Workshop’s Jason Bayani. FREE, $5-10 donation (pre-registration required). More event info available here.
Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/169358823801
San Francisco Neo-Futurists: The Infinite Wrench, 8:00pm – 9:30pm, Children’s Creativity Museum Theater (221 4th St)
Sponsored by Yerba Buena Community Benefit District
Join the SF Neo-Futurists as they present The Infinite Wrench: an ongoing, ever-changing attempt to perform 30 plays in 60 minutes for a live audience. “An underground power generator”—San Francisco Chronicle. Doors 7pm, show 8pm; $20 (pre-registration encouraged). More event info available here.
Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/169359146767
