Oakland Review of Books calendar of (not just) literary events, June 23–June 28
The sun has stood still and is starting to rewind, but summer is just getting started, even for Oakland’s newest youth poet laureate, Isaiah Kahn. There's plays and table reads at Shotgun, and just plays at Berkeley Rep. If you’re a K-12 teacher you can think about investigative journalism at Cal for a couple days. You have until the end of the week to submit your proposal to be part of Bather’s Library’s Summer Symposium (will be held in late August). Clothing is being swapped at BAMPFA all weekend and you know the art girls are bringing their finest, meanwhile jeans are being made into paper and paintings at 2727 California – go help. All weekend dancers will be ritualizing at Eastside Arts Alliance, there’s three chances this week to hear directly from Palestinian activist Iyad Burnat about what’s happening in the West Bank. There’s so much poetry happening everywhere I don’t know what to do with myself so to escape the terror of choice have committed to oysters and jazz and science on Friday instead. Also, our friend DJ Tallboy will be spinning premier jazz, soul and funk at Bar 355 on Thursday from 4-8pm, so stop by and tell your new favorite selector that ORB sent you... -MS, AB
Tuesday, June 23
Mystery Book Club, 4pm, West Branch BPL (West Berkeley). Read Mother-Daughter Murder Night by Nina Simon and come talk about its SoCal story of mother-daughter bonding through snooping around with other people who have already read up to the reveal (SPOILERS AHEAD). [BPL]
A Summer of Spike Lee Joints: BlacKkKlansman, 5pm, Elmhurst Branch OPL (Deep East). Remember the time Boots Riley gave Spike some shit for this movie? He kind of had a point! Apparently they’re friends again, but the movie is still “a made up story in which the false parts of it try to make a cop the protagonist in the fight against racist oppression.” [OPL]
Ideas We Need for the Future: Doughnut Economics, 6pm, Local Economy (Lower Rockridge). I have looked into this and I am pretty sure “doughnut economics” is an infographic for “what if we did ecologically-responsible socialism,” and, ok sure, whatever it takes to get consultants and "design thinkers" on board with right relation. [luma]
Romance Book Club, 6pm, North Branch BPL (Berkeley). Hang out with the hopeful romantics for an evening to talk about how the template of heterosexual pairings as an ending in comedy exists to resolve the social tensions upended within the carnivalesque space of the preceding story and therefore reassures the audience that order will be reestablished despite chaos and uncertainty, or just talk about Get a Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert. [BPL]
Lisa Olivera: When the Ache Remains in conversation with Carissa Potter, 6:30pm, Womb House Books (Temescal Alley). Standing room only! Hear authors Lisa Olivera (therapist, author) and Carissa Potter (artist, writer) talk about the way our hearts break and then we keep on living somehow, if you can squeeze into the room. [eventbrite]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Christian Bancroft Book Release: A Ghost Has No Fantasies, 7pm, Green Apple Books (The Sunset). If you were a paying ORB member, you'd have already learned that Christian Bancroft was at Pegasus on Monday, but now you'll have to spend what you would have paid in an ORB subscription on a toll or BART ticket instead. Luckily, waiting for you is: docupoetics resurrecting gay voices from Gestapo records of extermination and castration and held lovingly in Bancroft's cross-genre book of memory, A Ghost Has No Fantasies. Not only that, but you get to hear poets Mukethe Kawinzi and Caroline Mar too!! [GAB on the Park]
I Love You So Many with Terria Smith and Chris La Tray, 7pm, Clio’s Books (Grand Lake). We've got some special visitors from out of town coming through today! Author of Becoming Little Shell, Chris La Tray (Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians) is showing up because he knows getting to talk with Terria will be one of the highlights of his year. Terria Smith (Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla) directs the Roundhouse at Heyday, edits News from Native California, is a mother, a traveler, and now author of her first book, a memoir of how her travels to connect with people, especially other Indigenous and Black people, across the US and around the world have shaped her. Read her plain-spoken, funny, blunt stories in I Love You So Many to understand travel as kin-building, as adventure, as revelation that you bring home with you. [eventbrite]
Wednesday, June 24
Mystery Movie at the Library, 2pm, Elmhurst Branch OPL (Deep East). The librarians are getting a little punchy. Here's what they're planning: "Love movies? Love surprises? Then this show is for you!" They also claim that this movie is the GOAT but does that mean you'll be seeing the 2026 animated feature about a sportsball playing ruminant or the 1977 biopic in which Ali plays himself? Lights down, cell phones silent, report back on what games the librarians are playing. [OPL]
[West Bay Bonus Event Historized] No Apologies: Remembering the White Night Riots, 6pm, Et al. Books (The Mission). Left in the Bay, Pinko, and Sad Francisco put together this panel to talk about the murder of Harvey Milk and George Moscone and the infamously lenient sentencing of Dan White in 1979, which spurred one of the largest riots in San Francisco history. (A burning SFPD cruiser was immortalized on a Dead Kennedys album cover and in Dan Mavrides’ stylized “NO APOLOGIES” poster, created to raise money for the legal defense of those arrested). [insta]
Will Write for Food: A Workshop with Dianne Jacob, 6pm, Book Society (Berkeley End of College Ave). Pour however large a glass of wine that the automated spigots at Book Society will let you get away with and make like Julia Child with her Burgundy while the roast chicken is resting. [Book Society]
[North Bay Bonus Event] Underwater Economics of the San Francisco Bay, 6pm, Spaulding Marine Center (Sausalito). We're eating oysters and learning about the Bay this week! For $65 and a trip across a bridge, you'll eat Hog Island oysters, Sausalito sourdough, salad, clam chowder, and other bayside delicacies while you hear about restoring the Bay with native oysters from Margaret Ikeda (Architectural Ecologies Lab), Josie Iselin of The Alluring World of the Olympia Oyster and books about seaweed's role in marine ecology, the San Francisco Bay Living Shorelines Project, Dr. Katharyn Boyer on estuaries, and more. Oyster beds are breakwaters, pollution filters, and reefs full of potential -- what future can we imagine for the Bay that restores native species while preparing for warming waters? [Maria Finn]
Study History to Transform Society, 6:30pm, First Unitarian Church of Oakland (Old Oakland). The history of Communist Women’s Organizing! [KPFA]
WHB June Book Club: Audition by Katie Kitamura, 6:30pm, Womb House Books (Temescal Alley). Katie Kitamura's novel Audition is one of those books where there's a metric ton of unresolved tension and someone grabbing someone else's arm too tightly is the height of the action but leads to tons of drama. We've got two parts with a reality shift between them, family weirdness, the lure of a younger man and threat of a younger woman, and a writer writing about a writer. It feels very European, all together, but the copy makes you think you're going to be thinking through an affair and I don't think the marketing team read the same book I read. It's an off-kilter kind of book that might do something interesting to your thoughts about passivity, silence, and fear of replacement -- and if you had signed up to be a member of the Womb House Book Club, you'd have gotten the packet of critical material to help you process it. [eventbrite]
Lyrics & Dirges: Cherry Pie Press Edition, 7pm, Pegasus Books (Downtown Berkeley). New local publisher for queers Cherry Pie Press is here for Pride! Writers from the press are curated today and Pegasus had all the wrong info (sorry Monday readers), so here's the update from L&D directly: hosted by Cherry Pie publisher Natasha Dennerstein, featuring Tee Gardiner (slam champ from Inglewood) Dazié Grego-Sykes (performer and interdisciplinary arts guy), and Khalifa Mitchell. [Facebook]
Virgina, 7pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). If you think socially conservative sexual politics are fucked in this country, try 19th century Dalmatia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where, as Wikipedia informs me, “Families without male offspring were considered cursed and doomed. In order to save themselves from the curses, those families declared one of the female children a "virgin", i.e. man, hiding the truth as a family secret. The film follows the story of one such family.” Better a rooster for a day, than a hen for life: “as a handsome young boy, Stevan finds a boyfriend and a girlfriend, and a good deal of erotic tension with both.” [bampfa]
[West Bay Bonus Event Poemicized] Nick Martino's Debut Poetry Collection, SCRAP BOOK, 7pm, Green Apple Books (The Sunset). Nick Martino is rootling around in the archives of family shame, mementos, and fatherhood to patch together a poetry that is lyric, hybrid, and occasionally, a GIF (this is actually a very cool use of digital animation to enact an inverted blackout poetry form). Hear him in conversation with local poet Brian Tierney (Rise and Float from Milkweed Editions) about dads and trauma and finding forms to hold feelings. [GAB on the Park]
Berkeley Poetry Slam: Queer Prom! ft. Reggie Edmonds-Vazquez, 8pm, The Starry Plough Pub (Berkeley). It's Queer Prom and there are queens and kings everywhere -- look, here's one regal poet getting crowned: Reggie "This ain't about no sad shit, this is about the grilled cheese I ate at 3 in the morning in my friend's bed!" Edmonds-Vazquez aka the Berkeley and Oakland Slam organizer aka author of Ecology of the Hood from Foglifter. Now stay for the rest of the competition, maybe you'll be a judge, who knows what the night holds. [eventbrite]
Also: Jeremy Atherton Lin with Cathy Park Hong / Deep House at The Booksmith (The Haight)
Thursday, June 25
Maggie Tokuda-Hall storytime: Love in the Library , 2:30pm, Claremont Branch (Fancy Berkeley). Maggie occasionally takes breaks from doing her civic duty to do her other civic duty: turning ordinary children into bookworms (it's how we make more of ourselves, infectiously). Sharing the love story of her grandparents also means sharing the story of Japanese internment since they met in a camp, and this storytime is part of the library's epic run of programming in support of The Poet and the Silk Girl, from Heyday author Satsuki Ina. Get yourself a library that loves their local authors and local publishers like Berkeley's and Albany's do, and tax the hell out of yourselves to support it EL CERRITO. [BPL]
The Poet's Bookshelf: Book Club on Neither Created Nor Destroyed by Zara Jamshed & Workshop, 5pm, Nomadic Bookshop (Uptown). Gather for discussion of this new book (from Game Over Books!) by Oakland poet Zara Jamshed, who has written an ode to their undercut and a patriotic poem to their imagined community (cf B. Anderson) of queeristan, explored the self as museum, and more. Sometimes poets are engineers and trans and Pakistani and more -- and they definitely are in Oakland. [Nomadic Bookshop]
Black Life: Transition as Miracle, 5pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). An improvisational performance that finds out “What happens when two performance artists—identities unknown to each other as well as to the audience until the day of the show—come together?” They both “share Nigerian heritage,” and “their works are informed by Black Queer/Trans need and necessity, and inhabit the threshold between here and gone, spirit and skin, gender and masquerade.” This is the fourth “mystery duet” in a yearlong series called AS LONG AS THERE ARE CATASTROPHES, THERE WILL BE MIRACLES, organized by Gabriele Christian. [bampfa]
An Evening with Oakland's West Edge Opera, 6pm, Local Economy (Rockoperaridge). Opera season starts soon, and Pauline has opera-pilled us, so we are so ready to launch her at this year's installment. Get a sneak (verbal) peak in this discussion with West Edge Opera about their upcoming programming and making old kinds of art in Oakland today. I will say, when you read the lyrics that the opera singers are aria-ing, they're consistently pretty boring, even though they sound very pretty in their mouths. Opera is really meant to just be a lovely sonic backdrop to social climbing and affairs up in the boxes, as Edith Wharton has tried to tell you. [luma]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Embrace: a performance of cello, poetry, ceramics, and dance, 6pm, SFMOMA (SoMa). D.S. Waldman's debut poetry collection Atria, set in the galleries of the museum, inspires and sets the occasion for this performance of Embrace, a gorgeous multi-sensory art experience created by sculptor Ashwini Bhat, poet Forrest Gander, and musician Theresa Wong. I saw the first performance in the fog of the Headlands last summer and it was so engaging: integrating body, mind, song, making, seeds and dirt, words and movement. GO!! See the new version with additions of a dancer and another poet! This is very special and deeply of this Bay Area place and community. [insta]
Community meeting: No Coal in the East Bay!, 7pm, La Peña Cultural Center (Oakland Part of Berkeley). You don’t have to read Megan Wachspress’s big piece about the coal terminal before going, but if you do, you’ll want to; rumor has it an ORB or two will be there. Fuck the coal terminal, is our position. See you at La Peña to learn about the decade-long campaign opposing the coal terminal, get updates on the campaign, and brainstorm ways to take action in small groups. [La Pena]
America, Seen From Elsewhere, 7pm, Clio’s Books (Grand Lake). Madeleine Schwartz, founder and editor in chief of media comrade The Dial, who is the global to our local, comes to town on book tour for the Dial's first anthology, out with The New Press: How We See It: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump. It doesn't look good from the inside either, guys. Contributor Saumya Roy (journalist from India, teaches at Cal) joins the conversation too. [eventbrite]
Rolling Papers, 7pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). Is this the Estonian Clerks? I mean, probably not, but click the link, look at that picture, and read the description and tell me that’s not what comes to mind. Anyway, ignore me, and go ahead and see it, it actually sounds like a terve meeleolu. [bampfa]
Women Director Series: Miranda July, 7:30pm, Orinda Theater (Hot Side of the Hills). Heroine of the bisexual perimenopausal set Miranda July also has had something of a career in film, it seems (one might have guessed from the sharp three act structure of All Fours, plus the attention to set dressing). According to my brief review of brief reviews, her movie KAJILLIONAIRE involves cons getting heisty and then very gay, specifically Evan Rachel Wood and Gina Rodriguez. Preceded by a short written/starring/directed by Miranda July (her again!) who plays all the roles. [Orinda Movies]
Also: Decolonized Kitchen with educator Maribel Garcia at West Oakland Branch (West Oakland) / Diaspora Spice Co. Cookbook Evening at Greens Restaurant (Fort Mason) / Heavy Metal: Industrial Artisan Fair at The Crucible (West Oakland) / Repulsive Reads: Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle at North Branch (Berkeley) / Heated Rivalry Trivia at West Branch BPL (West Berkeley) / Discussion of Organizing Strategies and Unions of Our Own at Long Haul (Berkeley) / [SOLD OUT] The Leading Ladies Book Club: The Correspondent at Book Society San Francisco Popup (The Embarcadero)
Friday, June 26
Punk Poetry Vol. 1, 6pm, Nomadic Bookshop (Uptown). Great cross-bay line up of Punk Poets happening in Oakland! Mikey Gallagher, Melchor Sahagun III, Brontez Purnell, Giovanna Lomanto, and Josiah Luis Alderete are going to rock the Nomadic's mic tonight, and in addition to free excellent poetry, there will be free pizza and beer (also excellent). [insta]
Poetry! 6pm, Tamarack (Downtown). The listing says “Elias Gonzalez”, which the elder millennials will remember vaguely as a name associated with Cuba but! Is this actually Elisa Gonzalez in disguise, because that’s who showed up when I googled “Elias Gonzalez poet.” Come and be surprised, either way. Accompanied by Avren “Your Nonbinary Ambassador of Love” Keating, Angel Dominguez who writes smoke break poems against fascism, and Hannah Kezema (Game Over Books, hybrid works, listen here). [poetry in the bay google doc]
Tide Tables, Ambient Jazz and Bay Science with LoFi Oyster Co., 6:30pm, Local Economy (Rockymountainoysterridge ). LoFi Oyster Co brings their combination of ambient jazz (with live improvisational singer Roco Córdova today!) and shellfish into a three(four?)some with those swingers at Local Economy and their partner-for-the-day the Wild Oyster Project, which envisions a bay filtered by our native Olympia oysters and is collecting oyster shells toward rebuilding that ecology. Slurp up your second oyster-flavored evening of the week! [luma]
Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World, 7pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). I looked up bestsellers in poetry at one point, more than a decade ago, and Seamus Heaney, Charles Bukowski, and Mary Oliver dominated the rankings -- outsiders becoming insiders. Not many poets get their own movie, but this one does! Accompany this with a reading -- of her poetry, sure but also of Maggie Millner's great essay last year in The Yale Review reckoning with both Oliver and the middlebrow absconders of Oliver, in which she works to reclaim Oliver's darkness and lyric shame out of her own embarrassment in loving this most comforting of contemporary American poets. [bampfa]
Also: Friday Nights with The Seshen at OMCA (The Lake) / From Ochazuke to Adobo: Care, Memory, and the Immigrant Kitchen with Julia LaChica at Oakland Asian Cultural Center (Chinatown) / Heated Rivalry Trivia Night at Faction Brewing (Alameda)
Saturday, June 27
19th Annual Juneteenth Celebration & Street Festival, 10am, St. Mary's Center (Hoover Foster). Oakland's culminating Juneteenth celebration, held for almost two decades: with DJs and movies and librarians for liberation! Learn our history and get free. [OPL]
Knit Mending Craft Sesh, 10am, Strawberry Creek Park (West Berkeley). Fix your holey socks and sweaters outside in a park with Van Tran, whose sewing zine is at Bather's Library (I saw it in the paper and the flesh). Crafters, knitters, people who would rather repair then trash their damaged clothing-friends, sit in a circle and wear sunscreen. [insta]
Bay Area Tea Friends: arts, crafts, & old tree tea, 10am, Strawberry Creek Park (West Berkeley). Knitters and tea drinkers are quite the venn diagram that's nearly a perfect circle. Bring your own water, some "old tree" (interpretation up to you) tea to steep, some crafts to do or blur the circles into an ovoid shape and mend your ripped elbows while tea-sipping. [luma]
Olfactory Playground, 12 noon, Two Two (Grand Ave). Smellcaster Arianna Khmelniuk leads a four-hour studio in making scents that you can use to capture Oakland's smell with a base note of Lake Merritt funk and a top note of eucalyptus leaves on fire: "The studio is intentionally rigorous." Make us an ORB perfume, we’re worth it. [insta]
Meet Nicole Carr, author of The Price of Exclusion: The Pursuit of Healthcare in a Segregated Nation, 2pm, African American Museum and Library (Old Oakland). Journalist Nicole Carr talks about her new book on the overlooked history of Black medical professionals and the systemic barriers that have shaped healthcare inequities in the United States, blending investigative reporting with personal narrative. [OPL]
Marin Poetry Center Traveling Show, 2pm, North Branch (Fancy Berkeley). Poets come in to read you poems, start some friendly conversation, and only bite if you want them to. Readers: Kathe Jordan, Susan Cohen, Jeanne Wagner, Rebekah Wolman, Judy Wells, Dale Jensen. [BPL]
Feral Fruits: Foraging and Community, 2pm, Claremont Branch BPL (Fancier Berkeley). Scholars say the Oakland Bay Area is officially the gleaniest place in the United States. At the library, Daniel Goldberg of Feral Ecology will talk about the abundance of everything fruity growing inside the city limits and how you can ferment most of it into alcohol. [BPL]
Killer’s Kiss, 7pm, BAMPFA (Berkeley). Not Kubrick’s first film, but still pretty far from where he’d end up. If you can see the director of Dr. Strangelove, 2001, and The Shining in this, congratulations to you: it’s a movie that people watch because its director also directed Dr. Strangelove, 2001, and The Shining (but there are worse reasons, because he sure as heck did direct those movies too.) [BAMPFA]
Women in Wilderness: Nocturnal Journal Stroll, 8:30pm, Camp Ohlone Road Trailhead (Sunol). For the ladies (inclusive): come walk at night in the East Bay wilderness, let the dark settle into your skull, widen your eyes, open your ears, flow onto paper. Mary Oliver would love it. [EBRPD]
Also: Walk & Listen: A Piedmont Ave Branch Audiobook Club at Piedmont Avenue Branch OPL (Piedmont Ave) / Oakland Noticing Club: Rainbows at Local Economy (Rockridge) / The Movement Book Club reads In Transit by Dex Anderson at North Branch BPL (Berkeley) / Gardening Workshop: Mediterranean Climate & Plants at Piedmont Avenue Branch OPL (Piedmont Avenue) / June Death Cafe at Central Library (Berkeley) / Oakland Bloom Presents: Oaxacan Chocolate Workshop with Rufi's Cacao at Asian Branch OPL (Chinatown) / The Harbor Hootenanny- Square Dance & Concert at Point San Pablo Harbor (Upper Outer Northern Oakland Just Past Good Hot) / Agnes Martian at Shapeshifter Cinema (Jack London Square)
Sunday, June 28
Gemma Correll's Anxietyland, 3pm, Mrs. Dalloway's (Elmwood). Berkeley cartoonist and author shares her debut book of pictures with words in them that's a "hilarious thrill ride exploring the mysteries of the mind-body connection" and also voluntary commitment to a psychiatric hospital. With chuckles and guffaws! [Mrs D's]
Can I Get a SoulFlow Sundays?!, 4pm, Kinfolk (Downtown). Two open mics are coming together! SoulFlow Sundays, a space for Black creatives to share their work, and Can I Get a Witness, in which community engagement and response are prioritized, are linking up. Hosted by Black femmes Debbie and Tayleur: bring your poems, songs, raps, and your open hearts. [partiful]
[North Bay Bonus Event] 2025–2026 Graduate Fellows Exhibition, 4pm, Headlands Center for the Arts (Marin Headlands). This past year's graduate fellows Josephine Devanbu, Emily Harter, Jonah Reenders, Eleanor Scholz O’Leary, and bryant terry share their work. The show, titled "Welcome In This Continuous Loop of Transformation" is curated by Shirin Makaremi, a baker, an artist, and a seer of possibility. There's one of the Headlands' legendary dinners after, but it's sold out -- the art is free to look at and open to all though, and Shirin told me how much working on this show with the artists relied on deep conversations with the artists so she could interpret their practice and showcase their work for you, you, you. [headlands]
The Killing, 6:30pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). OK, this Kubrick kid is finally starting to figure out how to direct a decent movie; this one is a pretty darned decent movie. Racetrack heist, noir shit, etc. “I bet in eleven years he’s going to make 2001: A Space Odyssey" said no one in 1957. [BAMPFA]
Also: Fungi Workshop with Taye and Ryath of Symbiioitica at Fig Leaf Gardens (Redwood Heights)
