Oakland Review of Books calendar of (not just) literary events, May 20–26
All this week, you can vote in The Lake Merritt Dog Contest for the cute, ugly, young, old, pampered, or resilient character-rich dog(s) of your choice. Voting closes 5/25! So many good dogs! Hana Baba shares folktales from Sudan all week at the Oakland Public Library, if you missed her last week. It’s opening week for the Ballers, and SOME of us are still drama kids at heart who unabashedly love musical theater and are pretty damn excited by the new musical Cofounders by and about Oakland folks opening at ACT on May 29 (more on how the show came together from East Bay Yesterday)—so call up your neighbors and buy some tickets. And could this be a hot marigold summer? Oakland Public Library thinks so! Pick up your seedling from 5/24 to 5/31 and grow a teeny flowering sun. And now, on with the show!
Tuesday, May 20
Seeds of Conciseness: we are the web we weave, 12 p.m., Laney College Library, Oakland. An opening reception for the Spring 2025 Eco Art Matters Showcase, with performances and artist talks about the work that weaves them into closer community with human and nonhuman neighbors. [Instagram]
Oakland Poetry Slam, 7 p.m., Tamarack, Oakland. Monthly slam! Does it hold a candle to the Berkeley one? Writing Workshop led by Tino V.H. Jr. at 7:20 p.m., performances at 8 p.m. [Eventbrite]
Poets Maggie Smith and Matthew Zapruder, 7 p.m., Mrs. Dalloway’s, Berkeley. Both Smith and Zapruder have written books of poems and poetic memoirs exploring how language can approach the welling forth of human experiences uncontainable in words like “parenting,” “autism,” “neoliberalism,” and “my poem went viral then my husband had an affair because he couldn’t handle my success but my books of poetry are bestsellers now so fuck him.” Really into both of these poets, wholeheartedly. [Mrs. Dalloway’s]
West Bay bonus event: BOUNCE podcast launch party, 7:30 p.m., KALW HQ, downtown West Bay. Tip off the Golden State Valkyries’ debut season with the launch party for the new KALW podcast following the team's Bay Area journey. BOING! [Eventbrite]
Also: Kiss & Tell Salon on YA Romance w/ Alanna Bennett & Jasmine Guillory (Books Inc. Alameda) / Undefeated: The Wrongful Conviction of Pierre Rushing (Grand Lake Theatre)
Wednesday, May 21
Bring a Book, all evening, Couchdate, downtown Oakland. Lowkey night to catch up on some reading while good records spin. [Instagram]
Once Upon a Time at Fairyland, evening, Children’s Fairyland, Oakland. An adults-only evening of food, wine, costumes, and magic to raise a record amount of funds to support Fairyland in its 75th year! Limited seats remain; please reach out directly to Leslie Fay Marks, senior director of philanthropy, at leslie.marks@fairyland.org to inquire about ticket availability. [Fairyland]
Bonus West Bay event: The ZYZZYVA Issue 129 celebration and 40th Anniversary kickoff, 6 p.m., Kerouac Alley. The readers include Katherine Franco, writer and futurist Dominica Phetteplace, fiction novelist Marian Palaia, and poet D.A. Powell, emceed by ZYZZYVA editor Oscar Villalon. A San Francisco literary stalwart! [City Lights]
DÌDI, 6:30 p.m., The New Parkway, Oakland. Coming of age as a Taiwanese American boy in Fremont. East Bay story told by an East Bay director! [The New Parkway]
From Pinochet to Trump: Fighting to Defeat Fascism, 7 p.m., Berkeley. 25-minute film on nonviolent protest’s power against fascism in Chile, followed by discussion. [Eventbrite]
Also: Anti-Chevron Day Berkeley Banner Drop (580 overpass) / Much Ado About Keanu (Berkeley Library)
Thursday, May 22
Francine Masiello’s The Tomb of the Divers Book Launch, 3 p.m., Ishi Court, Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley. Learn about a cross-national, multigenerational novel by the noted Latin Americanist scholar and professor emerita of comp lit. [UC Berkeley]
Translator Odile Cisneroson galáxias by Brazilian avant-gardist Haroldo de Campos, 7 p.m., downtown Berkeley Pegasus. Joined in conversation by local author and translator Dick Cluster. Recently published by Ugly Duckling Presse (UDP makes my heart flutter every time, they’re so weird and wonderful). This brilliant work, composed over two decades and published in 1984, charts a linguistic odyssey across time and space, from Homer’s ancient Greece to the 1950s Beat poets—a formidable experiment in polyglot poetry. [Pegasus]
Bonus West Bay event: In Bituin opening night, 7:30 p.m., Bindlestiff. A semi-autobiographical performance about a Filipino American comic in search of his cultural identity, who finds the love of his life in Manila only to tragically lose her 29 years later. Four performances only!! [Bindlestiff]
Friday, May 23
The Tritone Poetry Series, 6:30 p.m., Tamarack, Oakland. Curated by Noor Khashe Brody, this week’s show features poets José Vadi (Chipped: Writing From a Skateboarder's Lens), Hector Son Of Hector, and Christine No (Whatever Love Means). [Tamarack]
Hannah Zeavin discussing her new book, Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the 20th Century, with Jessica Ferri, 7 p.m., Womb House, Temescal Alley, Oakland. From MIT Press, another favorite weirdo. Technology is seen and judged as harmful in domestic and educational spaces, even as it is a saving grace in the unending labor of raising a family. What’s a mother to do? (I bought a secondhand Snoo and slept six hours a night with a 2-week-old, so that’s my answer.) [Eventbrite]
eggcorn album release show, with Sucker Crush and Perhapsy, 8 p.m., Tiny Telephone Oakland. Music! Probably with some words in it! [eggcorn]
Bonus West Bay event: Sun Ra Birthday Celebration: Live Music from the Musele Project & screening of Space is the Place, 7:30 p.m., 4 Star Theater, Clement St. In 1974, KQED producer Jim Newman followed a jazz musician who believed he was from Saturn around the streets of Oakland. The result, Sun Ra: Space is the Place, is an Afrofuturist classic! Plus, the Musele Project is an Oakland based deep listening project. [4 Star Theater]
Also: OMCA Friday nights / Nikkolas Smith with his picture book The History of We (Mrs. Dalloway’s)
Saturday, May 24
More Than a Space of Preservation: The Making of the African American Museum and Library at Oakland, 11 a.m., AAMLO. A full day of activities that will provide an important link to the past, present, and future of AAMLO. View artifacts, watch a film screening, meet spoken word artists, and participate in AAMLO’s book giveaway. [OPL]
Celebrate revolutionary ecology on Judi Bari Day, 11:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m., Park Blvd. & East 34th St., ~3401 Park Blvd across from Arco, Cleveland Heights, Oakland. If you were NOT donating 10 bucks every month from your bookstore clerk paycheck in 1998 to Forests Forever, let me catch you up. This is an important Oakland landmark currently unmarked, so there will be a group making public art here to commemorate the history of the FBI’s efforts to paint direct action environmentalists as terrorists. I’ll put it another way: You liked Richard Powers’s Overstory? Come on out. [Bay Area Coalition for Headwaters]
Packing a go bag & making a plan, 2 p.m., the building at Gill Tract Farm, 1050 San Pablo Ave., Albany. What do you pack in a go bag? Prep together—disasters are a matter of when, not if. And we need each other when the fire, flood, or earthquake comes.
Redwood Heights Geology Walk, 2 p.m., Redwood Heights Recreation Center, Oakland. Speaking of earthquakes! Walk around Redwood Heights/Leona Heights with Deep Oakland author Andrew Alden and learn about the mines, creeks, faults, and rocks that shape Oakland’s history and present. Creep: Were TLC and Radiohead just channeling the Hayward fault? [Eventbrite]
Opening of Un//titled Collective’s exhibition Zephyr Coating, 5 p.m., 120710 Gallery, Berkeley. This curatorial debut by the Bay Area–based collective spotlights various local artists whose work explores transformation, materiality, memory, and identity—primarily through sculptural forms. Zephyr Coating takes inspiration from the poem Wind Shift by American poet Jan C. Snow. Poetry reading at 8:30 p.m. [120710 Gallery]
Fundraiser for Transit Books! 5 p.m., Womb House Books, Temescal. Our friends at Transit are one of the great local publishers who took a hit from DOGE shenanigans, so come out to their pop-up fundraiser party, hosted by Alexis Madrigal and Lauren Markham. [Eventbrite]
Woolsey Heights Early-ish Show, 7 p.m., Berkeley. Maw Shein Win, Odile Cisneros, and David Koehn. Long -running house show key to the East Bay (and national) poetry scene. [Instagram]
Also: Oakland Silent Book Club—weekend edition / Berkeley Nature Journaling Club / California Writers Club (Rockridge Branch, OPL) / Be The Next Nobody with Punk Band Karaoke (Ivy Room) / Work day at The Good Table ahead of the pay-what-you-can café opening, June 2025 / Port Costa all-day, all-town yard sale
Sunday, May 25
Black Birders Week 2025, 9 a.m., Thurgood Marshall Regional Park, Concord. Launch Black Birders Week! All events hosted by EBRPD for Black Birders Week are listed here. [EBRPD]
Turtle Trek, 9:30 a.m., Sunol-Ohlone Regional Wilderness, Sunol. In honor of World Turtle Day, meet at the Sunol visitor center for a scenic three-mile hike to High Valley Pond in search of the western pond turtle, California's only native freshwater turtle. Caveat hikor: Western pond turtle sightings not guaranteed. [EBRPD]
Launch party concert and fundraiser for Project Wonderland, 3:30 p.m., North Oakland. Project Wonderland is an immersive musical about artist communities, cults, folk music, and surviving climate catastrophe. Led by queer artists Jax Blaska and Gabi Orion and transpiring for the first time this September at Winslow House Project. [Eventbrite]
May 2025 Picture Book Club for Grownups, 3:30 p.m., Mr. Mopps, Berkeley. Picture Book Club is a group for grownups who love picture books and want to share their favorites by reading those books aloud to others and then having a fun discussion. I have been convinced by Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen’s argument that picture books are an avant-garde literary art form, and if you’ve never considered them through that lens, this is the place to go talk about it. Also, if you have never seen Gertrude Stein’s book for kids, illustrated by the legendary Clement Hurd, it exists. [Eventbrite]
Summer of Changing Light (Bathers Library Reading Group), 6 p.m., Bathers Library, Oakland. Meeting James Merrill’s epic occult poetic trilogy The Changing Light at Sandover and his collaborative writing approach with a collaborative reading approach, this group will consider the possibility that humanity as we know it is the most recent in a series of experiments in world-building, while exploring the formal shifts and breakdowns that characterize the poet as medium. Meeting outdoors in the hour of changing light. Led by Kelly Egan, a poet, amateur diviner, and student of various occult arts. [Bathers Library]
Also: 𝓐 𝓕𝓸𝓻𝓶 𝓽𝓸 𝓐𝓬𝓸𝓶𝓶𝓸𝓭𝓪𝓽𝓮 𝓣𝓱𝓮 𝓜𝓮𝓼𝓼 (Personal Space, Vallejo) / Sesame Spring Market (Berkeley) / Nature Meets Artificiality (TwoTwo, Grand Lake) / Fabric Marker Jam with Cone Shape Top (BAMPFA)
Monday, May 26
Memorial Day Civil War Plot Tour of Mountain View Cemetery, 11 a.m., Oakland. Led by Dennis Evanosky following the cemetery’s 101st Memorial Day commemoration event. [Mountain View Cemetery]
When The Smoke Comes, 6 p.m., Kinfolx, downtown Oakland. A free monthly creative writing space for the end and beginning of worlds, facilitated by Kevin Madrigal Galindo. Writing is a vehicle to explore how the creative can, must be, and already is political. [Eventbrite]
