Oakland Review of Books calendar of (not just) literary events, November 3–8
The rain gave the ferns, moss, and manzanitas their winter glow up this weekend, but the mushrooms are still deflated, waiting underground for more rain to fill their chitinous shells and plump them up for us to find. Soon, soon. In the meantime, review the ORB voter page (or our one-sheet) and vote before the polls close tonight!
This week theatre is underway in Berkeley (Shakespeare and more), and revving up to honor Dolores Huerta soon in Oakland. Soon, soon. This weekend you can jump into the stream with the steelhead of Alameda Creek (metaphorically: it’s a conference) or cross the Bay to remember CCA and bring your ephemera for the community archive. The sixth installment of Hidden Colors is sold out at GLT (amazing to see an indie film about Black resistance to white supremacy getting so much love, but read Michael Harriot on Tariq Nasheed for a dose of skepticism). GLT is also showing many other movies you can go to, like the 23rd Annual Animation Show of Shows and La Bola Negra, a movie made by a lot of people named Javier. The Albany Library of Greater North Oakland is slinging books for cheap all weekend and over on the cold side of the hills in greater East Oakland, the Castro Valley library is hosting a conversation with artist Kalie Grenier and the Muwekma Ohlone about artworks on display all weekend. The large university that sits astride Strawberry Creek is trying to fit in all their events before finals, so go infest the public university with your townie presence as we suggest below, or I guess you could sing along to your favorite Leonard Cohen songs from Thursday in the West Bay, starting in Yiddish and going on from there. And don't forget you’ve got our calendar friends at Screen Slate for your movie needs and Same Page SF for your books in the West Bay needs, and the best art all over the Bay from San Francisco Has [No] Culture and even more art from artbae and even more Oakland from Azucena at Oaklandside! There’s a lot, is what we’re saying, even as we taper toward hunkering inside near a fire to read all the books we bought last month. Soon, soon. —MS, XL
Oakland Review of Books
Tuesday, November 3
Electoral Democracy, before end of day, A Democracy (Near You). [Helpfully correct opinions]
Long Train Running: The Story of the Oakland Blues, 6pm, West Oakland Public Library (De Fremery). Are you down and out, did your woman treat you wrong, did you wake up with that low down feeling lingering and lagging on your mind? Come down to the library for this 1981 doc about the West Oakland blues, which came up from Louisiana and Texas to the Bay and "got a slow draggery beat and a kinda mournful sound." The film was made by Peter Webster and Marlon Riggs when they were students at the J School at Cal. Riggs went on to make influential documentaries about race and sexuality and was tenured at his alma mater before dying of complications from AIDS at age 37. Alongside the screening, a conversation will be led by the organizers of the Black Studies Collective reading group that has been convening at the library this past year. [insta]
WAITLIST Tommy Orange and Shane Hawk talk indigenous horror stories, 6pm, Local Economy (Rockridge). I've had enough of creeps slithering around in my life, vampiric and slit-tongued, so I’ll be skipping this. But it is spooky season, and half the folks reserving tickets don’t come to events, so show up if you daaaare. There's been so many horrors visited on Indigenous people that this anthology of spine-shivering stories should sink its fangs into everyone's psyche. Contributor Tommy Orange will talk with anthology co-editor Shane Hawk: both are hella Californian and members of the Cheyenne & Arapaho tribe. Gear yourself up for what's hiding in the dark: behind seemingly kind eyes and kind words there are gaping wounds and blood spatter and inhuman things that feed on souls. [luma]
Finding Synchronicity: An Election Night Living Room Conversation, 6pm, Book Society (Elmwood). Do you want to NOT talk about the future of this nation, state, and community? Sip wine with Sky Nelson-Isaacs, a spiritual seeker who found some string theory and synchronicity at some point after his parents introduced him to his first guru in kindergarten. He’ll be leading the conversation with early screensaver millionaire turned Democratic organizer Joan Blades, who thinks the brownshirts, red hats, and the rest of us should have drinks and chat amiably as the results come in. [booksociety.social]
Floating to Shore Poetry Open Mic, 7pm, Night Heron (Downtown). Bring some rhythm and drama to the bar tonight! Alie Jones hosts the last Floating to Shore of 2026, so pull out all the poetry, stories, lyrics, spells, curses you saved all year for hollering up alongside all the crows massing in the autumn sky. Take your turn at the mic to let them fly. [insta]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Lo-Fi Oyster Co. presents Normal Dreams featuring Liana Zhen-Ai and Astrid Sonne, 7pm, Saint Joseph's Art Society (Leather District). If you haven't been here, get your ass to the West Bay because this is gorgeous (and because Ken Fulk is up to his ass in debt due to the place I waitressed at the summer after college being a totally gorgeous albatross so let’s enjoy this while it lasts). Say hi if you come, and let's slurp some seafood and quaff champagne while we immerse ourselves in experimental music and movement. Liana Zhen-ai dances and Astrid Sonne brings the strings and song, all of us surrounded by exquisite furniture and art and ideas of oysters. [thethirdplace.is]
Also: Club de Lectura | Book Club: "Chicano Movement for Beginners" at EastSide Arts Alliance (Rancho San Antonio) / FRISH BRANDT—Unfinished Business: Writing the Five Essential Letters of Your Life at Books Inc. (Palo Alto)
Wednesday, November 4
Reading with a Water Hero, 10:30am, Newark Library (Deep South Oakland). So yesterday Oakland voted on who should manage the EBMUD water supply from the Mokelumne River, but interestingly enough, the Alameda County Water District gets its water for the eastern and southern parts of the county elsewhere: in large part from the State Water Project, which siphons water from the Delta and the high Sierra, and from the Alameda Creek Watershed, one of the major waterways in the East Bay. Let the truth spill from the mouths of babes as they ask at storytime about supporting steelhead trout habitat and the lives of salt marsh mice among the pickleweed. [AC Library]
Sanctuary Making: Immigrant Families Reshaping Geographies of Deportability, noon, Social Sciences Building (Cal). Sanctuary Making by Carolina Valdivia explains both how immigration enforcement has moved to places like Highland Hospital here in Oakland as well as into grocery stores, gas stations, and street corners. Using the "100 mile zone" rule turns most of California into a border zone. Valdivia particularly focuses on San Diego county, and on young adults in families with members at risk of deportation, learning how they find safety in a deeply precarious time. [UC]
Landback Litigation, 3:35pm, Berkeley Law (Cal). If you missed ORB and Cassie Thornton's opening salvo for the Seize Piedmont Community Art + Design Perennial at the Bathers Library Summer Symposium, spend some time today historicizing your class war. Learn about Ackerman v. Piedmont, the case filed last year on behalf of the Dearing family, the Black landowners driven out from Piedmont through eminent domain in 1924. Zoe Polk, Executive Director of the East Bay Community Law Center, and Arnold E. Brown II, the lawyer suing Piedmont on behalf of Dearing family descendants, will talk about all the ways real estate agents, racist governments, and bad neighbors have made generational wealth for themselves by yoinking value and opportunity from people of color in the Bay Area for lo this long century plus. [UC]
Celebrate Diwali: Stories, Dance, and Light, 5pm, Golden Gate Branch (San Pablo Corridor). It's all Diwali all the time this week! Get your family dance on at the library, where all the ravers are bumping and grinding in saris and kurtas. [OPL]
One Village, One Book Bookclub, 6:30pm, Montclair Branch (The Hills). This is the ORBiest bookclub, focused on reading and writing from here, in the most adorable library around. The Giveaway is a set in a noir Berkeley with bisexual tendencies, and goes on from there. Solve the mystery with your fellow book clubbers. [OPL]
Truong Tran: "How to Exi(s)t: A Poet's Memoir", with Esmé Weijun Wang, 7pm, Pegasus (Downtown Berkeley). Truong Tran will discuss his new memoir How to Exi(s)t from City Lights (Kirkus: "A wise, reflective self-portrait shimmering with genuine emotion and bracing honesty") with novelist and essayist Esmé Weijun Wang (The Collected Schizophrenias, The Border of Paradise). Writing into English from Asian immigrant experience and through minds off kilter to the mainstream, these local writers hold our world up at an angle, helping us see its weirdness and our own. [pegasusbookstore.com]
The Berkeley Slam ft. Ashia Ajani, 8pm, The Starry Plough Pub (Berkeley). When I saw Ashia last week at the cutest wine bar open mic, they were pure audience but today they take the stage! Come hear their poems about place and plants, ancestors and queer connection, then perform your own for the judges in three minutes or less and see if you can make it to the next round! [eventbrite]
Also: Berkeley Book Chat with Atreyee Gupta: Non-Aligned: Art, Decolonization, and the Third World Project in India at Geballe Room (Cal) / Geography Colloquium: Teacher Organizing Across the Americas: Diverse Strategies for Transforming Unions, Schools, and Society at McCone Hall (Cal) / Expecting Inequity: How the Maternal Health Crisis Affects Even the Wealthiest Black Americans at Banway Building (Cal) / Richard Louv—Noticing at Book Passage (North Bay) / Pub Scholar: "How Hollywood Gets Ghosts Wrong (and Right)" at 51 and Tel (Downtown) / Short Story Symposium: The Book of Martha, by Octavia Butler at 540 Laguna St (West Bay)
Thursday, November 5
Lunch Poems: Reading by Stephanie Young, 12:10pm, Morrison Library (Cal). Stephanie Young, who guesses we'll never have an orgiastic Happening and guesses that we're too old to carry out maintenance activities in public spaces, during public hours, is also teaching Creative Writing in the Age of AI at the School Formerly Known as Mills and was also recently thinking really hard about plants and what they can teach us about Creative Writing in the Age of AI through the drugs they make for us. Whichever thread she'll pull on today in the wombiest library on the campus Formerly Known as Cal (the branding committee says that only applies to Athletics now but ORB refuses to comply with corporate bullshit), it will be a spectacle and all the poets will feast and maybe we can have an orgiastic Happening if it's in the library, at lunchtime, and more a fever dream than something messy on the rugs. [insta]
Wrenching News Workshops, 3pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). I am just really into print, and touching it, wringing the paper and crushing it. I used to always help crunch and twist the paper for our woodburning stove in the winters (and summers... California), and now you can do that but for a Maren Hassinger sculpture instead of flames. Be part of a collective: get ink on your fingers and make art together. [bampfa.org]
One Fighting Irishman: A Film Screening and Panel Discussion, 6pm, Oakland Asian Cultural Center (Chinatown). Wayne M. Collins showed us what solidarity looks like when he joined the fight to defend Oakland's Fred Korematsu and thousands of other Japanese citizens and residents who had been interned, on behalf of the ACLU. There's been a book about his life and passionate work, now there's a movie by Sharon Yamato and Evan Kodani, narrated by George Takei, who was interned as a child. After the short doc, discuss the work with the filmmakers and Karen Korematsu, Fred's daughter. [oacc.cc]
In the Stax featuring Kayatta, 6pm, Tarea Hall Pittman Branch BPL (South Berkeley). West Oakland rapper and poet Kayatta now stays in Berkeley, where she educates and inspires young people with words and beats. Pull up a chair to listen in to the series highlighting Black voices in the Bay and stay a while.[BPL]
STACEY GORDON: The Pearl Farmers, 6:30pm, Books Inc. Alameda (The Island That Used to Be a Peninsula). Alameda novelist Stacey Gordon brings her first book into the world: The Pearl Farmers (She Writes Press). There's three sisters and a fight over inheritance set on a freshwater pearl farm in Tennessee, which seems all pretty pat, but you know what, this is an oystery, pearly week so buy yourself a little treat of a novel and enjoy the luster of a bunch of little orbs rolling around inside a story you know all the beats of. [eventbrite]
[West Bay Bonus Event] An Evening with Dodie Bellamy, Randall Mann, & Baruch Porras-Hernandez, 7pm, Et al. Gallery (The Mission ). Three West Bay institutions come together to promote poetics: Small Press Traffic, Foglifter Press, and USF’s MFA in Writing Program all still exist, and they are the reefs of an ecosystem for colorful poets to go swimming and gulping and hiding in nooks and crannies, to feel the vibrations from each fellow poet's movement in the water, to feed on the words of West Bay poets whose language has been accreting into knobbly statuary around us all this time. Hear some very queer work because San Francisco is nothing without the gays and their vibes: Dodie Bellamy brings the prose, Randall brings the villanelle, and Baruch brings the punchlines. [insta]
Lisa Hanawalt: I Can't Stop Thinking About Horses and Sex, 7pm, Pegasus Books (Downtown Berkeley). When men are unreliable, get a pony. Cartoonist Lisa Hanawalt talks with fellow story-drawer Julia Wertz about being into horses and fucking, though ORB primly hopes those two kinds of riding are carefully delineated and held in separate boxes in the comic strip. Also, the two cartoonists will talk about how to draw animals and humans all sexy-like. [insta]
[West Bay Bonus Event The Second] The Side of San Francisco's Homelessness Crisis We Don't See, 7pm, Decentered Arts Studio (SoMa). Giovanna Lomanto, poet and staff person at Raphael House, which supports and shelters homeless families, guides us through the real precarity of life and the barriers families have to jump in order to get help. I still remember trying to help a mom who had lost her housing in Oakland, and two of her kids were staying on couches with friends, she was staying in a motel room and asking for $100 to make it just another night with her five year old and teenager, and all the shelters were full in Alameda County. I was calling and calling and when there was one slot finally available, the parent could only bring one child with them. And she had to get herself all the way to Richmond for services, and that was after waiting 90 days from losing her income. It's so easy to despair and give up, but there are places and people who are bridging the gaps, and Giovanna will tell you those stories, too. [luma]
[West Bay Bonus Event The Y2Kest] manual reading club: the practice of machine reading, 7pm, tiat (Union Square). This is a different kind of machine reading: here you read the machines, through the technical language and drawings humans have made to explain them. Remember when cameras and software and vacuums came with books? Open the manual and read with your hands and eyes, learn the poetics of how these thingamabobs work. [luma]
Member screening—Songs My Brother Taught Me, 7:30pm, Sansaar Books (El Cerrito). Everyone's doing memberships these days, that's how businesses are getting by in this economy. Get a membership at Sansaar and it becomes more than a bookstore: now you can watch Chloé Zhao’s first movie in the shop, made before Hamnet and Nomadland brought her to wide acclaim. In Songs My Brothers Taught Me, Zhao brought members of the Pine Ridge Lakota people into the movie, drew from their real lives to tell the story of what it means to leave home, leave the land, leave family. Find community in the bookstore, which is also a movie theatre. [luma]
Also: Kelly Lytle Hernández | Racist by Design: Two Centuries of U.S. Immigration Control at Sutardja Dai Hall (Cal) / Jennie Durant, “Bitter Honey: Big Ag’s Threat to Bees and the Fight to Save Them” at Mulford Hall (Cal) / Matrix on Point: Propaganda Machines and Public Truths in the Age of AI at Social Sciences Building (Cal) / Fascism After Work: Post-Fordism, Abandonment, and Care at Dwinelle Hall (Cal) / Lia, Mira, Maria: Performance/Reading with Marília Garcia (2026 Brazilian Writer-in-Residence) at Spanish & Portuguese Library (Cal) / Reclaiming the Witch with Maya Gawonii Shabazz Saleh at Gender Equity Resource Center (Cal) / The Believer Issue 155 Release Party with Katherine Cusumano at City Lights Bookstore (West Bay) / Anthroposcenes: An Evening of Climate Theatre at The Ashby Stage (Berkeley)
Friday, November 6
Untitled Vol 2. Benefit Auction + Anniversary Party, 6pm, Untitled Vol 2 (Temescal Alley). Drink some beer and wine, and bid on some fine art by artists like Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Selby Sohn, and Beatrice Thornton. There are going to be readings and a raffle, and you'll be there to support the East Bay's art ecosystem and if you're lucky you'll go home with "The cats fucking beneath the pepper tree (Winslow House)" to bring the wilds of Vallejo to your boring walls and fuck up the joint a bit. [eventbrite]
An epic family read, Kirk Lombard's The Shadow Stream, 6pm, Local Economy (College Ave). I am having a piscine week, reading Hannah Hindley's Love and Other Fish, learning about the steelhead in Alameda Creek, and now bringing the whole family to the gathering to celebrate fisherman and Heyday author Kirk Lombard (Sea Forager’s Guide to the Northern California Coast) and his novel for children and animal lovers of all ages. In his story, everyone's favorite masked bandit, a lost boy, and a trout band together to try to save an urban waterway from going from bad to worse, and stop a damn dam from blocking fish from their home shoals. Weaving together lessons about humans and nature learned over a lifetime with both, Lombard's The Shadow Stream is for everyone who loved Homeward Bound and thinks anthropomorphizing animals is probably better than objectifying them. [luma]
Poetry Reading at Tamarack, 6:30pm, Tamarack (Downtown). Trans poets all night! The readers hosted by Naseem Alavi for your fabulousest Friday are a broad range of local genderfuck poets: the mysterious Flor Pericón, the only slightly less mysterious sometime-DJ Tajinder Virdee, the two spirit, cephalopod-loving Xóchitl Manuel Márquez most recently of Litcrawl, and KB Brookins (poetry book Freedom House and new memoir Pretty) who loves a good literary events calendar and says in Poetry, "I am the old / photo booth, making pixels with my mind. / Scoot over, T. Give me more to immortalize." [insta]
Safar (Journey): a Film by Priyanka Suryaneni, 7pm, EastSide Arts Alliance (Rancho San Antonio). Every Friday the EastSide Arts Alliance shows a movie that tells a story of collective resistance to oppression. Come through today for a film bringing out the story of early South Asians in California, specifically those came over in the early 20th century as revolutionaries building anti-colonial power outside of India so they could go back and run the British out. This film tells the story of Punjabi-Californian Joti Singh, who choreographs traditional dances, including one inspired by one of those revolutionaries: her great-grandfather Bhagwan Singh Gyanee, a Ghadar party leader who came through Angel Island, became a local anti-colonial leader in the Sikh communities of San Francisco and Stockton, organized international mutinies against the British Raj, spent time in prison for revolutionary activities, and lived to tell the tale. [ESAA]
Also: Mean Streets at BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley) / Harakiri at BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley)
Saturday, November 7
Discuss New Yorker Short Stories, 10am, Alameda Free Library (Once a Peninsula, Always a Peninsula). The hardcore readers of Alameda will not let you throw away your August issues until you've read Sheila Heti, Emma Cline, Rachel Yoder, and Madhuri Vijay in the last literary weekly we've got. Extra motivation: there will be cookies. [eventbrite]
Celebrate Diwali: Stories, Dance, and Light, 10:30am, Montclair Branch (Montclair). More library Diwali! Probably no actual oil lamps in the stacks, but hopefully lots of anklets jingling, stories of daring rescues and demon battles, and some arts and crafts for the kiddos. [OPL]
Meet the Authors: W. Kamau Bell and Adam Mansbach, 10:30am, Main Oakland Library (The Lake-ish). I remember when Akashic Books published Adam Mansbach's Go the Fuck To Sleep in 2011 and I was pulling and packing it from the shelves of the SPD warehouse in West Berkeley constantly. Man it's fun to see bestsellers from the backend. Now Berkeley's Mansbach has sent his eldest kid to college and he's written a new kids book with Oakland's W. Kamau Bell that's perfect for the rainy days that are coming, because when your kids complain about being bored they can make like the children in Rock, Paper, Scissors, Cheese! and improvise. Yes AND. [OPL]
Club Pear, noon, Two Two (Grand Lake). Sorry folks, the only culture here is cultured pearls, but that's enough for ORB tonight. Oysters are for eating (on Tuesday), for irritating into jewelry (today), and for restoring Bay health (in the future, if you want it). [partiful]
Diwali Variety Show, 12:30pm, Newark (Deep South Oakland). Your local library is getting decked out for Diwali, assuming your local library is in the Oakland suburb of Newark. What varieties of Diwali will be shown is anybody's guess, but it's great to see such intracommunal diversity. [AC Library]
Exploring BeHere / 1942 with Margaret Yee, 1pm, OMCA (The Lake). The reckoning with California's role in leading the unconstitutional incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War Two will continue until we stop locking immigrants up for the crime of working in our fields and factories while melanated. OMCA guide and educator Margaret Yee shows visitors how the exhibit of Japanese artist Masaki Fujihata's work starts with images first created by Dorothea Lange and Russell Lee to document the internment when the photographers were employees of the federal government, then digs into how the voices of those imprisoned escaped via a poetry exercise with “Evacuation” by Mitsuye Yamada. [OMCA]
[North Bay Bonus Event] Kirk Lombard: The Shadow Stream, 1pm, Book Passage (Corte Madera). The waterways of the Carquinez Strait and Golden Gate are no match for fisherman and novelist Kirk Lombard, who traverses the treacherous tides of the Bay in order to venture northwards, past the flooding at the Hwy 1 exit, up Corte Madera Creek at full swell to dock at Book Passage, pulling stories out of the water the whole way. Follow Kirk's imagination upstream as he tells the story of a boy and some animal friends determined to save a river, in a novel for middle grade readers set conveniently in 1997, before cell phones made escaping into the woods a lot harder. [bookpassage.com]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Wood Street: Film Screening and Q&A, 2pm, Koret Auditorium, SFPL Main (Civic Center). Go West Bay to see the movie made by Oakland neighbors about the Wood Street encampment's last days in West Oakland, and talk afterward with folks who were part of that community, cleared to make space for a parking lot. [insta]
LINDA NORTON & KIRIL BOLOTNIKOV: Collaborative Writing and Radical Imagination, 2pm, Nomadic Bookshop (Uptown). Get in poets, we're COLLAGING! Cento it up with exploratory poets Linda Norton (Wite Out, full of blackouts, cut-ups and erasure poems) and Kiril Bolotnikov ("me in california? now? / what a strange thing to happen/ what a life"), and expand your mind by pressing it up against other minds on the pages and in the aisles of the bookstore as you browse for the words you can unzip and recombine into a whole new animal, a chimera of collective composition. [nomadicbookshop]
The Great Camouflage: a Black surrealist poetry workshop, 2:30pm, The Sanctuary (Upper Broadway). Get unreal and get radical with amalee beatty and the Black revolutionary poets of the Caribbean negritude tradition. Last one of the year and worth way more than what you’ll pay for the wisdom on offer. [google doc]
ALAMEDUH Zine Issue 2 Release Party, 3pm, Faction Brewing (Alameda, Temporarily an Island). Hyperlocal is so much better than hyperscale! When you go deep instead of broad you build community together, everyone pitching in. ALAMEDUH Zine is popping off the page with food, art, zine making, goodies, and if you stick around after sunset, a dance party. The best part about making a zine or tiny book is that you can get others to start making their own and now you have a scene. [insta]
Oakland Diwali, 6pm, BLOC15 Event Venue (Jack London Square). When are Rama, Sita, and Hanuman going to get the Wilson and Nolan big guns? We hear you don't even have to be white to star in a major motion picture these days, so any time now.... While we're waiting, collect the marigold garlands left over from the Dia de los muertos altars and bring them and all your sparklers, diyas, and party clothes to this South Asian celebration of light winning over darkness. All the dances, all the good snacks, all because there's an epic drama that got told 2500 years ago and everyone loves a an epic story with a happy ending and a monkey god sidekick. Now that OMCA nights are over, we'll see you at the indoors festival instad! [eventbrite]
AMP Gathering 2026, 7pm, TAC: Temescal Art Center (Temescal). Experimental music sharing the soundscapes of Lebanon and then a discussion with Oakland People's Arms Embargo about their work to make OAK less of a hub for the brutal dealing of death to civilians halfway around the world. [insta]
Also: Oakland Noticing Club: Myth at Local Economy (College Ave) / AAMLO Kids Club at African American Museum and Library (Old Oakland) / Beyond Traditional Publishing with Albert Flynn DeSilver at Book Passage, Corte Madera Store (North Bay) / Kids' Hand Sewing Circle at Temescal Branch OPL (Temescal)
Sunday, November 8
[West Bay Bonus Event] The Forum with Rosanna Xia: California Against the Sea, 9:30am, Grace Cathedral (Nob Hill). Author of the only book about climate change caused sea level rise along the California coast, which is deeply relevant right about now as El Niño flooding shows us what's coming in the next few decades. Rosanna will be in discussion with The Very Rev. Dr. Malcolm Clemens Young about confronting the future not with fear or rose colored glasses, but by shouldering our shared responsibility. [ Grace Cathedral]
Hummingbird Saves Fire—Native Community Day, 11am, Fairyland (The Lake). Fairyland is Ohloneland and stories of how fire moves on this land help us understand the place we inherit responsibility for, as settlers who love this city of concrete laid over fields of flowering gold and the stumps of redwood giants. Hummingbird remember all the flowers whose seeds are banked and waiting, and how his throat was set aflame as he brought coals back to the people. And puppets of course (of course!) will tell you the story. [insta]
Mapping Utopias, 1pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). Utopia means no place, because of course the ideal society doesn't exist, but if it COULD, how would we get there and where do we make a left? Isa Prieto leads a discussion and some collaborative map making to imagine our way to another world, maybe the Big Rock Candy Mountain, where all the cops have wooden legs. But watch out who you let steer the good ship Idealism: as Ursula K Le Guin wrote in 1982, "The rationalist utopia is a power trip." What else could our collective vision of a perfect society encompass and would there be a strong mayor running it? (Probably not). RSVP to save your place in paradise! [bampfa]
We Owe You Nothing: The Politics & Poetics of Debt and Freedom Dreaming, 1pm, Black Panther Party Museum (Downtown). This is for sure the coolest event of the week! A poetry workshop led by writer Maddy Clifford of the Debt Collective, the first ever debtors' union. Shed the shackles of what you owe and dream toward freedom. But don't forget your anger, that's the fuel. It's not business as usual anymore. "Enough is enough is enough is enough," sings Maddy and you can sing along. [eventbrite]
Paris Marx: Hyperscale, 2pm, Clio's Books (The Lake). Incels rejoice, for Jeff Bezos is trying to build a data center in Oakland for new AI agents capable of rendering high-quality Malfoid gooner bait for the hungry masses. If none of that makes sense to you, congratulations on being healthy and normal! Even so, it's probably time to learn about what data centers are and why everyone is so goddamn mad about them. Enter Paris Marx and Dr. Alex Hanna. It's hard to think of many journalists who hate the tech industry more than (or as rigorously as) transit geographer Paris Marx, whose new book Hyperscale decries the environmental disaster wrought by the data center boom. Alex Hanna is a sociologist and the senior researcher at the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, who also released a book on AI last year. [eventbrite]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Kevin Waite: The Boundless Biddy Mason, 2pm, Book Passage Ferry Building (The Embarcadero). Biddy Mason, the subject of a Fighting for Justice biography from Heyday, has now gotten the big biography for adults treatment. Brought to Los Angeles by her Mississippi enslaver and held illegally in captivity in the 1850s, Biddy Mason connected with free Blacks in Southern California who helped her fight for her rightful freedom in the courts. She became a foundational figure of Black Los Angeles: midwife and medicine woman, church founder and landowner, for whom generosity was a watchword: "The open hand is blessed, for it gives in abundance, even as it receives." Hear from historian Waite about how Mason's story intersects with California's history and the larger American shame of chattel slavery. [bookpassage.com]
Tagalog Children's Books, 2pm, Dublin Library (Cold Side of the Hills). There are so many languages and cultures in the Bay Area and the library would like to stock books for every one of them. Today it's Tagalog, so bring your heritage language and read along, no matter your level of linguistic competence. Books on offer: Palaruang Bahaghari (The Rainbow Playground),by Mark Norman S. Roquiem, and Ara ng Kabaligtaran (Opposite Day) by Jomike Tejido, so go out past where the fog stops, where the skies when clear get cold and frosty as we tilt farther from the sun to join in. [AC Library]
Lab for Holding: a poetry puppet parade extravaganza, 3pm, Albany Bulb (The Bayshore). Puppets are serious play and so is poetry, and so is the strange dumped lump that is Albany Bulb, a no-man's land of blackberries and mud flats. Writer/puppet lovers, and parade organizers are: Ankoor Patel, who likes to dress themselves in boots and your poems, Hanne Williams-Baron who has written about hats and secret shows for ORB, and Clara Sperow, editor at 14 Hills and giver of medical advice in the form of poems: to get rid of a headache, "fill up 40 gallon jugs with/ ocean water. drink it in smoothies every / morning for the magnesium. // make love." There will be tea, and wear a jacket, it's getting to be that time of year. [luma]
How to Get Home in the Dark Poetry Anthology Reading and Generative Workshop, 3pm, Local Economy (College Ave). Emilie Lygren, educator, naturalist, and poet, made it through their own dark spells thanks to poems, and in their deep empathy for all of us in our moments of despair, offers us a bouquet of poems that are a steady hand when the trail gets slippery. Emilie is joined by educators Alegria Barclay and Melissa Fowlks, and poets Zeina Hashem Beck and Antwan Linton Penn to read and speak on the collection's themes. And because reading leads to writing, bring your pens and get ready to think a blank page into a lantern of words for all the readers who need you to help them find their way, too. [luma]
[North Bay Bonus Event] Poetry Reading, 4pm, Art Bloc Sausalito (The Waterfront). Poetry travels across the Bay's lapping waves today. East Bay poet Benjamin Gucciardi (Arguments, West Portal, his poems make my heart explode and I adore him for it) and the sharp yet tender murmurings of Katie Peterson (Fog & Smoke: "The fog comes home / through the Golden Gate, it has no home / in the ocean. What an absurd thought.") meet up with Tim Hunt (Western Where and more books besides), a Sonoma County kid who left the Bay to profess poetry at Deep Springs and in Illinois, and came back again. [The Art Bloc Sausalito]
I Was, Am, Will Be: Showcase + Open Mic, 4pm, EastSide Arts Alliance (Rancho San Antonio). Everything poetic and performy is happening in East Oakland tonight. Organizer of many community open mics and performer at most of the ones he doesn't host, JR Rice shares his words ("Howling out verses for Oakland like an awoken rage"), his books, and a short film. Poets should have poet friends, and JR does; check out the folks he's bringing along: recent Oakland Youth Poet Laureate Cael Dueñas-Lara, song-writer Bianca "BB" Brown, stage-actor Anthony "The Chef" Jefferson, Oakland-born poet and performer Rewop, and Adam Hudson who gives the whole crew a beat. [ESAA]
Crossing the Rubicon: The Betrayal of American Democracy, 2000–2026, 5pm, Clio's Books (The Lake). Journalist and UC Berkeley professor Mark Danner has become strongly identified with his work on the Trump beat over the last stupid bullshit decade, reporting from the earliest days on the campaign trail to the attempted coup in the capital and beyond. But Danner has actually been knee-deep in the mines since the mid-80s, with bylines attached to stories as varied as the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador to torture at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. Tonight he's joining it-sociologist Arlie Russell Hochshild (Strangers in their Own Land) to discuss his new book Crossing the Rubicon, a collection of his work since 2000. Ask him if The Guy smells as bad as they say, I'm dying to know. [eventbrite]
[South Bay Bonus Event] Tiny Room Poetry Series with Danez Smith and DVT, 6pm, SJZ Breakroom (San Jose). For the cost of a drive down 880 and whatever you feel like paying for a ticket, you can hear Pulitzer finalist (for Bluff) Danez Smith perform their work alongside West Bay poet Tongo Eisen-Martin and musicians Damani Rhodes and VADIA. A Midwesterner who thinks winter means frozen lakes you can stand on, Danez throws the gauntlet at us who bask in our dry November days, "O California, don't you know the sun is only a god / if you learn to starve for him?" And the Tongo trio brings a soulful chorus to make even San Jose sound holy for a night. [tickettailor]
Also: Closing of Fairyland at 75: A Legacy of Magic at OMCA (The Lake) / Robin Rosenbluth, Rosanne Annoni & Georgine Hodgkinson on Mothers and Daughters: Writing Formative Relationships in Memoir at Book Passage Corte Madera (North Bay) / The Human Condition I: No Greater Love at BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley) / Formation Open Mic Hosted by Aya De Leon at Nomadic Bookshop (Uptown) / Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt at BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley)