Oakland Review of Books calendar of (not just) literary events, October 13–October 18
Here’s what’s happening in the semi-longer term around town: Bathers wants to introduce you to Riso printing this fall, Leigh Lucas (Golden Poppy winner for poetry) to writing about motherhood, the Queer Arts Center wants to invite queer femmes and womanist writers into a writing circle, El Cerrito is getting in on the artist-at-the-dump residency hype (applications due 11/4), and all this weekend Lake Merritt wants to host you at night among the lights. In addition to all of Litquake it’s now theatre season, I warned you last week: Cal students made a play, Dracula is a play, there’s another spooky play in a subterranean East Bay theatre, and get ready for Halloween puppets at the end of the month in Driveway Follies. Artists are reimagining watersheds and waterways down in the Deep South Oakland neighborhood of San Jose Friday and Saturday, and if you’re planning to sling zines in December, get your tabling application in to EBABZF soon. And honor the radical Black legacy of the Panthers by celebrating the anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party in 1966, sixty years ago, right here in Oakland. The autumnal chill has finally come in and there’s a palpable energy shift as the acorns fall and even the housecats start to bulk and fluff up for winter. ORB throws parties as a strategy, yes, but the point is to do the same thing as this calendar: to help us find each other, to see the labor and imagination we’re all bringing to the Oakland Bay Area, to find the mindmelds that collectively make language into literature and ideas into art, leaping us all from the known to the new. See you out there. -MS, TC, AB
Our friends at Transit Books are hosting a fundraising pizza party with a forest theme on Friday, October 16, 7-10pm, at Donkey & Goat Winery in West Berkeley. You can come for $50 and get two drink tickets and some pizza, or pay more and support even more books. Interpret the theme however you want, there will be a costume contest for those who go all in on sartorial forestry, and real tattoos are on the menu again too, we hear, alongside the natty wine and pizza. (They gave us a little money to tell you about their party, but we would have anyway, because we like them.)
Tuesday, October 13
10/13 Ashby BART Housing Project Spotlight, 1pm, Berkeley Law (Cal). They’re actually building tall housing in Berkeley. Hear about what’s happening at the Ashby station and vote for Measure RTM so we can keep BART running and not end up with some weird ghost town apartment block. [google.com]
Black Banjo Reclamation Project: Painting and Craft Workshop w/ Sierra Salome, 4pm, EastSide Arts Alliance (San Antonio). Country and bluegrass and cowboys and the banjo were always Black, now it’s all coming back. There will be singing in a circle and hot, good food, and learning Afrocentric traditions of making community through art and story. [ESAA]
Making California more affordable: An expert panel, 4pm, Social Sciences Building (Cal). This white paper from the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative is so boring and predictable I can’t even (oh, let me guess, unions drive construction prices up, so we should just... not use union labor!). Every economics department and center ever is just caping for capitalism, and their solutions for affordability issues are always “DOGE the government” and “Deregulation!! Should we try it again??!!” In this fourth installment of the BESI white paper, the one thing I think they’re right on is that it’s confusing and unnecessary that childcare is regulated both by California’s Dept of Social Services and the Dept of Education, an overlap exacerbated by the otherwise wonderful expansion of public TK and preschool in the last few years. But as geographers remind us, there is an alternative to the “more houses, less government” path to affordable living, and it looks like organized labor and higher wages, strong and enforced rent control, state-provided public services, and state support for private enterprise. Somehow this never occurs to Economics researchers. At least this is a panel of “author meets critics”—but one of the critics is president of the Contra Costa Taxpayers Association so go and be ORBy and critique from the left. [UC]
Discussion of The Savage Mind: An American Legacy, 4pm, Native Community Center (Cal). Terria Smith (Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla), the editor of the magazine News from Native California, is over the moon that David Treuer (Ojibwe, Leech Lake Reservation) has a new book out, so let that tell you to show up and hear him talk about The Savage Mind: An American Legacy, in which he posits that the frontier has not vanished as American historians claimed; rather, the frontier was never a place but a state of cruelty, one that has been moved into the violence of American imperial wars overseas and the death-cult nature of an American civic life that incorporates massacres of children into our very national character. [UC]
California Inside Out Book Release Party, 5pm, Temescal Brewing (Temescal, Unsurprisingly). Show up for a collaboration between local Heyday author/artist Obi Kaufmann and local fermentation experts on their new beer, “Uncommon California,” with Obi’s art on the outside and refreshing inspiration on the inside. Buy a copy of Obi’s new book California Inside Out along with a six pack and you’ll be supporting The Center for Biological Diversity too. [insta]
[West Bay Bonus Event] ~Litquake~ Invitation | Abandonment: A Collective Poem in Assembly, 6pm, Et al. (The Mission). Connect with poets and then connect with each other in a poem! Readings by poets aracelis girmay (I hope she reads her poem about a rat), Ladan Khoddam-Khorasani (wants to know how we will take care of each other with poetry), Gabriel Cortez (Panamanian poet for the people!), and Dora Prieto (who has an unruly relationship with geography), and then everyone in the room will collectively write a poem, building on one another, holding one another, caring for the contributions of all. [litquake]
Stagebridge Presents: Tell Your Story!, 6pm, Montclair Branch OPL (The Hills). I love stories from our elders, especially in the Bay Area, which involve living on communes (Rachel’s mother AND stepmother), bringing me to work in her lab office as a newborn because there was no such thing as maternity leave (my mom), cutting cane in Cuba (Steve Wasserman), and learning Marxist theory from Black Panthers in San Quentin (Dorsey Nunn), and the magical realism of affordable real estate (all of them). Send your favorite storytelling seventy-year-olds to the cutest library in the hills to practice and then get them in touch with East Bay Yesterday to get their stories into the historical record. [OPL]
Jasmine Guillory’s debut YA book (& birthday celebration), 6pm, EBB’s Event Space (Rockridge). Happy birthday Jasmine and happy book birthday to It’s Only Dancing, Jasmine’s first YA novel! There’s summer camp, there’s dancing, there’s going to be cake and sparkling everything. I’ve been reading Jasmine’s writing since she was writing for The Toast on the internet of yore, and my personal favorite of her novels is By the Book, with its romantic collaboration between a writer and editor, but the affirmative-consent-is-hot sapphic wine country romance Flirting Lessons is a sexy delight too. Jasmine always held her launches at EBB until The Fire, and now for the first time in a couple years, the tradition is BACK: another good reason to celebrate! [luma]
Photo Saloon—Catherine Opie: On Identity and Collectivity Community Conversation, 6:30pm, Bathers Library (Telephotograph). Talk with other “lens-based artists” about portraiture, as discussed by photographer Opie with former students in this “workshop in a book” book. Ladies and they/thems to the front! [insta]
~Litquake~ Asale Angel-Ajani: Fugitive Archives, 7pm, Pegasus Books (Downtown Berkeley). Bi-racial author and anthropologist Asale Angel-Ajani turns her Stanford-approved skills of research and storytelling to her own complex, entangled and exciting family tree, finding artists and the incarcerated, KKK members and fugitive slaves among its roots and branches. Talking about always having been one complicated, violently enmeshed people, in conversation with Oakland’s forever fella Carvel Wallace. [litquake]
Portrait of an Artist As a Young Woman, 7pm, Clio’s Books (Grand Lake). Judy Juanita was born in Oakland and came of age within the Black Power movement in the Bay, and she pulls together threads of experience from being a young woman committed to the politics of liberation to inform her writing across genres, including DeFacto Feminism: Essays Straight Outta Oakland. In conversation with Alexis Krasilovsky, whose years as a young woman filmmaker in the ’60s and ’70s informs her new novel Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman, the two women reflect on what it means to aim for liberation at a time when women’s liberation seemed to still be wrapped up with men’s desire. Listen to the stories these elders tell, and remember the shitty media men list was published less than ten years ago. [eventbrite]
[West Bay Bonus Event] ~Litquake~ The Author/Critic Dilemma, 7pm, Page Street Co-Writing (The Castro). Strangely, no ORB editors/contributors on this panel. Go and find out what the angst is about R-ing Bs is in the West Bay, then come back to O and advise us what not to do. [insta]
Also: Sugar Skull Painting Workshop at Martin Luther King Jr. Branch OPL (Deep East) / Making Stories (for kids) at Rockridge Branch (College Ave) / New Book Reading and Discussion: Iran and the Bomb at Stephens Hall (Cal) / Indranil Chakravarty | The Power of Intercultural Dialogue: Octavio Paz between Mexico and India at Stephens Hall (Cal) / Shoshana Berger // Good Life Design is as Little Life Design as Possible at Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation (Cal) / Hemming & Mending Clothes By Hand with Bea Byrne at West Oakland Branch OPL (De Fremery) / Michael Pollan & Christof Koch: A Journey into Consciousness at Zellerbach Hall (Cal)
Wednesday, October 14
Alameda Used Book Sale, 2pm, Alameda Free Library (Once a Peninsula, Always a Peninsula). There have been lawsuits fought and won to allow for the sale of used books, so get yourself some media that stays good and never expires (though the ideas inside might have). Find out what the Islanders have been reading and donating to support their library, starting today and going until they’re hopefully all reshelved in your bookcases on Saturday. [humanitix]
Teen LIT Club (Librarians-in-Training), 3:30pm, Main Library OPL (The Lake-ish). The youth are into zines and all kinds of print, you know, which the library has lots of. So send your teen over to the Main to train up for the future of dead tree media even while the natter of pivot to video pumps ever more bytes into data centers until the boom busts again and books are still there, still legible, waiting for you to flip open the cover once more. [OPL]
Book Talk & Signing: Human-Centered Schools, 6pm, Nomadic Bookshop (Uptown). Hear about Human-Centered Schools: A Roadmap to Sustainable School Progress from Scott Goldstein, a teacher and student centered educator from DC. Another guide to how to do education right by caring about the people involved: follow up by throwing copies at the school board candidates and superintendent, see if they can apply it to OUSD without hiring three more administrators to track the paperwork. [humanitix]
A Body in the Bookshop, 6pm, Book Society (Elmwood). Get creepy and plot some murders with Gigi Pandian, Carmela Dutra, and M.M. Chouinard, three Bay Area mystery writers. I loved me some Agatha Christie as a kid, but am not personally a fan of thrillers or cozy mysteries, because in thrillers violence, often against women, is used to entertain while simultaneously decrying it as something only the depraved Other commits (The Lovely Bones is the WORST book I have ever read for this reason), and cozy mysteries weird me out, because the actual reverberations of broken trust and trauma caused by interpersonal violence and carceral responses just are not the same vibe as flirting and soup recipes, and mashing them together is just unsettlingly dismissive. But hey, it’s spooky season, disturb yourself however suits you; I’ll be sitting over here with my books of poems, haunting myself with grief and loss amid the ritual renewals of landscapes readying for winter, like a total normie. [booksociety.social]
Workshop—Investigating Public Agencies and Institutions: A Crash Course Part 2, 6pm, Tamarack (Downtown). Second part of the Bay Anarchist Free School workshop on using public records requests to get hold of documents. Come knowing what you want to investigate, bring a laptop and a lust for rabbitholing. [Tamarack Calendar]
The Language of Trees with Katie Holten, 6pm, Clio’s Books (The Lake-ish). Artist and activist Katie Holten has been thinking with trees, about trees, and in trees for a very long time. In this celebration of all the ways trees enter our worlds and we enter theirs, Holten will be in discussion with local editor and writer Marthine Satris (hi!) about the landscape of literature and the words that spell open the natural world to our minds, questing and electrified as a tick clinging to tall grass. Oaks and acorns will likely sprout up. [eventbrite]
Gemma Hartley’s No One Loves An Angry Woman, 7pm, Mrs. Dalloway’s Bookstore (Elmwood). Gemma Hartley has a new memoir and the title is pretty straightforward: No One Loves an Angry Woman: An Exvangelical Coming-of-Rage Story. Local memoirist and feminist blogger/podcaster Tracy Clark-Flory (My Mother’s Daughter) will be in conversation. Both Amanda Montell and Amanda Montei blurbed it, and righteous female vengeance, speaking out loudly against wrongs perpetuated by men with power and patriarchy itself, is having its day. [Mrs D’s]
The Berkeley Slam ft. Kevin Madrigal Galindo, 8pm, The Starry Plough Pub (Berkeley). Come early to write, come at eight to listen to Kevin being out and proud and as Oakland and Chicanx as anyone could be on a stage, full of big, true words like “ South City/ & Zapopan raised me. Dutch crunch sandwiches & tortas ahogadas / would test positive in my curly hair” and full of recipes from Mexico and stories from the Bay, and vice versa. [eventbrite]
Also: Richmond Sea Level Rise Community Workshop at Richmond Memorial Auditorium (Greater Northern Oakland) / SOLD OUT! WE GATHER: Fall art opening and “community” conversation at Local Economy (Rockridge) / The Work in Progress Screening and Discussion with Robert Reich at Zellerbach Auditorium (Cal) / Oakland Privacy: Fighting Against the Surveillance State at It’s Private (Somewhere in Oakland) / Critical Tea Theory: Gongfu Tea & Gongfu Uncles at tiat (West Bay) / Pub Scholar: “Spirit Cannot Be Colonized: Neuroscience & Decolonization” at 51 and TEL (Temescal) / ~Litquake~ Passages of Babel: Translation and the Book Arts of Servane Briand at San Francisco Center for the Book (West Bay)
Thursday, October 15
Tommy Pico in Conversation with John Freeman, 5pm, Zoom (The Internet). Online, but you need to get in on this California Book Club conversation that Alta is hosting. Even if you’ve already read Nature Poem, borrow the audio book on Hoopla from OPL and thank me later. Kumeyaay poet Tommy Pico discusses his work, “Nature Poem,” a book-length poem critiquing and ironizing the expectation that as a California Indian he’d have a nature poem in him that wasn’t also about hooking up with men he met on grindr and living in big glittery cities—and yet, bird singing and plant gathering, and yet, the southern border scissoring his people and their land and language. I’d quote my favorite lines to you but that guy across town with my copy needs to give it back, porfa, so I’ll just be listening in to the wonderful John Freeman interviewing the poet about it too, in the meantime. [altaonline]
Oaktown Thursdays: Black Panther Party 60th Anniversary Kickoff Celebration, 5pm, Latham Square (Downtown). The Panthers have always been about both style and substance, so slap on your red lipstick and your black berets (but leave the rifles at home; California outlawed open carry in response to Panther self defense, you know). Get hella Oakland with live music, fashion, a car show, and wrestling, would you believe it. All to celebrate sixty years of Oakland’s homegrown revolution and its spread across the Black global diaspora. [insta]
Bathtime for Snow Monkeys Release Party, 5pm, Mrs. Dalloway’s (Elmwood). Monkeys and haiku, snow and hot springs, with Oakland author Maggie Tokuda-Hall doing the words and illustrator Yas Imamura on the pictures! Bring your kids, but leave your monkeys at home, splashing, soaking, and saying poems to each other. [Mrs D’s]
Black Panther Party 60th Anniversary: Honoring the Rank & File, 5pm, Main Oakland Library (The Lake). BPP Historian Billy X Jennings hosts this gathering of veteran party voices speaking about their grunt work to run community programs and deal with state harassment. Starts with a short film, “Lords of the Revolution.” The great thing about joining a commie org is that the workers matter, and sixty years later, they still do. [OPL]
WHB Feminist Horror Film Series: Possession, 6:30pm, The New Parkway (Uptown). Polish director Andrzej Żuławski’s splattery 1981 masterpiece about divorce, Cold War Berlin, and tentacled sex monsters. ORB pal and Book Domme Jessica Ferri, the founder of Womb House Books, will introduce the movie, the first in a monthly series of feminist horror movies. [insta]
Nathaniel Philbrick with Julia Flynn Siler: The Rush: California Gold, the Civil War, and the Making of the Modern World, 7pm, Rakestraw Books (Hot Side of the Hills). National Book Award winner and Nantucket boat guy Nathaniel Philbrick is in the Bay but not IN the BAY, or even near it. You either have to get all the way out to West Portal in the city or all the way out to Danville to hear this out-of-towner talk about California. Your call, but at least in Danville he’s in conversation with Siler, who wrote The White Devil’s Daughters and so you get a twofer for the drive. Challenge: buck the escapism trend and get into nonfiction with his tales of vigilantism, the gold-driven scramble for wealth and power, and how California has been a heavyweight in national politics since the very beginning. [rakestraw books]
[West Coast Bonus Event] Alice: Memoirs of a Barbary Coast Prostitute , 7pm, City Lights Bookstore (North Beach). The true story of a woman’s life in rough and rowdy San Francisco is captured in Alice: Memoirs of a Barbary Coast Prostitute. For the book’s tenth anniversary, Ivy Anderson and Devon Angus present Alice’s memoirs within the historical context of their research into its origins: learn the origin of Maiden Lane, which, I’ll give you a hint, had no maidens anywhere, but lots of ladies of the night. [citylights]
History of the Elephant Barn, the New Deal WPA Sculpture, and the 415 Society, 7pm, Chapel of the Chimes (Piedmont the Avenue). In body, you will be in the chapel, but in your mind you’ll be in the hills, climbing around Joaquin Miller Park, where the redwoods and eucalyptus tower over a barn an elephant named “Baby Boo” first occupied, sculptures installed during the New Deal still loom monumentally, and more that local historian Amelia Sue Marshall will tell you all about. [humanitix]
[West Bay Bonus Event] ~Litquake~ A 22nd-Century Conservation Ethos for California, 7pm, KALW (FiDi). Three Heyday authors combine their power like a reboot of the Planeteers: Dillon Osleger pulls in public lands and the forests of the central coast, Laura Cunningham goes back into deep time and even deeper into purple needlegrass, and Obi Kaufmann maps an ecology of mind. Read their books, then look up and out, see this place we live and love in like never before. [litquake]
Reclaiming Judaism from Zionism Book Launch, 7pm, 1101 Eighth St (Berkeley). The Middle East Children’s Alliance is giving you a chance to make up for your Birthright trip today. Featuring the book’s editor Carolyn Karcher and contributors Linda Hess, Seth Morrison, and Rabbi Cat Zavis, co-editor of Tikkun magazine. Subtitle is “A Moral Imperative After the Gaza Genocide” and yes, but also—if only we were after. [humanitix]
Also: Kintsugi 2026: Healing and Repair of Japanese American Community Trauma from WWII at Hotel Kabuki (West Bay) / Edward Said: The Politics of an Oppositional Intellectual at Stephens Hall (Cal) / Jon Cho-Polizzi and Lin Hierse in Conversation at GOETHE-INSTITUT (West Bay) / Friends of the Fountain Film Screening & Presentation at North Branch BPL (Northbrae) / Paulina Borsook–Cyberselfish at Word on the Street Books (Hot Side of the Hills)
Friday, October 16
Gerardo Aldana | Sak Tahn Waax, Astronomy, and Psychedelics in the History of Mayan Oracular Science, 12 noon, Latinx Research Center (Cal). The Indigenous Mayan people, many of whom now call Oakland home, are the descendants of the people who were solving complex equations in Guatemala more than a thousand years ago, including the recently deciphered astronomical calculations of “mathematician-sage” Sak Tahn Waax. No idea how psychedelics factor in, but that’s why you go to the lecture. [UC]
Friday Nights at OMCA with MacArthur Maze | 60th Anniversary of the Black Panther Party, 5pm, OMCA (The Lake). East Bay Hip-Hop ensemble MacArthur Maze takes the stage outside, the documentary Memories in Motion: Selected Stories of Mildred Howard plays inside, followed by Howard’s grandson, Lamar “MYL3Z” Brown, talking about learning to make art with his grandmother in Berkeley. DJ BlackWoman™ keeps the vibes going for an all Oakland, all Black night to remember the radicals who asserted their own power for community, starting sixty years ago. [OMCA]
GET-HYPE OPEN MIC IS BACK! Fall Edition, 6pm, Discover Community Cafe (West Oakland). Poet-about-town J.R. Rice hosts an open mic at 7pm and a workshop for the hour before that; this is a night to stretch yourself. Featured poet Thesis The Statement hails from Chicagoland and has been in the slam world for a while now, getting featured, getting known (but impossible to google and no social media, this poet must be experienced in person or not at all). Art, music, snacks, drinks, and West Oakland’s finest on a Friday. [insta]
Waking Up Woman, 6pm, Nomadic Bookshop (Uptown). East Bay born and raised filmmaker Nijla Mumin brings “Waking Up Woman,” her “poetic memoir one-woman show,” back home to Oakland. Hold her stories of growing up Black and Muslim with her in the light of performance, pay what you can to keep art alive. Q&A after moderated by local poet and community spark Alie Jones. [Nomadic]
The Archive Comes Alive: Documentary Poetry, Photography, and the Art of Witness, 6pm, North Gate Hall (Cal). Poet and playwright Tess Taylor talks process, how her research into Dorothea Lange’s work in California became a poem that accompanied an exhibition and now has become a play. In conversation with art dealer Richard Moore and photojournalist and professor Ken Light; they will discuss how documentary becomes art, how archival materials inform creativity, and how Lange bore witness even while employed by the feds to record everything going down during internment. [UC]
Poetry Reading, 6:30pm, Tamarack (Downtown). Readings by Scout Faller (Antiphony, Action-Spectacle) who made a “sonnet for running into your ex” that starts like it oughta: “oh my god hi how are you all? how is every single person here doing/ the entire gang all two of you? that’s really great to hear that you’re /great and i am doing great as well. it’s so good that we’re all great”—isn’t it so great? And by Trinh Lê, who wonders, in their interview with ray levy uyeda, “Does everyone’s poetry sound the same because everyone’s writing in a Google Doc?” and Selby Sohn, a performance artist, zine-maker, and poet who draws worms and makes chapbooks that double as tinfoil hats. [insta]
Transit Books Presents: Our Party in the Forest, 7pm, Donkey & Goat Winery (West Berkeley). It’s happening! Tonight! Come on over to Donkey and Goat for the Transit Books Big Fall Fundraiser and celebrate the East Bay literary scene, international literature, and dressing up like a forest creature to honor the new Transit book Our Life in the Forest by Marie Darrieussecq. All the dryads, squirrels, lumberjacks, chanterelles, and green men will get to eat pizza and toast to the work of bringing books that matter into the world, and throw some coins in the proverbial fountain to keep the work going. [luma]
Sugar Coated, 7pm, Clio’s Books (The Lake). I don’t know what your first question was upon seeing Marion Nestle’s name on a book talk about sugar but mine was answered on wikipedia: “Nestle’s name is unrelated to the company Nestlé, and is pronounced Nes-sul.” UC Press just published Sugar Coated, co-authored by the long time critic of the food industry that looks at the cereal box and what’s inside it, and the talk with Cari Borja, who worked for the Edible Schoolyard and was Alice Water’s righthand woman for a while, will range widely across what healthy food is and how to understand food systems (and dismantle the extractive, industrial ones, right?) [eventbrite]
Raging Bull, 7pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). Soulless and monotonously violent, a lesser Scorsese whose basic operation—extending grace to an operatically self-pitying ogre—is hard to stomach in this particular American moment. (Oh, hey, check out what screenwriter Paul Schrader is getting up to these days.) The boxing scenes are cool, though. [bampfa]
The Fight For Our Schools, Our Fight For The Town, 7pm, Oakland Liberation Center (Fruitvale). Get into a discussion about who to vote for on the school board so you don’t accidentally end up voting for the pawn of billionaires who are bored and annoyed and want to mess with Oakland politics, starting with the school board (reminder, the school board answers to the Alameda Dept of Education, not the mayor, the city council, or anyone running Oakland, and none of the taxes going to the city touch the schools). [insta]
Also: Untold Stories: ARTogether 2026 Artists-in-Residence Group Exhibition at ARTogether Center (Downtown) / Open Mic: The Poetry Lounge Halloween Edition at Club 811 (Old Oakland) / Did Nikole Hannah-Jones Sacrifice Her Child? at TBA (Oakland) / ~Litquake~ Heaven Looks Like Us: Palestinian Poetry at Telegraph Hill Books (West Bay) / FORESTSPEAK - Kelsey Chen Fall residency art show at Now Place 此间 (West Bay) / Film Fridays: WOOD STREET at EastSide Arts Alliance (San Antonio) / Sweet Abyss & CST Collision —DJ sets and The F.A.G. Archive, tea by Jes Young at Beauty Supply Arts (Downtown)
Saturday, October 17
Grupo de Tejido Maya Mam/Mayan Mam Weaving Group, 10am, Fruitvale Branch OPL (Deep North Guatemala). The final gathering of expert weavers from Union Maya, who will share their techniques and their finished work, as practiced in their ancestral homelands in Guatemala and continued here in Oakland. The event is for and by the community of Mayan Mam speakers, and there will be translation support available in Spanish and English. If you want to know more about the folks that brought Oakland’s Mayan people together to renew their culture and connections, read El Timpano on the loving and determined work to create Union Maya and what ending its programming will mean. [OPL]
Storytime for Caregivers: Britt Murlas of Little Feminist, 10am, Local Economy (Rockrich). Just like library storytime, but with a sheen of clubbiness! But just a gloss—no one has to pay anything to go to Local Economy events. They’re always free or pay-what-you-want, so pile in this morning with your babies and toddlers and save your money for East Bay Booksellers next door; once you finish discussing inclusive books for kids and “how to curate a diverse library” with the publisher of the Little Feminist board books, you’ll finally understand how to teach your baby not to be a bigot (I may have tipped over too far in reading my then four-year-old a book about the kidnapping of children and families for the transatlantic slave trade; maybe just start with “all bodies are beautiful” and save the horrors of our society for when they hit kindergarten.) [luma]
History Walks at Cal: Beyond the Golden Gate, 11am, Oxford & Center (Cal). Take a walk through UC Berkeley’s relationship to East Asia, from its professoriate to its architecture, with PhD Candidate Andrew Hardy: Cal has always been enmeshed with goals of American Empire in East Asia, and the tour draws on Hardy’s research to show connections between this history and the campus environment. 2 hour free walking tour. [insta]
~Litquake~ Read The Room: A Celebration of Books, 12:30pm, Kerouac Alley (North Beach). We love an event in an alley, and this one involves not only a reading focused on queer stories but also “Community poetry writing with Kevin Dublin, poetry friending with Sean Owens, and bibliomancy by Scott Sessions.” Books Not Bans sends books into prisons and generally supports freedom to read, and they’re making the alley happening happen so turn out. [city lights]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Poets Theater Workshop with Lindsey Boldt & Steve Orth, 1pm, Et al. Gallery (The Mission). Poets theater is a Bay Area tradition that’s being brought back to life by Lindsey Boldt and Steve Orth, who will guide a workshop in what David Buuck has explained as what happens when poets want to make characters appear. But be warned, these are not plays: “PT is written solely to occasion the getting together of the cast and the audience,” and “PT only occurs during the performance of the piece in front of others (and, often, at the bar afterwards).” [jotform]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Dorothy Lazard: Behind the Desk at the Main, 2pm, Museum of the African Diaspora (SoMa). Every conversation about Dorothy's librarianship leaves the whole, packed room in paroxysms of delight, and Pendarvis Harshaw, coming in as another Black writer raised in Oakland, will bring his own deeply rooted and thoughtful touch to the conversation about what it means to be part of a public institution in Oakland, helping a city hold onto its own history. [eventbrite]
The steamy romance of a universal basic income, 6pm, Local Economy (Rockhardridge). Romance novels are no longer the low on consent, high on heteronormativity supermarket spinny racks fillers of our youth. In Alexandra Romanoff’s Big Fan the political wife turned DC strategist after leaving the nogoodnik who’d been cheating on her heals her bruised heart by chasing a dishy pop star and trying to get him to endorse a universal basic income. Hey look, crushes and ambitious political ideas, women can do it all! Hear from Romanoff and UBI enthusiast Natalie Foster about how to tell the kind of story that can get someone into bed with you—ideologically, of course. [luma]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Jean-Baptiste Phou: Coming Out of My Skin, 7pm, Telegraph Hill Books (Telegraph Hill). Jean-Baptiste Phou came to the Bay Area with Villa Albertine to spend time thinking and researching into Anthony Veasna So’s work, the gay Cambodian fiction writer who died in the West Bay just as his career was hitting take off. Phou, also a gay Cambodian man who grew up in a white society (France in his case) here speaks about his recent memoir, in which for the first time in his work, he addresses his sexuality and identity under a white gaze. In conversation with César Cadabes, Artistic Director for the GLBTQ Asian Pacific Alliance (GAPA) Theatre. [eventbrite]
~Litquake~ Picturing the Past: Graphic Novelists on History and Memory, 7pm, Mrs. Dalloway’s (Elmwood). Graphic novelists who maybe should be renamed graphic nonfictionists Frederick Noland, Nadine Takvorian, Emil Wilson, and Maria van Lieshout show their work about what already happened and then talk about making serious comics with graphic memoirist Briana Loewinsohn. [litquake]
~Litquake~ An Evening Spell: Trans Poetry & Hardware Hang, 7pm, The Crown (Uptown). I don’t know exactly what the word hardware is doing in this sentence, twice: “An evening time experimental live hardware performance, reading, and party featuring trans hardware musicians and poets.” But my guess is that there will be synths. Curator and critic Jaelynn Walls brings together Cat Laugian (Cone Shape Top ) and Daria Lourd (aka Bored Lord, aka half of Darlynn, the other half of whom is Jaelynn—get yourself a spouse who will lift you up!). Eager to see how the poetry will slide in there. [litquake]
Also: Castlemont Farm Community Work Day at Castlemont Farm (Deep East) / Emergency Preparedness Day at College of Alameda (The Temporary Island) / Trash Falcons Trash Museum of Trash: Special Exhibit at Main Oakland Library (The Lake-ish) / Family Movie Morning: Pixar’s Coco at Dimond Branch OPL (The Die-mond) / Berkeley...Is Mural Reception at Central Berkeley Library (Downtown Berkeley) / Craft Club: How to Hand Knit a Bowl at Upstairs (Temescal) / ZYZZYVA Movie Matinee with Ingrid Rojas Contreras and Andrew Sean Greer: Amarcord at Big Roxie (West Bay) / La maison des bois: Episodes 1–3 at BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley) / Deborah Fruchey, guest poet at Claremont Branch BPL (Fancy Berkeley) / SANDRA PROUDMAN: THE END OF US at Books Inc. (Alameda the Island that Used to be a Peninsula) / In Honor of Life & Death at Dear John (The Laurel) / White Nights at BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley) / Nathaniel Philbrick’s The Rush: California Gold, the Civil War, and the Making of the Modern World at Bookshop West Portal (West Bay) / Black Art Exhibition with the Black Panther Party Museum at Akoma (Uptown) / dead internet theory iMac LAN party at Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (Old Oakland)
Sunday, October 18
Because I Have To #1: Amar Lal & Paolo Bicchieri, 10am, Local Economy (Rickrodge). First gathering to discuss creative life in the Bay hosted by Jeff Wright: starting with Amar Lal and Paolo Bicchieri. Paolo is a writer who organizes Kitchen Table, the reading series that emulsifies poets, chef pop-ups, and food writers: Kitchen Table. Amar Lal is a musician out of Oakland who tours in a band and experiments with sound. Enjoy coffee and conversation with three folks making life, community, and art in the Bay. [luma]
[West Bay Bonus Event] A Life Of Their Own, 1pm, Problem Library (Inner Sunset). Christina Pappas, Christie George, Celine Nguyen, Toby Shorin, Jackson Tejeda, Jeff Masamori, Marthine Satris (who is Octobering with a vengeance), and more local and visiting book friends will gather to discuss books as they are, could be, our immersion in them, their invasion of us, and where exactly the edge of bookishness might be. Then, dinner, together. [aloto.life]
Spotlight Sundays: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange, 1pm, OMCA (The Lake). Too few people realize that Oakland is an important site for photography historians; Dorthea Lange’s entire archival estate, with over 40,000 original negatives, is housed at the Oakland Museum of California. This makes OMCA the natural home for this theatrical production (by Berkeley playwright Tess Taylor) about Lange featuring large projected backdrops of her work. [OMCA]
7th St Museum Research Tea, 1pm, 1726 7th St (West Oakland). Artists and researchers Ellena, Bleu, and Naima have been learning about the history of Black West Oakland, and over tea will share their learnings and invite all neighbors and those invested in collecting the stories of West Oakland and the cultural legacy of Seventh Street, deliberately destroyed to put up BART for suburban commuters. [insta]
Trash Falcons Tales!, 2pm, Main Library (The Lake-ish). Steinbeck wrote in Travels with Charley that “American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash—all of them—surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered with rubbish.” Cheery guy! But American cities are also full of falcons, specifically Trash Falcons, who have collectively dredged well over a dozen tons of Oakland’s most beleaguered badger holes such as Lake Merritt. That doesn’t mean everything goes straight to the dump, however: the Trash Falcons Trash Museum of Trash (TFTMoT) tells us stories about the city by putting our garbage on display. The organizers of this talk promise to cover the “haunted lore of Lake Merritt,” and more importantly, promise that the trash has been properly sanitized. [OPL]
Shaihu Umar, 3pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). Nigeria is one of a handful of countries whose founding executive was also a major literary figure in their country. Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, much like Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia or Léopold Sédar Senghor in Senegal, was not only his country’s first post-colonial prime minister (the ONLY one, actually), but he was already a successful novelist. He wrote Shaihu Umar in response to a request by a British administrator in the then-colonial government seeking to promote Hausa literature, but by the time Adamu Halilu adapted the novel into a film in 1967, Nigeria had undergone a successful independence movement with Balewa at the forefront, but Balewa had been assassinated during a coup. The film was long thought lost until a negative was rediscovered a decade ago, so we are lucky to be able to see it at all! [bampfa]
Jennifer Hasegawa, Elizabeth Robinson, & Jami Macarty, 3pm, Art House Gallery & Cultural Center (Berkeley). Hang out with three poets at Poetry Flash, the long-running Berkeley reading series. Jami Macarty says, “let’s forget abandonment and night-rinse our bodies / until we’re clear of this and this and that and that / then through the branches the billion stars” in her book The Long Now Conditions Permit; Jennifer Hasegawa is an Omnidawn poet and her new book is Silicon Ana which sounds weird as hell, as any exploration of consciousness and embodiment at this moment is bound to be; and Elizabeth Robinson rounds it out with poems from Vulnerability Index, emerging from witnessing and helping homeless neighbors. [facebook]
CIGAW: Can I Get a Witness?, 5pm, Location upon RSVP (Oakland). Fifty people already plan to show up because there’s open mics that are competitions, and there’s open mics that are for feeling the embrace of being heard. The host of CIGAW has gathered folks for walks, beach clean ups, and more because community comes from making our world together, but now we’re back to the poems, and the richness of Black/POC/LGBT voices witnessing each other to each other. [partiful]
The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, 6pm, Moments Cooperative and Community Space (Downtown). This is an incredible documentary about Panthers from their earliest days to the height of their power, carefully assembled from a decades-old cache footage that was discovered in the basement of the Swedish national public broadcasting office. Why are people always misplacing old footage?? Someone please get the filmmakers a proper filing system. The “Nostalgic for Nothing Cinema” series attracts a great crowd, so the post-film discussion is likely to be lit. Masks required & scent-free, so leave your Chanel No. 5 at home. [insta]
It’s Safer in the Front: Resisting the Rise of Autocracy, 7pm, Tamarack (Downtown). I Was A Teenage Anarchist, so the fact that members of the CrimethInc Ex-Workers Ex-Collective is still putting on presentations in my own town warms the cockles of my heart. Seriously, would you have guessed twenty years ago that they’d outlast the International Socialist Organization? But this talk isn’t just directed at cynical aging ultras, but to appeal to anyone (even electoralists!) who seeks to oppose the still-rising tide of fascism. Come discuss the power of resistance in the streets, and how to build solidarity across political camps. [insta]
Tending the Vines West Coast Book Launch by Ashia Ajani, 7pm, Nomadic Bookshop (Uptown). Ajani’s own website bio identifies the author as “a carnivorous plant, an overripe nectarine,” so they seem to speak with some authority on plants! Three years ago, their debut book of ecocritical poetry Heirloom teased out the tangled bank enmeshing Blackness and ecological survival. Their new nonfiction book Tending the Vines focuses on eight different plants (wild mustard, kudzu, eucalyptus, passionflower, and more) and their relationship with the Black diaspora in the United States. Ask them if they know Audrey II! [nomadicbookshop.org]
The King of Comedy, 7pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). The inspiring and heartwarming story of a plucky, down-on-his-luck comedian who wants nothing more to make America laugh. Fun for the whole family! Seriously though please leave your kids at home for this one, it will traumatize them. [bampfa]
Also: Launch Party for Truong Tran’s How to Exi(s)t: A Poet’s Memoir at City Lights Bookstore (West Bay) / Get Out the Vote! Postcard Writing Session at Local Economy (Rickrodge) / Sun Dial: Punk Art Market at Vetiver (The Laurel) / Willie Sings the Blues: A Berkeley Shakespeare One Night Stand at Feinstein’s at the Nikko (West Bay)
