Oakland Review of Books calendar of (not just) literary events, October 6–October 11
It’s hella hot this week, but we still showed up to sell you ORB hats and seduce our way into your inbox over the weekend, so welcome new subscribers! Come to the Monthly ORB Happy Hour, on Wednesday 4-6pm, on the shaded patio of Portal in Eastlake. Hot weather is good weather for line-drying your clothes and reading books under the trees by the lake and for thinking about the weather together (scroll down to Sunday). Or you might want to duck into some air conditioned movie theatres around the Bay: the Mill Valley Film Festival is going on in the North Bay, the New Parkway has Halloween movies starting now, or go wherever Screen Slate tells you to. More movies! If you want to drink a cold beer to cool down instead, there’s the Drunken Film Fest around various bars in Oakland; if you want to watch movies for liberation, head to Sansaar all month. As a web of editors, we love an ensemble and the Network of Ensemble Theatres does too, so all week long they’re in Oakland calling in all art-makers to share wisdom about collective scene making and strengthening the arts org ecology. You have a couple more days to propose a project for a Winslow House Project residency in Greater Oakland’s Vallejo neighborhood. Plan ahead to show up at Nomadic Bookshop for all their events this month, buy the book for this month’s Womb House book club, and get your art school on for the entire rest of the year with new Reading Groups over at Bathers Library (don’t forget! Members can submit mini writings to the next Bathers minimag any time). It’s banned books week and also of course Litquake—we’ve got all the best East Bay temblors below and Christina at Same Page SF has the West Bay hub of the festival covered (she’s also co-organizing A Life of Their Own on October 18 for the bookiest conversations about reading books you ever did hear, what a legend!). Wherever you go, whether a show, a parade, a bookstore, or a political meeting, tell us what the vibes are. —MS, XL, AB, PK
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 6
Failure by design, 12 noon, Social Sciences Building (Cal). George Rilinger is coming to campus to talk about his book, Failure by Design: The California Energy Crisis and the Limits of Market Planning, and I’m going to be honest, I was really interested in this book until I read the sentence “a broader theoretical framework for thinking about markets as the products of organizational planning and the limits of social engineering, contributing broadly to sociological and economic thinking about the nature of markets,” and not because I don’t respect that kind of theoretical work, but sometimes you just want to hear more about the California energy crisis, in more practical terms. Then again, since I’ve been trying to understand what “Market Planning” is, so I can understand what he’s saying about it, I’m kind of a little more interested in what a weird kind of artificial market electricity is, which I guess is his point. [Cal]
Rally & Speak Out for a Moratorium on Data Centers in Oakland!, 2:30pm, Oakland City Hall (Downtown). City Council will be discussing a 45-day moratorium on data centers, the first step towards banning data centers in Oakland altogether. Arrive by 3:15pm for public comment, and fill the room with bodies. [insta]
Lily Beckett | Poems on the London Underground (and Beyond), 3pm, Philosophy Hall (Cal). Combining public transit, poetry, and what literature does in the world in one event? Yes please! Eric Falci, my personal favorite member of the Cal English faculty, will be chatting with Lily Beckett about all of it, plus Thatcher and AI because they have to I guess, and hopefully the question of accessibility and the middlebrow in literature. Vote for increasing BART funding so we can have poetry in the new cars. [UC]
Beatrice Tam Dong: Celebration of Life, 5pm, Oakland Asian Cultural Center (Chinatown). With speakers, poetry, music, and displays of her art, the community is invited to honor and celebrate the life of Eastwind Books cofounder Beatrice Dong. Dong was an iconic and essential figure in the Bay Area third world liberation front and ethnic studies movement, and she and her husband Harvey kept the spirit of power to the people and fighting white supremacy going in the bookstore they ran for decades in Berkeley. Remember her work and carry it on. [Nichi Bei]
Zoot Suit, 5pm, Elmhurst Branch OPL (Deep East). After you watched American Pachuco in Berkeley on Monday—the 2026 documentary about Luis Valdez’s life—it’s time to see his 1981 film about the 1943 “Zoot Suit riots” that not only made Valdez’ name but helped establish in the broader public consciousness what “Chicano Cinema” was (a film every reviewer or critic is required by law to describe as “blistering.”) There’s a historical story there that’s worth knowing—and you’ll come away knowing it—but that story of racism and criminal injustice and a very Californian war over being in public are not even the main thing, in a movie whose stylish grace and staging are also the whole point. [OPL]
Wisdom Weaver Workshop: Shark Talk!, 5:30pm, Nomadic Bookshop (Downtown). Dr. Camila Cáceres, Water and Ocean Advocate at GreenLatinos, hangs out in the bookstore to tell us all about sharks, like the Great Whites who like to snack on seals but mostly spit out surfers. Fun Oakland shark fact: pregnant leopard sharks swim into salt marsh sloughs and channels and into our estuaries full of eelgrass here in the East Bay to give birth. [saltedrootssurf.org]
Club de Lectura | Book Club: Chicano Movement for Beginners, 6pm, EastSide Arts Alliance (Deep East). Oh oops, we missed the first meeting, but show up for the second discussion and the following two led by “Community Service Organization Oakland” which is the most deliberately neutral sounding org name I have ever encountered, and for all the right reasons. Learn about El Movimiento through reading and discussing Chicano Movement for Beginners by Maceo Montoya, UC Davis Chicano Studies prof and author of many other books besides. Learn your history, and how much of it happened right here. [ESAA]
The Black Studies Collective Community Reading and Discussion Series, 6pm, West Oakland Branch Library (De Fremery). Last meeting for the year of the Black Studies Collective, which has been reading The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back From Anti-Lynching to Abolition by Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill Mullen this fall. If you missed the series, read the book on your own and keep your eyes peeled for them to hopefully do it again next year (funding permitting—this year came to fruition thanks to a UC Berkeley Black Studies grant, let’s keep that town-gown collaboration going please!). [OPL]
Arguments: A Reading & Celebration with Ben Gucciardi and Aracelis Girmay, 6:30pm, John Hinkel Park (Berkeley Hills). I picked up my copy of Arguments from EBB Sunday and was intrigued to see this on the copyright page, which I imagine a lawyer friend wisely insisted should be there: “The poem ‘Argument’ draws on real places and experiences, but its events and characters are fictionalized.” May all of our writing be so daring as to demand disclaimers. Ben organizes the Sundial reading series, coaches soccer, advocates for immigrants, has a Markham at his side, hunts for mushrooms, hails from the West Bay but came home to the East Bay, and has a powerful, powerful heart. His poetry moves me to tears, and he’ll be reading with Arecelis Girmay and a couple hundred friends will be listening, eyes glistening, along with me in the park. [luma]
The King of Aloe Vera, 7pm, Pegasus Books (Downtown Berkeley). It’s launch day, baby! Tomas sends The King of Aloe Vera into orbit around the bay/California/the world, in conversation with Vincent Chu (Nice Places). Their novels might be set on the wrong side of the Bay Bridge, but Moniz is an East Bay dude now, who teaches at Berkeley City College, has zined his way through the years, and is a deeply generous part of the writing community here. Jeff Chang says The King of Aloe Vera is “a love song for the weird old Bay Area.” Be careful, he’ll flirt the heart out of you with photos of his grandkids. [insta]
Move the Knowledge Out, 7pm, Understory (Fruitvale). “What do you know that no one asks you about, and who needs it next?” is apparently the prompt, as Network of Ensemble Theaters (NET) kick it back to you at Understory, to offer the wisdom you have. Come with a real question and one thing you need and then, hopefully, leave with collaborators, sharper questions, or even answers. (NET will be in the Bay for six days building human infrastructure amongst the people who make art and the people who organize.) [luma]
Restoration, 7pm, Clio’s Books (The Lake). Carol Davis discusses her debut novel Restoration with Amanda Uhle (author of the memoir Destroy This House, publisher of McSweeney’s). Clio’s has a lovely description of the way that houses in these books serve as metaphors for belonging, stability, and memory, but instead I am going to give you the takes from goodreads, which are unreliable as anything but diagnoses of the strange expectations of people who sign up for netgalley: “I can’t stand 3-page chapters” and “I wasn’t drug through the anguish of her childhood with her” and “well-written, but claustrophobic, stressful read” for Uhle and “the prose style did not match what happened. Much of the prose was really descriptive,” a warning for “language and infidelity,” and “The narrator’s thesaurus worthy recountings rang like an hollow litany. I desperately wanted Risa to speak for herself” for Davis, who apparently should have written the entire book in the first person to begin with. Fuck the haters and find out for yourself if a house can ever be a home. [eventbrite]
Oakland Alliance Against Racist & Political Repression: General Members Meeting, 7pm, 1610 Harrison (Downtown). This local group has been fighting for families who lost loved ones to police violence, to turn cop jobs into civilian jobs, and are just generally doing the work of abolition. I bet they have opinions about the new OPD contract to raise salaries too. [insta]
Also: The History of Soca Music from Trinidad and Tobago at EastSide Arts Alliance (Deep East) / Mend, Alter, & Upcycle Your Clothes at North Branch BPL (Berkeley) / Julia Moss—WANDERERS: A Walk Through Time and Transportation at Mrs. Dalloway’s Bookstore (Elmwood) / One Village, One Book Reads 107 Days by Kamala Harris at Montclair Branch (The Hills) / Floating to Shore Poetry Open Mic hosted by Alie Jones at Night Heron (Downtown)
Wednesday, October 7
ORB Happy Hour, 4pm, Portal (Eastlake). Come hang out with ORB writers and readers at Portal, and take a book home with you. Kids welcome, if that helps you drop by. [ORB]
We’re not ready for We’re Not Ready for SuperIntelligence, 6pm, Wheeler Hall (Cal). Join Effective Altruists at Cal to watch a youtube video that some of the most normal people on the planet are sharing on their LinkedIn, and then eat their snacks and chat with them, if you dare. The premise here is that all the hype is real, but dangerous, except in an exciting and cool way. I bet there will be a lot of soft hands. [luma]
Miriam Pawel on the history of the University of California, 6pm, Local Economy (Eastmost Berkeley). Historian Pawel’s new book California Dreams is about the UC system—after writing books about the United Farm Workers movement, Cesar Chavez, and “The Browns of California.” Her new one pairs well with Tony Platt’s Scandal of Cal, and can we recommend a Chris Newfield chaser? Pawel will be conversing with Berkeleyside founder Frances Dinkelspiel (and Berkeleyside chatted with her here). [luma]
Wood Street Screening with Director Q&A, 7pm, Vine Cinema & Alehouse (Hot Side of the Hills). Tell your friends who crossed the hills for the yard space to go see Wood Street and hear from the unhoused Oakland folks themselves speaking for themselves alongside the director who watched the community get broken and dispersed by the city. [vinecinema.com]
Oakland Originals Premiere: Three New Documentaries, 7pm, Grand Lake Theater (Grand Lake). Three local Oakland documentaries! MC RyanNicole’s Grit & Forgiveness deals with the impact of gentrification on her hometown (which is The Town); Gilbert Gong inThe Heart of Lincoln Square chronicles the rebirth of community in Chinatown, and John Jones III in One Place in America, comes back to East Oakland after serving time to become an asset to his community, no longer a liability, and to take the lessons of community from East Oakland and spread them throughout the city. [oaklandoriginals.com]
The Berkeley Slam ft. Leticia Hernandez-Linares, 8pm, The Starry Plough Pub (Berkeley). The Berkeley Poetry Slam at The Starry Plow was the first time I ever got goosebumps and chills from hearing poetry performed, way back in the year of our lord 2001 when I was eighteen. Let Salvadoran-American poet and profesora Leticia Hernandez-Linares raise the hairs on the back of your neck tonight. [eventbrite]
Also: Bedazzle a Banned Book at Main Oakland Library (The Lake-ish) / Charles L. Ponce de Leon: Rolling Stone and the Rise of Hip Capitalism at Book Passage Ferry Building (West Bay) / An Evening of Songs, Stories, and Poetry with Amy Speace at The Back Room (Berkeley) / Run It Like a Business at Clio’s Books (The Lake) / Elaine Elinson’s “RADIANT AS THE STARS” at Mrs. Dalloway’s Bookstore (Elmwood)
Thursday, October 8
Symposium on Trans Negativity, Day 1, 4pm, 315 Wheeler Hall (Cal). Enough of belonging, visibility and pride: Thursday afternoon kicks off a three-day academic symposium on “trans negativity,” which means both a “devaluation of trans people across contemporary discourses” (boo!) and an “exciting turn within trans thought” (yay!) that “refuses to be edifying and instead embraces the bleak, dissociative, and antagonistic.” In other words, given how many different UC Berkeley departments and centers are sponsoring this thing, it means whatever you’d like it to mean, or not mean. Bring your naysaying vibes to campus, where Cal professor, contributor to the beloved and infamous Make the Golf Course a Public Sex Forest!, and internet trickster Grace Lavery will give an opening presentation of her forthcoming book Personal Demons, in conversation with Jessy Nyiri and Ava Kim. [UC]
Khiara Bridges: Expecting Inequity, 5pm, Tarea Hall Pittman South Branch BPL (South Berkeley). UC Berkeley Law Professor Khiara Bridges embedded at a prenatal clinic in the West Bay catering to wealthy women and it turns out that racism crosses all borders, even class ones, for Black mothers. Come learn about the imperative of reproductive justice to protect Black moms and babies from their heightened risk of death even in the Bay, even in Piedmont. [BPL]
Living, Working and Creating in the Bay: An Alameda County Artist Discussion, 6pm, Open Test Kitchen (Old Oakland). A movement has to have some movers and shakers at the heart of it to get anywhere. Join April Pascua (performer), Jaelynn Walls (author, curator), Sasha Kelley (BLACspace Cooperative), and Cat Lauigan (Cone Shape Top) to choreograph some creative organizing in Alameda County—what does living as an artist here actually feel like and what future are we moving toward. Bringing together people from music, theatre, literary arts, and more to advocate together for funding, support, and community. [insta]
Dave Zirin on The People’s Historian, Howard Zinn, 6pm, Local Economy (Rockridge is “Pretend Berkeley” according to Judy Juanita). Dave Zirin (The Nation) comes through to talk about a guy with a name almost like his but not quite, in his new history of a historian: The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn. Davey D, host of Hard Knock Radio on KPFA, in conversation, to bring the real lefties out. [luma]
Judy Juanita & Benjamin Bowser on Black life in Oakland, 6pm, Main Oakland Library (The Lake-ish). This is the GOOD stuff: Judy Juanita grew up in Oakland, was editor in chief of the Black Panther’s party newspaper as a student at SF State, has written a book of poetry called “Manhattan my ass, you’re in Oakland,” and has a new memoir out about her life right here: California Fever Dream: A Memoir. She’ll be talking with Prof Emeritus from CSU East Bay Benjamin Bowser about his research into the century plus of Black life in Oakland, forthcoming in his book When Black People Lived in Oakland. Come through to learn about large scale patterns and individual experience of a changing Oakland from a Black perspective. [OPL]
R.O.A.D.T.I.P. - Radical Overview About Ditching Technology In-Person! (Oakland Stop), 6pm, Tamarack (Downtown). First event I ever went to at Tamarack was the Tech Tribunal organized by Brian Merchant to help us all think like modern day Luddites, which is to say, to resist the replacement of people by machines for the sake of profit. Now here we go again, Ludditing it up! Some folks from a Far Deep Northeast Oakland suburb (I think we pronounce it “BrookLYN”?) share how throwing a damn good party is the way toward revolution, and how to organize it all in person. Puppet theatre comes up, as is its habit when you get this many radicals together. [insta]
The Queen of Bad Influences: Stories by Jim Shepard, 6pm, Best Friends Wine Bar (Solano Ave) This is a genre I haven't encountered before: historical SHORT fiction. Enjoy time traveling via Shepard's "dazzling" "indelible" prose to various points in history where bad shit is about to go down. [banter]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Litquake’s Booksellers Ball, 7pm, The Paper Doll (North Beach). Drag, bookstores, wine, and keeping the brightest literary festival in the West Bay in the black is a good time, and it’s on tonight to launch the month of counting down to LitCrawl and stopping off at plenty of other author events along the way. [litquake]
Dorothy Lazard!, 7pm, Clio’s Books (Grand Lake). If you’ve read a book about Oakland’s past in the last few years, the chances are good you’ll find the author thanking Dorothy Lazard in the acknowledgements. Lazard’s new book, Behind the Desk at the Main, talks about the modern American library, but specifically ours (and hers): the one and only OPL Main. She’ll be chatting with Mr. East Bay Yesterday himself, Liam O’Donoghue, and he may ask her to clarify the circumstances of her controversial un-invitation from the library for whom, for so many, she’s been the most visible and important representative. [eventbrite]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Translator to Translator: Translating Diaspora, 7pm, KALW (FiDi). The first of four conversations curated by Jon Cho-Polizzi on Black diasporic literature brings poet and translator Aaron Coleman into the conversation. Jon Cho-Polizzi, a professor of German focused on the radical literary scene in Berlin, will speak to the work of Afro-German writers, and Coleman will talk about Cuban literature and the work of literary activism. [CAT]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Jean-Baptiste Phou in conversation with Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, 7pm, City Lights Booksellers & Publishers (North Beach). Two South East Asian writers come together to talk about Jean-Baptiste Phou’s work as a gay French-Chinese-Cambodian writer who has now moved to reroot in the country of his ancestors in Phnom Penh, and about other cheery topics, like genocide, exile, and imperialism. Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, DVAN co-leader, is in conversation. [insta]
Samantha Josephs: “Carrying”, with Ugur Dursun, 7pm, Pegasus Books (Downtown Berkeley). In Carrying, Joseph’s highly highly praised debut novel, a trans woman who is so fishy even her husband hasn’t guessed finds herself unexpectedly, impossibly pregnant, and since all books about pregnancy are by default body horror, this is a genre novel that has been called Rosemary’s Detransition, Baby. Shall we ask Pauline to review this next? [Pegasus]
Also: Banned Books Button-Making For Teens at Main Library (The Lake-ish) / Writer’s Workshop at Nomadic Bookshop (Uptown) / Ride or Dye at Studio Twenty Six (Longfellow) / WIRED’s Uncanny Valley Live Recording with Paulina Borsook at The Commons at KQED (West Bay)
Friday, October 9
[FULL UP] Brooks Island!, 8:30am, The Bay (Neither Berkeley nor Richmond, but both). Called Isla de Cármen by a Spanish explorer, this island just south of Richmond and West of Berkeley, and according to its wikipedia entry I’m reading appeared as “Brooks Island” on maps from 1850 onward. This “relaxed, narrated boat ride” is the only way to get there, for a two-mile hike, with hot drinks provided, but you can't because all the RSVPs are russvpped. [EBRPD]
Creative Mornings Altitude Speaker Series with Gretchen Carvajal, 9am, Chapter 510 (Old Oakland). Gretchen Carvajal speaks from her Filipina identity and community, inspired by the mentorship of Black and AAPI writers and activists. Starting as a slam and performance poet, she has expanded across media and disciplines but stays rooted in the Bay. Start your day off with some flow. [insta]
Symposium on Trans Negativity, Day 2, 9:45am, Wheeler Hall (Cal). Trans writers and thinkers continue to prove the negative all day long on campus, starting, we hope, with some kind of catered antimatter first thing in the morning. Professors from near and far, including the very distinguished Jack Halberstam and Cal’s own Eric Stanley, will be mixing it up with poets including Cameron Awkward-Rich and Willa Smart of the Tamarack reading series. Four negative panels with four to five negative panelists apiece will make you forget you ever had a gender in the first place. Just say no! [UC]
ALL OUT Arms Embargo Mobilization, 10am, Fed Ex Shipping Center (Deep East). Mobilize against FedEx shipping weapons to Israel via the Oakland Airport. [via a text I got]
Forbidden Stories: ‘The Deportation Project’ and keeping journalists’ stories alive, 4pm, The J School (Cal). Hear about journalists leading the global investigation into Trump’s deportation efforts and the prison camps the US is supporting abroad about the threats facing journalists seeking truth that exposes corruption and how international collaboration protects their work. Speakers: Laurent Richard and David Barstow, whose motto for the new project behind this effort, Forbidden Stories, is “Killing the journalist won’t kill the story.” These reporters are the real ones. [UC]
~Litquake~ An Afternoon with Mahogany Browne, 4:30pm, Chapter 510 (Old Oakland). Bring your kids, their teachers, and yourself into the room to hear Mahogany L. Browne (A Bird in the Air Means We Can Still Breathe) in conversation with poet and performance artist Belinda Bellinger, after young poets from Youth Speaks start off the afternoon. Alie Jones (Saltwater Moonshine) moderates, and Black women’s belief in the future and of the importance of children’s belief in themselves as artists will carry the day. [Litquake]
Voter Forum with OUSD School Board Candidates, 5:30pm, Parker Community Resource Center (Eastmont). Reminder! Oakland schools have no accountability to the city they’re plopped inside! The Oakland school district is administered by the Alameda County Dept of Education: the taxes you pay the city do not fund the schools, and the mayor can’t do anything about the schools, only the Superintendent can. Now that that’s straight, go hear from school board candidates and all the promises they are making. It is said that Prop 43 will also be under discussion. [insta]
~Litquake~ “I took the lake between my legs”: Women of a Certain Age Read Poems on Sex and Death, 6pm, Vintage Berkeley Wine Shop (Elmwood). OK, Mahogany L. Browne is done talking to children, now she’s here to be very, very adult over a glass of wine. Get in the mood with “frankly erotic” work by women poets in the heart of their power (aka their 40s): readers are Browne and fellow poets Prageeta Sharma, Jen Siraganian, Melissa Stein, and Barbara Jane Reyes in the garden, running hot and not at all bothered about it. [litquake]
Poetry! Tamarack, 6:30pm (Downtown). Julian Francis Park (co-editor of the Communist Poem a Day newsletter), Joni Prince (Tamarack poetry cohost and also a communist), and communist-until-proven-otherwise James Loop who makes poems that say things like, “I was told my plaintive look would attract/ co-travelers. / People will tell you all kinds of things if / You let them” and “oh my garden! / I played a trick on you/ told you you should grow that you were asked for that you / asked for.” (poetry in the bay)
Kwento Across Waters Open Mic, 7pm, Malaya Botanicals (Alameda The Temporary Island). Read, sing, and dance out your “Tender Rebellions” at this AAPI and Filipinx centered open mic tonight! [insta]
Also: Mini Banned Books Keychains (For Teens) at Main Oakland Library (The Lake-ish) / Play: Wind UP Mice Issue 4 Release Party & Five Year Anniversary Celebration at et al. gallery (The Mission) / ~Litquake~ Olivie Blake: Dreamland at Gilman Brewing (West Berkeley) / ~Litquake~ Hernan Diaz with Ed Yong at BATS Improv Theatre (Fort Mason) / Body Love Open Mic at The Back Room (Berkeley)
Saturday, October 10
50 Years Along the Lafayette-Moraga Regional Trail, 9am, Lafayette Community Center (Hot Side of the Hills). Learn some hills history and some park history with the surburbanites on the other side of the tunnel. [EBRPD]
Una Ofrenda Musical/A Musical Altar for our Muertos, 10:30am, Children’s Room at Oakland Main (The Lake-ish). Ofrenda and music making! This is why we love our library: it’s a true community space that shares not just the buzzy and popular and new, but also connects us together within Oakland’s many cultures, so everyone can make this place together. [OPL]
Coffee with a Cop, 11am, Piedmont Avenue Branch OPL (Piedmont the Street That’s In Oakland). Even cops get to come to the library. Free lattes and “no agenda or speeches”—that’s what YOU think. [OPL]
Gallery+Studio / Echoes of Nature, 11:30am, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). I heard from the New Parkway that the shadow puppet workshop organizer bailed, which sucks, but somehow, I have found you yet one more puppeting-adjacent event. Risa Lenore of Possibly Puppets helps you envision anything as a puppet, and influenced by the show at Berkeley of Maren Hassinger’s twisty, twiny artworks, you will get to use rope and string to make creatures. [bampfa]
Merci Mini Scent Fest!, 12 noon, Mercy Vintage (College Ave). Drink champagne, meet local independent perfumers, and ask them what Oakland smells like. [insta]
Tote Bag Swap, 1pm, Central Berkeley Library (Downtown Berkeley). Diversify your tote wardrobe, and we won’t even mind if you give away your ORB tote, it’s just widening the ORBit. And you can always sign up for a membership to get another one. [BPL]
Lake Merritt Modernism: Architecture, Recreation, and Play, 1 pm, Laney College Quad (The Lake). The West Bay is destroying brutalist midcentury art, but in the East Bay we’re rediscovering it and walking around it. Modernist architecture advocates Camila Baum, Anna Grune, Gary Leung, Petra Marar, and Barrett Reiter talk and walk us through the way that the mid-century shaped the built environment of the lake and shaped our ideas of how to be in public together. See the Geodesic Bird Dome through new eyes by the time two hours is over. [docomomo-noca]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Symposium on Trans Negativity, Day 3, 1pm, The Lab (The Mission). Trans negativity crosses the bridge for a final anti-hurrah. Cameron Awkward-Rich, whose latest book of poetry evokes this best of times and worst of times in trans life, reads: “Upon first glance, it is difficult to decipher a figure, much less a facial expression. Upon first glance, it is difficult, the figure. Upon first glance, there is no face.” Theory king Jack Halberstam, who gave us the concept of “queer time” twenty queer years ago and has been philosophizing up a storm ever since, follows in conversation with artist Leila Weefur. [UC]
A Place for What We Lose, with author Tamiko Nimura, 2pm, J-SEI (Emeryville). Scholar and writer Tamiko Nimura will speak with fellow memoirist Susan Ito about her book of intergenerational trauma and healing, A Place for What We Lose: a daughter’s return to Tule Lake. Nimura interlaces her life, experiences, and memory with the manuscript of her father’s unpublished memoir about his experiences of internment to reveal how place and pilgrimage hold history. [j-sei]
On Record | Bay Area, 2pm, BAM House (Downtown). Part of the NET gathering! Bay Area theatre matriarchs tell us how they’re doing it, and that they’re already here. Hear from Dr. ayodele nzinga, director of all ten of August Wilson’s Century Cycle plays,Cat Brooks (Tune in to her on KALW at 8 AM on Law & Disorder most days), stage and screen director Elizabeth Carter, experimental theatre person and SF Mime trouper Edris Cooper-Anifowoshe, and visiting from NOLA, Lauren Turner Hines. Then stay for the party. [insta]
Día de los Muertos with Cascada de Flores, 3pm, Claremont Branch (Fancy Berkeley). Celebrate Dia de los Muertos with barriletes, calaveras, and ofrendas in the Claremont barrio alongside all the nannies raising their employers’ children to be bilingual. [BPL]
Dorothy Lazard Author Talk, 4pm, North Branch BPL (North Berkeley). Lazard the librarian gets to speak at a library, finally! [BPL]
~Litquake~ Claudia Rankine: Triage, 7pm, First Presbyterian Church of Oakland Fellowship Hall (Adams Point). OK, Litquake is bringing in the rock stars and will be filling up the pews: Claudia Rankine with Cathy Park Hong—I’m sorry, did you need anything more to get you out the door? OK here: 2026 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate Isaiah Kahn and Vice OYPL Isabel Shen (I love that there’s a VP of Poetry in Oakland) will be reading first before the heavy hitters take the stage. [litquake]
Also: Short Course: Memorial to Joshua Clover at Online (The Internet) / Club de Lectura en Español: El abogado y la Seńora at Fruitvale Branch (Deep East) / Golden State Pie Contest at Potrero Hill Neighborhood House (West Bay) / Oakland Noticing Club: Shadows at Local Economy (Rockridge) / Roots & Rhythm at Clinton Park (Eastlake) / Postcard Party with Authors Against Book Bans at Pegasus Books (Solano Ave) / on being Chinese and online with viola he at tiat (West Bay) / Rockridge Book Club Reads Catalina by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio at Rockridge Branch OPL (College Ave) / Banned Book Bingo with the Golden Gate fREADom Writers at Book Passage Corte Madera (North Bay) / Nourish Your Bloom: An Evening of Immersive Poetry, Journaling & Open Mic with Taran Singh at Far Leaves Tea (San Pablo Corridor)
Sunday, October 11
Boat to Brooks, 8:30am, Brooks Island (Berkeley Marina). More boats, more bay, more Brooks Island! You will ride on a big boat and then a small boat. Bring your own water or you will be rimed like the ancient mariner without a drop to drink. [EBRPD]
Dignity For All Art Exhibit & Art Build, 12:30pm, Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists (Berkeley). Berkeley’s Unitarians are preparing for their fifth annual pilgrimage to ICE detention centers in Kern County as part of their ongoing campaign to close the wretched institutions, and like any public-facing political campaign this requires a lot of art. This exhibit showcases narrative and visual art produced and deployed by the Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity, followed by an art build for this year’s journey. Wear your cutest work clothes, because There Will Be Paint. [google]
~Litquake~ Lesbians Are Elsewhere: Writing the For All Gaze Archive, 2pm, Clio’s Books (The Lake). Lesbians! Are they everywhere? Yes, comrades, yes: everywhere. Lesbians are in the DVD/Blu-Ray section at the library. They are in the streets and in the sheets and sometimes in cleats in Mosswood Park. They are on both sides of the counter at your nearest Buffalo Wild Wings. They are in something called “The Archive.” And they are at Clio’s, where lesbian (and[/or?] queer) writers will engage with curated selections from Oakland’s own F.A.G. (For All Gaze) Archive. [eventbrite]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Honoring Red Jordan Arobateau: Book Launch for Time Also Will Make It Interesting, 2pm, Et al. (The Mission). Red Jordan Arobateau was always there when it happened. A central figure in the midcentury underground dyke bar culture of New York and Chicago who moved to San Francisco in time to witness the Summer of Love and transitioned during the city’s subsequent neoliberal political-economic backlash. In this new collection of his journal entries, the late poet, playwright, and painter describes his dreams, his political fury, and a messy ground-level view of a quickly transforming city. Readers will include poet and book editor Cameron Awkward-Rich, who is sticking around for the weekend. [jotform]
Motherhood and Interspecies Solidarity in a Time of Climate Crisis, 2pm, Local Economy (Rockridge). When artists and scientists get together to make a book, strange beauties result. The Weather and the Whale is what specifically results from two years of cross-disciplinary communication, because both artists and scientists start from a place of deep attention, which climate chaos and its consequences for animals both human and non deserve and demand. The collective who created the book were all drawn to the interdisciplinary moment when whalesong recordings in the ’70s drove public support for the endangered species act; now, thanks to climate chaos, whale mamas can’t make enough milk to keep their babies alive in the Salish Sea up north, and right here gray whales and humpbacks are coming into the Bay at higher frequencies, leading to increased shipstrikes. As poet Rachel Dillon writes in “A dead whale can feed an entire ecosystem”:Please, someone—tell me a poem can coax oil from a sea bird’s throat.Tell me what to dowith my hands—my hands—what can my hands do now? [luma]
PITCH, 2pm, Mosswood Park (Deep East). I am SO GLAD I found this, and this is why you read ORB, to find out about site-specific local dyke history dance performances on a softball field in East Oakland. If we don’t see a cluster of ORB baseball caps out there, you are all kicked out of the ORBit. This is for all the League of Their Own fans, all the community sports joiners, all the people into people’s histories, all the lesbians and butches, sapphics and allies, and all of us who love what Oakland does, which is make new, incredibly inventive art from the heart of local community. There’s a real diamond in there, reach for it. [eventbrite]
Book Release Party! The Order of the Golden Calf, 6:30pm, The Long Haul (Berkeley). In his fourth novel, Bay Area fixture Vincent Gorden imagines a future Bay Area unshackled from racism, patriarchy, and capitalism. But this equitable and bioregionalist future does not exist outside of history, as a conspiracy from ex-Apartheid nationalists seek to reassert a global order based on white supremacy and fossil fuels. Fittingly, the book release party will be held at an anarchist infoshop, and food and live jazz will be provided. [insta]
David Shaddock and Dawn McGuire Poetry Reading, 7pm, Art House Gallery & Cultural Center (Berkeley). Most poets have day jobs outside of literature, and I appreciate it when their poetry openly explores their diurnal lives. This reading showcases two readers who have found a way to wear both hats. Berkeley’s David Shaddock is a psychotherapist-poet whose new collection Tehachapi Pass speaks to the same concerns that animate his private practice, from climate catastrophe to domestic life. Moving from the superego to the frontal cortex, poet-neurologist Dawn McGuire’s collection American Dream with Exit Wound is informed by her own work with veterans with PTSD, addiction, eating disorders, and other mental scars of war. [poetryflash.org]
Also: The Oakland Slam and Wide Open Mic! at Nomadic Bookshop (Uptown) / Who’s to Say This Isn’t a Garden: Poetry Reading at The Secret Alley (West Bay)
