Oakland Review of Books calendar of (not just) literary events, September 15–20

We’re two weeks into September and the calendar is already mad full. Even Monday has good shit. Props to Devon for her ability to filter and curate down to a top five; I don’t have that talent. There's just so much, how can you choose? Theatre is ramping up (at Berkeley Rep and in this satire of Berkeley politics that for some reason is playing in Contra Costa), and since it’s still summer for one more week, free Shakespeare in the Park came to the West Bay with Antony and Cleopatra are loitering around, imperially. Movies about animals are playing in the West Bay and the Oakland International Film Festival has one more week left too. People are walking all day for poetry in some Sonoma County heat, or you can walk and learn South Asian Radical History in Berkeley soon now that the fall schedule is up. The Seventh Street Museum is working with artists and local folks to build their archives of Black West Oakland—I stopped by the other day and learned a ton, and Gene even made my white West Oakland ancestors a local wiki page! I promised to bring in my family ephemera for digitization and you can too. It’s Coastal Clean Up Day on Saturday so pitch in if you can figure out what's trash and what’s infrastructural hardscaping along our bayshore. Share the calendar with a friend and tell them ORB is where it’s at and  make a plan to leave your house and read the city as well as your books. We’ll see you out there. —MS, AB, XL

Tuesday, September 15

Josette Melchor // Newtemporary: Designing in the Space Between New and Next, 5:30pm, Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation (Cal). Designing for impermanence is a very different approach to placemaking than I have ever heard, one pretty antithetical to my own understanding of rootedness, memory, and patterns of use as foundational to place, but on the other hand, God is Change, and a city is made by the people who are are changed by it. But on the other other hand, Burning Man is not a real place and neither is the internet, which seem to be Melchor's two major bona fides. [UCB]

The Earth Said Remember Me, a guide to resisting environmental amnesia, 6pm, Local Economy (Rockridge). Sierra Magazine editor Jason Dove Mark wrote a book that says: Go outside. Bear witness. Make a record. Pass it on. Here's a book with a great set of tools for doing just that. Stories of the flocks of birds darkening the Bay Area skies at the start of colonization, that salamanders and lizards lived in East Oakland yards in the '90s, and the tree-filling clusters of Western Monarchs along the coast every winter in the '80s are not nostalgia, but a history of our world. Remember so we can reimagine. In conversation with Melinda Kramer, Co-Founder of Women’s Earth Alliance. [luma]

Berkeley City Council: Resolution Opposing Coal, 6pm, Berkeley City Council @ BUSD Boardroom (Downtown Berkeley). So you read about why and how coal keeps trying to leave the US through the Port of Oakland, now hang out with Megan "No on Coal, Yes on Sleater-Kinney" Wachspress along with some large scale puppets, David Solnit's art, and everyone else who thinks it's a bad idea to keep heating up our atmosphere. The port is a chokepoint: hold your hands steady on the neck of the fossil fuel industry. [No Coal in Oakland]

[SOLD OUT] The WTF Did I Just Read Book Club: Open Throat, 6:30pm, Book Society (Elmwood). I am very into the bookstore for white women who drink white wine taking on weirdo lit once in a while, even though I hear experiencing them up close and personally is as if goodreads reviews came to life. I would love to be in the room for the discourse around Open Throat, which has got to be one of my top five queer mountain lion narrated books set in LA of all time. I loved that Henry Hoke, at the talk I went to about the book, called it, within an hour or so, a monologue, a poem, a novel, and not a novel at all. Whatever the fuck it is, it is funny and sad and beautiful and dreamily bizarre, just like LA. [Book Society]

[West Bay Bonus Event] Isabel Allende–Story Telling: A Writing Life, 7pm, JCCSF (Laurel Heights). Our second favorite Chilean writer in the Bay (after Lili Loofbourow) Isabel Allende talks about her creative process and how she gestates books in her belly, inviting stories and characters in from where they've been waiting in other dimensions, with Anna Sale, who talks about hard things, but maybe not usually escaping a coup. [JCCSF]

When We Win: The Forest for the Trees, 7:30pm, La Pena (Oakland part of Berkeley). This documentary is about Judi Bari, the Earth First! activist whose car exploded due to a pipe bomb under her seat while at the toplight at Park and MacArthur, a few blocks from where I live now. She was a key organizer of Redwood Summer, a fraught moment in the Timber Wars that defined the several decades post-'70s throughout Cascadia as environmentalists got more confrontational in protecting old growth while loggers in a slumping rural economy got more desperate for work. Important history in California, with a deeply Oakland part of the story. [La Pena]

Also: Lakeview Branch Book Club Reads Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders at Lakeview Branch OPL (The Lake) / Blood in the Desert at Clio’s Books (The Lake)

Wednesday, September 16

Teen Zine Club: Embroidered Zines, 3pm, Main Oakland Library (The Lake-ish). A stitched spine is mighty fine, difficultly for where I was going zine rhymes with queen not with spine, but you can add some colorful texture if you're so inclined and maybe someday you'll get to embroider a McSweeney's cover design. [OPL]

Shankar’s Fairies, 5pm, Stephens Hall (Cal). Irfana Majumdar directed this movie, but her mom—historian and anthropologist Nita Kumar, who will be present—wrote and produced it, and she'll stick around afterwards to chat about it. Ask her about what it was like to watch her daughter direct a movie in which she played her own grandmother. [UCB]

[West Bay Bonus Event] Francis Fukuyama IS the last man, 6pm, Commonwealth Club World Affairs (Embarcadero). Come and hear Francis Fukuyama be low-key a little mad that no one actually READS his famous essay but everyone thinks they know what it says. Apparently he has a memoir, about all the different conservative institutions he's been in and around? OK. [CWC]

Launch of 'Because We Need Each Other' Zine, 6pm, Nomadic Bookshop (Uptown). This is about how to call in instead of cancel, and how the left should not eat itself for the sake of purity. On the other hand, compulsive forgiveness without the work of accountability and rebuilding trust is also no good. Discussion with coauthors Kazu Haga and Shilpa Jain, and zine illustrator Cattails Comix. Come if you're curious about being flawed together, accounting for everyone's potential to do harm, and how to handle each other's vulnerabilities so as not to exploit and hurt those who have trusted you with them. [insta]

Queer Trans Hysto Zine launch party, 6pm, Local Economy (Rockridge). Instead of getting hysterical over trans people, get hysterectomied instead (if you want to; no one's into compulsory reproductive medicine here) and buy a zine with stories, art, and poems about queerly becoming uterus-free. Edited by locals Hanne Williams-Baron and Adrian Matias Bell, who will host the contributors reading their work out loud. [luma]

Mothophilia—More than 20 Reasons to LOVE Moths!, 6:30pm, Magnolia Building (Piedmont the Enemy City). Local ecologist Allen Fish leads the Piedmont takeover by teaching you how to use lures to attract moths and then look at them at night and why you'd want to do such a thing. I am sure Piedmont would love it if we studied nature at night in their neighborhoods, there would never be any problem with that nosirree. [Capturepoint]

Umami Mart's Everyday Sake: The Go-To Guide, 6:30pm, Rockridge Branch OPL (College Ave). Kayoko Akabori and Yoko Kumano, who run Oakland's Umami Mart are into the surge of sake and have made us all a useful guide so we don't feel like total rubes looking at all the options. A beverage professional told me last year that sake is having a moment in her world, and strangely, also that Boston is the place to go for the most exciting sake experiments. But there's a big sake factory (with a museum!) right here in the east bay so I think we can get weird with it once we've got the basics down thanks to Akabori and Kumano. [OPL]

Screening of Sugarcane with Julian Brave NoiseCat, 7pm, David Brower Center (Downtown Berkeley). Julian Brave NoiseCat (Tsq̓éscen̓ First Nation) made a movie that's "really a reverse Western buddy stoner roadtrip tragicomedy" with fathers and sons and sons without fathers and snatched away children and a culture determined to persist nevertheless. [eventbrite]

[West Bay Bonus Event] Helene Wecker–The Gates of Midnight, 7pm, JCCSF (Laurel Heights). Wecker's The Golem and the Jinni earned a place on my shelf for that gorgeous cover alone, but then the book was fantastic too when I finally read it, and yet somehow I missed the fact that there was a sequel, nevermind a trilogy planned? Good thing I finally caught on and you can catch up too. If you too love an intersection of Jewish and Arab mythology in New York City and really well-written fantasy, come on down. [JCCSF]

[West Bay Bonus Event] The Bay Area’s Overlooked Indigenous History, 7pm, Decentered Arts Studio (SoMa). Go deep with SJSU prof Abel R. Gomez, whose research on contemporary Ohlone tribal communities in the Bay Area, where he was born and raised, showed him the importance of ceremony as part of #LandBack and right relationship. Hear the history, and know that the native People of this place are still here, remembering it, loving it, imagining how it can be. [luma]

Bitter Honey, 7pm, Clio’s Books (The Lake). Jennie Durant on big ag, tiny flying farmworkers, and the role of the Central Valley's monocultures of orchards in starting the traveling bee circus that's become a big fat business and a contagion spreader. With Jeanne Merrill of the Berkeley Food Institute. [eventbrite]

James Ciano: The Committee of Men , with Leigh Lucas & Will Brewer, 7pm, Pegasus (Downtown Berkeley). Nonlocal poet James Ciano brings his debut book of poetry out from BOA Editions The Committee of Men to the Bay where his backing band for the night includes Leigh Lucas and Will Brewer, who are both fun to have a drink with. Ciano edited the Collected Poems of Larry Levis (out from Graywolf, don't look at their new logo without bracing yourself first), so in the line of that son of Fresno, expect verses exposing the tenderness disguised by hetero masc whiteness. [Pegasus]

Also: Arts of the Border with Debarati Sanyal at Geballe Room (Cal) / Learn Book Binding with Xochitlpili 'Prince' Faulkner at Tarea Hall Pittman South Branch (Berkeley) / Frauke Berndt on Christian Kracht’s novel AIR at Dwinelle Hall (Cal) / Black Authors Book Club Reads Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist. at West Oakland Branch OPL (De Fremery) / Roy Remer—Zen Caregiving: How to Care for Yourself While Caring for Others. at Books Inc. (Alameda) / Joseph Coulson's "THE PRINCE OF MEMPHIS" at Mrs. Dalloway's Bookstore (Oakland) / Barbara Forever at BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley) / Democracy Noir at Grand Lake Theatre (Grand Lake)

Thursday, September 17

Gasper Begus: Understanding humans, animals, and machines, 11am, Weill Hall (Cal). In what sounds like sci fi, Gašper Beguš is "creating an artificial baby language learner" in his lab. He also applies his linguistic chops to Project CETI, which studies whalesong. He and his wife and fellow researcher Nina apparently are also using Finnegan's Wake's attempts to escape English while recombining it (Oh Jimmy, always anticolonial even when you didn't mean to be) to model the inner workings of language formation within AI systems, but more importantly, Beguš has observed that baby whales babble. [UCB]

REI Colloquium: Banished Citizens: A History of the Mexican American Women Who Endured Repatriation,12 noon, Philosophy Hall (Cal). Proving that the past is never past, in the 1920s and for two decades a million ethnic Mexicans were deported, including citizens married to immigrants. Writing about women targeted for their race and working class status, sent back to the place that they didn't in fact come from, Maria Ramirez shows us where we've been before, and what the generational consequences are. [UCB]

California Live! Fighting Back: Claudia Polsky on Taking Trump to Court, 12 noon, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). When research funding was stripped from UC researchers due to the petty tyrants holding the purse strings in Washington, it was the professors who got it back, while UCOP sat around on its hands. Hear from Berkeley Law professor Claudia Polsky about how she and her colleagues are serving the people of California, clawing back a billion dollars of grant funding so far. [UCB]

The Once and Future World Order: Why Global Civilization Will Survive the Decline of the West, 12:30pm, Philosophy Hall (Cal). Well, that's a relief. (Or is it?) [UCB]

[West Bay Bonus Event] Poems and Wine, 5:30pm, Golden Sardine (North Beach). The poets are writing tonight, not reading at the Deen. Join Garrett Schlichte and Hieu Minh Nguyen to get served riesling and hot poetry prompts. [insta]

Paulina Borsook and Alexis Madrigal: Cyberselfish, 6pm, Local Economy (Rockridge). Two former Wired reporters bemoan the self absorption, libertarianism, and extreme individualism of the tech industry. Maybe I am just using the internet all wrong, but I find that it connects people across space, gives me incredible research access, and is just another communication technology. Neither a modem nor an iphone makes you a selfish asshole; treating other people as disposable tools does, and that's either a diagnosable personality disorder or capitalism problem. [luma]

History, Memory, and the Power of Storytelling, 6pm, Brower Center (Berkeley). At this Earth Island salon, Annie Leonard (The Power of Stuff) and Jason Dove Mark (The Earth Said Remember Me) speak to the power of independent journalism and storytelling rooted in research and facts to bring about grassroots actions and build collective power through shared convictions that we can see the world for what it is an imagine, remember, and invite ourselves into a better one. [eventbrite]

Flight of Poets: Dean Rader, Jessica Jacobs, Judy Halebsky, 6pm, Solano Cellars (Solano Ave). Nothing messy ever happens when poets start drinking, that's definitely not a thing. Tonight, sip and swirl a glass of your own for the first in a series planned for Albany's literati all of fall and into winter as you listen to Dean Rader (from a poem for Ferlinghetti: "there is poetry, in the dirt under your nails, poetry / on the skin of your children, / in the holy music of your daily duties, poetry, / along the boulevards, / poetry, on the billboards, in the bedrooms, / poetry in your voice, poetry, in your broken body & / in your hands"), and Jessica Jacobs who got a Guggenheim last year, and Judy Halebsky, who is a poet, translator, teacher, and circumambulator of Mount Tamalpais, like all the best of us. [insta]

SOLD OUT Member Preview Opening for BeHere / 1942: A New Lens on the Japanese American Incarceration, 6pm, Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) (Oakland). I guess I understand why people like to go to new exhibit openings on opening day, before everyone else, but also, come on, just show up a couple days later? Or whenever. It's still gonna be there. Anyway, that's what you're going to have to do for this one, because it is SOLD OUT. [museumca.org]

[West Bay Bonus Event] Splendor: Trans Poets Book Launch, 7pm, Green Apple Books on the Park (The Sunset). Celebrate Splendor: Trans Poets with translators Andrew Wilson and Jana Vourgourakis. Since trans people who don't have to live in the states are pretty averse to coming here right now, hear the translators read the work of Québécois poet Pascale Bérubé alongside local trans poets Alexis N. Garcia (they have a book coming out and an are.na, which we love) and Mukethe Kawinzi, transexual goatherder, land steward, poet, and author of Koans to a Young Cowboi among other exquisite chapbooks, zines, and words of all kinds. [CAT]

All That’s Left of You Screening, 7pm, Berkeley City College (Downtown Berkeley). See the Oscar nominated historical epic of Palestinian displacement, and stay after for the Q&A with people who know what they're talking about. [humanitix]

Elizabeth Metzger's The Going Is Forever, 7pm, Mrs. Dalloway's Bookstore (Elmwood). Elizabeth Metzger comes up north to share her newest work. Her poems are fantastic; I loved hearing her read at the LA Times Festival of Books a couple years ago and have been enjoying her poetry made from motherhood and its horrors and wonders ever since (Go read "Make Me" which gives the new collection its title NOW!). In conversation and reading with Jesse Nathan, whose book The San Francisco Poem comes out from Scribner next year and the previews I've heard from it are phenomenal and even involve a bison in Golden Gate Park. [Mrs D's]

Remembering El Cerrito’s Model Senior Center, 7pm, Castro Clubhouse (El Cerrito). El Cerrito has its charms and its alarms, but it also has a history, including a community senior center that supported elders holistically for decades. If you want to learn more local history, join Megan Steffen and other engaged citizens in connecting intergenerationally with community and place and listen in. [El Cerrito]

Also: Bancroft Round Table: A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth with James Tejani at Zoom (On the Internet) / Loren Means on Jewish Directors, Film Noir & the Femme Fatale at JCCSF (West Bay) / Opening Reception of Attentive Earth with Artists Muzae Sesay and Alexcia Sundra at The Guardhouse, Fort Mason Center (San Francisco) / GAAVANI: Her Journey Home — Celebrating the Female Voice in Gurbani Kirtan at Stephens Hall (Cal) / Take Back Your Privacy at Tarea Hall Pittman South Branch (Berkeley) / Songs of Earth Movie Screening with Zyzzyva and Rebecca Solnit at The Roxie (West Bay) / Future Consciousness Design: An Eco Performance Lab Workshop with Aurie Stetzel at The SERC Space (Cal) / Brenda Hillman & Robert Hass - Still House in the Desert & A Third Commonness at Book Passage Corte Madera (Corte Madera) / Poetry Circle at Claremont Branch (Berkeley) / Marion Seidemann Fredman: A Time to Hide at Books Inc. Alameda (The Island) / Something Out There in the Distance with Grant Faulkner and Gail Butensky at Clio’s Books (The Lake)

Friday, September 18

Aarthi Vadde, The Writer’s Hand-at-a-Distance, 12:15pm, South Hall (Cal). Reading is dying, and writing, also, but somehow we're producing and consuming more text than ever. In her new book, Vadde talks about how "generative AI, in its current form, is the culmination of a Web 2.0 cultural logic in which companies privatize and monetize user-generated content or mass writing," and in this talk, she'll chat about how writers like Megan O’Gieblyn, Vauhini Vara, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, and Sheila Heti initially took up generative AI only to drop it went it stopped being cool. [UCB]

[West Bay Bonus Event] Type High Party, 5pm, San Francisco Center for the Book (Design District). Thirty years of making words the old fashioned way, setting one letter at a time, rolling ink over lead, getting the bite just right: come celebrate with all the other people who correctly say "typeface" instead of "font." Say hi to Marthine if this is also your jam. [sfcb]

OMCA Friday Night (with Kiyomi and Cal Raijin Taiko), 5pm, Oakland Museum of California (The Lake). The usual OMCA thing—look for Aaron and the twins, they're always there—but also it's the opening week of "BeHere/1942: A New Lens on the Japanese American Incarceration," so Cal Raijin Taiko will be doing taiko, followed by singer-songwriter Kiyomi. [OMCA]

Alice Diop: l’Afrique fantôme, 5pm, 4229 Dwinelle Hall (Cal). Soraya Tlatli will be moderating a talk with Alice Diop, in French, so if you're down for that, in French, roll on through. [UCB]

Tasting Wine, Unearthing Memories, Writing Stories, 5pm, Vintage Berkeley (fka The Gourmet Ghetto). In vino veritas, so Grant Faulkner and Brooke Warner will help you blurt out your truth one glass at a time. [Vintage Berkeley]

MANAGE THE MACHINE, 5:30pm, Books Inc. (Alameda, forever a peninsula in its soul). Would you like to hear some folks from Salesforce and Accenture talk about How to Harness Human-AI Collaboration at Work? Well you are in luck! [eventbrite]

Author Talk + Demo with Joyce Tang of Bake Sum, 6pm, Preserved (Rockridge). Learn how to make tofu pudding today from Joyce Tang, author with Soleil Ho of Bake Sum: Asian American Pastries, Breads, and Other Treats. Go home and make your own treats so the lines at my neighborhood bakery don't get any longer. [Preserved]

Poetry! 6pm, Tamarack (Downtown). Probably back at Tamarack after a slight displacement for a couple weeks, but check the schedule. Readers are all grad students, all the way down! Katherine Franco (recent work in Zyzzyva, TriQuarterly, and the stellar Cleveland Review of Books), Rebecca Teich (crrrrritic and poet), and Rodney Dailey II (find him in Hearsay, Copenhagen, and elsewhere, as they say). [bay area poets]

Giants Rising, Film Screening (in the Redwood Grove), 6:30pm, UC Botanical Garden (Berkeley Hills). Watch a movie about the redwoods, in the redwoods, and witness as the redwoods do not watch you, because they don't really notice you, because you'll be gone soon and they will remain. Award-winning documentary film, etc, listen to featured redwood researcher Dr. Todd Dawson, etc. Redwoods. [UCB]

[West Bay Bonus Event] McSweeney’s Quarterly Issue 83 Release Party, 7pm, Enterprise Brewing Co. (SoMa). Like ORB, McSweeney’s Quarterly is swearing off readings at parties. Come celebrate Issue 83 with beer, music, and friends, and read the mag yourself on the BART ride home. [insta]

Senegalese Meet Sene-Gallic, more ALICE DIOP, 7pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). A couple of shorts—one from 2007 and one from 2025—so it's a sort of 'see how far she's come as a filmmaker,' as well as being literally a meditation on the journeys taken and not taken, from the homeland into the Heart of Darkness (i.e., France). Free tickets, but you have to pick them up at 6, so it can't sell out (but arrive early). [bampfa]

Berkeley Storytelling Festival, 8pm, Impossible Stage (Berkeley). This is the first year of a three day festival dedicated to bringing the voices of people in diaspora to the stage. Take a workshop, listen to a performance, come back tomorrow for more. [diaspora arts connection]

[West Bay Bonus Event] SF Neo-Futurists' The Neodivergent Wrench, 9pm, Theater 33 (Union Square). Plays about having a nonstandard brain, written and performed by cast members with lived experiences of ADHD, autism, depression, bipolar disorder, and every other kind of weird brain thing. My son says he doesn't like the term "neurodivergent" being opposed to "neurotypical" because "everyone's different, no one is typical," which is very sweet and still it's helpful to have a term for people at the very far end of the bell curve where trading encyclopedic knowledge of pokemon (or book publishing, ahem) is the ultimate in satisfying social experiences. [eventbrite]

Also: SOLD OUT Birding by Kayak at MLK Jr Shoreline (San Leandro Bay) / The Bike Fix at 81st Avenue Branch (Deep East) / The Role of Fire in East Bay Ecosystems, with Alan Shabel at Zoom (The Internet) / Story Explorers Salon: Stories of Travel & Adventure at Local Economy (Rockridge) / The Poetry Lounge Open Mic at Club 811 (Downtown) / Dimond Book Club: Finding My Way: A Memoir by by Malala Yousafzai at Dimond Branch OPL (The Dimond)

Saturday, September 19

Creek to Bay Day, 9am, Sausal Creek and Others (Oakland). So many creeks in Oakland and they all go to the Bay, so when you clean up the creeks, you clean the Bay, the beaches aren't covered in trash and the seabirds don't try to feed their babies legos and ziplocks. It's not as good as making the packaging producers handle the problem of waste they created for fun and profit (you remember The Ontology of Trash I don't have to remind you again) but it's something we can do together that's not making things worse. [insta]

2026 Rides and Readers 5th Annual Car Show, 9am, San Leandro Main Library (South Oakland). Vintage car show at the library—where vintage now means everything before 1975. Man libraries are really expanding their mission these days. The librarians must be pulling their hair out trying to figure out how to catalogue and shelve these books that go vroom. [City of San Leandro]

Coastal Clean up Day, 9am, Shorebird Nature Center (Berkeley Marina). Pick up trash along the Berkeley shore and if you find the weirdest piece of flotsam or jetsam you win a prize. [City of Berkeley]

Coastal Cleanup Day but in Oakland, 9am, Martin Luther King Jr Regional Shoreline (San Pablo Bay). The Bay is part of the coast, and you can join in cleaning up all the trash that floats and lands in the mudflats and marsh. [EBRPD]

Women in Wilderness: Aquatic Macroinvertebrates, 9:30am, Bollinger Canyon Staging Area (San Ramon). Go for a short hike along a creek while learning about women who science and various be-shelled creatures who swim. [EBRPD]

Children's Book Festival, 10am, Children's Fairyland (The Lake). Hip hip hurray, all the picture books are here today, and with puppets, of course, and young writers too, who might write books of their own someday soon. [fairyland]

Community Archiving Day, 11am, EastSide Cultural Center (Deep East). Make an appointment and come build the collective memory of Black, Brown, and Indigenous lives and work in Oakland. If you've got ephemera, put it in the archive. You can get a stipend and a lyft voucher to make it easier to get it all digitized (though don't throw away the box of stuff! Digitized media have their own entropy.) [insta]

[West Bay Bonus Event] Layout and Binding for Pocket Notebooks, 11am, tiat (Union Square-ish). Did you see the book binding workshops for free at the Berkley libraries this week? Look in the Alsos. If you miss them, you can go here and pay $65 at the intersection of art and technology. The notebook IS having a moment. [luma]

Rockridge Branch 30th Anniversary Party, 11am, Rockridge Branch OPL (College Ave). Now I am curious: this is the 30th anniversary of the current library's location—where was it before? And was it called the Shafter Library then, as the neighborhood used to be known before the Rockridge name creep? [OPL]

[North Bay Bonus Event] Isabel Allende with Jasmin Darznik—Story Telling, 11am, Book Passage (Corte Madera). Isabel Allende is making the rounds this week! Up in Marin in conversation with fellow novelist Jasmin Darznik, whose job chairing the CCA creative writing program ends next year because we're replacing the arts with whatever Vanderbilt is. [bookpassage]

[West Bay Bonus Event] Bookstore & Chocolate Crawl, 12 noon, Mission: Comics & Art (The Mission). It's like a pub crawl that won't get you in embarrassing legal trouble and appear in your future divorce filings! Ally with the brain in its ceaseless war against the body as you eat copious amounts of candy and pastelitos while meeting some of the best bookmongers in the West Bay. Bookstores on the crawl include: Love Potion Library (to stock up on bodice-rippers), Mission Comics and Art (to celebrate our nation's greatest religious holiday, Batman Day), and Bolerium (for "Trotsky and naked men"). [eventbrite]

Books and Merch Sale, 12 noon, Bathers Library (Telegraph Avenue). Justin is clearing out the front of the shop to make room for more art, more printing, more residencies, so come buy prints, goodies, books, and more to help make way for more making! [insta]

[West Bay Bonus event] 45th Anniversary Lowrider Parade, Hopping Contest & Art Exhibit, 12 noon, 24th & Mission Street (The Mission). Cruising, hopping, however you drive it, make sure your car is bajito y suavecito today if you want to get in the parade. Admire the paint jobs, deluxe interiors, and bass lines pumping. Or just hang out in the streets in Oakland any old day to the same effect. [SFLRC]

Fable Storytelling Writing Workshop, 1pm, Nomadic Bookshop (Uptown). Duane Horton, local fantasy author writing from his lived experience as a queer Black man, helps you shape your story at the bookstore today. Octavia Butler said she loved sci-fi because there were no rules, and in fantasy you could play around with similar what-ifs and figure out where your imagination can take you. Speculate away, and built the world you want us all to imagine our way into. [insta]

Black Feminist Book Club: Kin by Tayari Jones, 1pm, Paschal-Hunter Gallery (Old Oakland). Two young Black girls from Louisiana forge different paths, one toward security, one toward adventure. This book is in the top 300 of all books on Amazon, is Jones's second Oprah pick, and PW called it a "tour de force" because they're legally required to say that at every conceivable opportunity. [meetup]

Ballet Folklorico de Ricardo Velazquez Performance, 1pm, Brookfield Branch OPL (Deep East Oakland). Celebrate Mexican folk music and dancing at the most newly renovated library in the OPL system and start Latinx Heritage Month off right. [Oakland Public Library]

Jerusalem Through the Seams of Memory, Closing Event, 1pm, Uptown Body & Fender (Uptown). Uptown Body & Fender has been where things like this happen: a conversation on decolonial research, oral history, artistic collaborations, and public scholarship between Saad Amira (al-Quds Bard College), Samar Awaad (independent researcher and culinary artist), and Sherine Ebadi (PhD Candidate, UC Berkeley Geography). The closing event for the multimedia exhibition, “Jerusalem Through the Seams of Memory” which has been hosted there, featuring the stories of four Jerusalemite elders, and their experiences of movement and severed connections during the time of the Nakba. Music, Palestinian poets, and a tour of the SUMUD Mural in Uptown, Oakland led by the muralists and organizers. They also get great reviews on yelp for body and fender work. [berkeley]

[West Bay Bonus Event] 45th Annual Northern California Book Awards, 2pm, San Francisco Main Public Library (Civic Center). We're all winners, but some are more winning than others, at least tonight. Amy Tan is winning something, but will be accepting by video since she's talking about birds in Palo Alto in person (see below). More importantly, is there a betting pool on local literary awards (who is your money on in the short lists), or is there time to start one. [eventbrite]

CONSTANCE MOORE: A LANGUAGE OF STITCHES, 2:30pm, Books Inc. Alameda (Formerly a Peninsula). Local author and artist Constance Moore has made a picture book, A Language of Stitches: The Radical Quilts of Rosie Lee Tompkins about another local artist, the quilter whose work is now all archived at BAMPFA. Colorful, textural, full of story, and that's just the textiles. [eventbrite]

Shrink Rap: Mental Health Happy Hour, 4pm, The New Parkway Theater (Uptown). Since Parapraxis delayed their open house and you missed out on the psychoanalytic deep dive there, hang out with some mental health experts over fries and a beer this week instead and learn more about the great weirdnesses that reside inside our minds and hearts. [TNP]

[North Bay Bonus Event] Helene Wecker—The Gates of Midnight, 4pm, Book Passage (Corte Madera). I liked it when the golem and the jinn kissed in book one, can't wait to see what they've gotten up to in book three. Does fantasy become romantasy? I sure hope so. [bookpassage]

Bite Back! Purple Uni Bites & Ocean Restoration Party, 4pm, O2 Artisans Aggregate (West Oakland). Slurp up some uni (urchins' yummy bits), and dye some wool purple with their tests (the spiky bits) alongside dyed-in-the-wool coastal ecology nerds. There's an imbalance in the NorCal kelp ecosystem thanks to the late 1800s sea otter extirpation for fashun that means a century later there are too many urchins eating baby kelp all the way up our coast and not enough of them being eaten. Become the keystone species you wish to see in the world. [insta]

Ed Yong & Amy Tan with John Muir Laws, 5pm, The Foster Museum (Palo Alto). There's seldom a good reason to go to Deep Southwest Oakland's outer exurbs, so here's a rare bird indeed: Ed Yong (Oakland birder, author of books) in conversation with Amy Tan (Oakland-born birder, author of many books) as the final keynote conversation to wrap up the Wild Wonder Nature Journaling conference hosted by John Muir Laws. I learned recently that the collective noun for gulls is a squabble, which is correct and something you should drop into casual conversation whenever possible. [Book Passage]

Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves, 6:30pm, Oakstop—1721 Broadway (Uptown). Stuart Schrader is among the sharpest living historians of the carceral state. His first book, Badges without Borders, retold the story of American policing as a form of counterinsurgency that the United States developed abroad during the Cold War before bringing its tactics home to disarm Black activists and revolutionaries domestically. His newest book, Blue Power, picks up where Badges without Borders left off, explaining how police power has only continued to grow in the face of mounting resistance over the past few decades. This in-person discussion with Schrader is meant to not only look back at local uprisings in Oakland, but to strategize new ways to challenge police violence. [insta]

I Wish Everything Wasn't So Bad—Play by Manijeh Mohamedi, 8pm, Central Stage (Richmond). Finally! Arts and entertainment for the very late night crowd! And a Yemeni coffee place nearby will probably be open afterward to keep the conversation going. All in Persian, so some good language learning opportunities too. Penultimate show, with funds from ticket sales going to support families affected by the fucking insane war Trump and his belligerent minions thought was going to be fun to jerk off to together. [humanitix]

Also: Hiking with Poles: Skills & Techniques + Practice Hike at Reinhardt Redwood (The Hills) / Autumn Equinox Party with Feed Black Futures at West Oakland Farm Park (West Oakland) / 2nd Annual Black Maternal Health & Wellness Expo: A Womanist View: Community-Rooted Birth Care at West Oakland Branch OPL (De Fremery) / Books and Garden Seeds Giveaway at African American Museum and Library (Old Oakland) / Marin Poetry Center Traveling Show at Book Passage Ferry Building (West Bay) / [West Bay Bonus Event] Poetry Open Mic Featuring LaborFest Writers at Clarion (West Bay Chinatown) / Learn Book Binding with Xochitlpili 'Prince' Faulkner at Tarea Hall Pittman South Branch (Berkeley) / MAHJONG Salon, a Fundraiser for Kearny Street Workshop at Kearny Street Workshop (West Bay) / Reading the City: Language and Poetry in Dutch Public Spaces at Alumni House (Berkeley) / The Hole at BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley) / Natalia Brizuela and Julia Bryan-Wilson on Lotty Rosenfield: Disobedient Spaces at BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley)

Sunday, September 20

2026 Alameda Legacy Home Tour, 10am, Edison Elementary School (Alameda the Island—For Now). I am such a sucker for a crooked old roof blanketed in a mess of uneven slate shingles. The Year of Endless Island Walking Tours rolls on with this jaunt through the Fernside neighborhood, where residential Storybook-style structures popped up like cutsey little magic toadstools from 1925 to 1936. Some volunteers will apparently be costumed in "period attire," but it remains to be seen whether this means dressing as flappers and bootleggers or as clever medieval cobblers. Bring sunscreen, comfortable walking shoes, and all the whimsy you can muster. [insta]

Community Dye Day—Bundle Dyeing, 11am, Makeshift Center at Standard Parts Studio (Longfellow). Make a print using just flowers and the power of your imagination and "mordant," different chemicals that helps bind pigments to organic fibers, and wear a bouquet every day! [insta]

Autumn Equinox Queer Poetry Garden Event, 11am, Bancroft Community Garden (Berkeley). Summer is ending, and with it ends the inaugural season of the queer garden poetry series Exquisites. Come sing a dirge with poets KB Brookins, Sophia Dahlin, and Briana Grogan. This installment is co-hosted with Krupskaya editor and psychonaut Stephanie Young, who will also be reading. [insta]

Rebel Readers, 1pm, Dark Carnival Books (Claremont The Piedmont of Berkeley). Beloved sci-fi/fantasy institution Dark Carnival Books just celebrated their golden anniversary! Apparently not content to rest on their laurels after the party, they are co-hosting an afternoon of author readings with "Bay Area Guerrilla Speculative Fiction Writers," an organization that is so underground that they apparently have no online presence whatsoever aside from their appearance on the flier for this event. The lineup includes a raft of local authors such as Berkeley fantasy legend Diana L Paxson, co-founder of the Society for Creative Anachronism. [insta]

Deborah Santana // Loving the Fire, 1pm, Marcus Books (Longfellow). Life after divorce seems pretty good, if instead of finding meaning in your husband who happens to have been Carlos Santana, you find it in being useful to the world. Even if you aren't getting your memoir blurbed by Isabel Allende and Natalie Goldberg, you can live-laugh-love your way into a higher purpose at any age. [eventbrite]

Pink Trash, 2pm, Crescent Lawn (Cal). Dancer, fiber artist, filmmaker, performance artist, and sculptor Maren Hassinger is taking a victory lap. Long one of California's most versatile and storied working artists (she turns eighty next year!), she is restaging her 1982 performance piece Pink Trash on the crescent lawn at UC Berkeley with six UC Berkeley students. Make sure to head across the street afterwards to see the rest of her retrospective exhibit at BAMPFA. [bampfa]

Film Screening of The Street Project + Connect with Safe Streets Advocates, 3pm, The New Parkway (Uptown). According to a famous and widely-reported (but poorly-sourced) legend, Camus sometimes told his friends "I know nothing more stupid than to die in an automobile accident." And yet, well over a million people die in car crashes every year, and road traffic injuries are the leading cause of death for people between the ages of 5 and 29. The situation is infuriating, preventable, and getting worse. The Street Project is a documentary about how the largest public urban spaces— our roadways—became so dangerous, and introduces us to activists trying to end traffic violence for good. Tickets are sliding scale (and include popcorn), and a conversation between transportation activists Tonya Love and Carter Lavin. Parking is sometimes tight around The New Parkway, so take the 6! [wobo.org]

ROMANTASY BOOK CLUB with S.C. BANDREDDI, 3pm, Books Inc. Alameda (The Island). Let us all gather to offer critical support for Romantasy, the billion-dollar subgenre that seems to be keeping the rest of the book industry alive, and which some see as a recession indicator. This month's book selection is The Game of Oaths, which seems kind of like a Marquis de Sade-inflected spin on battle royale fantasies like The Hunger Games but (hopefully) with slightly more fucking. The author, S. C. Bandreddi, is from the Bay Area and will appear in person, so you can finally reenact the the book signing scene from Pluribus. Don't make it weird! [eventbrite]

Semi-Open Mic, 5pm, The New Parkway Theater (Uptown). I think what distinguishes this from a fully-open mic is that everything must be family friendly, so no dildo juggling acts I guess. Come witness an evening of Oakland's greatest (PG) "poetry, storytelling, comedy, music, dancing, and more," and showcase some of your own, all for free. Hosted by local soprano-of-note Alison Wahl. [TNP]

Autonomous Rural-Urban Organizing Orientation, 5:15pm, Tamarack (Downtown). California is arguably ground zero for the modern labor exploitation techniques that govern the current food regime, but it's also the epicenter of some of the most important challenges to that system. This orientation meeting introduces attendees to a diverse range of neighborhood-based organizing tactics that can help you build solidarity with food workers even if you don't work in the industry. Dinner cooked with ingredients grown in participating grower collectives is provided. Naturally! [insta]

The Last Waltz, 7pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). I'm not usually big on concert films, but there's a reason why Scorsese's documentation of The Band's 1976 farewell concert at the West Bay's Winterland Ballroom is considered one of the best movies ever made in the genre. It's an incredible snapshot of an era in rock music history (and Bay) that was swiftly collapsing, even if few people in the room could recognize it at the time. It doesn't really matter if you don't care much for The Band, because famously pretty much everyone who could still play a guitar and roll a joint without falling over by the mid-70s takes the stage at one point, from Joni Mitchell to Muddy Waters to Emmylou Harris to Ringo Starr. But what the concert is less known for is the astounding collection of local poets who performed: Diane di Prima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Duncan, Lenore Kandel, Michael McClure, and more. Plus, Bob Dylan nearly fucked up the entire production by being a characteristically capricious asshole. Back then, it probably would have been hard to imagine that he'd outlive nearly all of them. Anyway, if you look closely at Neil Young's performance you might notice that a massive blob of cocaine on his nose was clumsily rotoscoped out in post-production. Woof. [bampfa]

Rumi's Caravan, 7pm, The Freight (Downtown Berkeley). Here because we respect the master of the flyers-on-poles game. Rumi's Caravan is a decades-old Sebastopol institution that dishes up heaping slices of crunchy old-school Bay Area poetic style. Drawing on their interpretation on Rumi's "ecstatic poetry," the performers aren't reading from a script but "improvising" a breathy conversation through quotes from a corpus of verse they have memorized. They are definitely playing the hippie hits: Mary Oliver, Rilke, Maya Angelou, Robert Bly, Leonard Cohen, and other poets you're likely to see embroidered into quilts on the walls of whoever is hosting the Men's Circle or Consciousness Raising meeting this month. All funds go to the Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA). [The Freight]

Also: Intro to Recycled Papermaking at San Francisco Center for the Book (West Bay) / Love and Lit Book Club: Fast by Millie Belazaire at The Internet (A Series of Tubes) / Junk Journaling with Angie Hilem at The New Parkway Theater (Uptown) / Fables & Futures: A play-based children's workshop on tech and society at Local Economy (Rockridge) / Season 2 of King of Drag with the Rebel Kings at White Horse Bar (Oakland/Berkeley border)