Oakland Review of Books kalendar of (not just) literary events, April 21–26
We’re continuing to touch Oakland this week but only consensually, unlike lefty lech Swalwell’s suburban sleaze act over on the hot side of the hills. Next week is taste: all vibe reports on your favorite gummies from your celebration of 4/20 today are welcome. The West Bay wants to read cookbooks and talk about food writing all week long now to get you ready for ORB’s mouthy adventures. Once you’ve come down from your high, weigh in on the City of Oakland’s general plan for a “City of Neighborhoods,” by 4/23 and share how we can create more walkable places that are affordable for working people and artists. In Berkeley, Electra is plotting revenge over champagne and a script on weeknights. There’s a battle of SoCal versus NorCal this week but it’s not in a stadium, it’s in meadows and your backyard. Earth Day is Wednesday, but you can help steward nature in and around our city any day–including a shoreline cleanup on Saturday. Indie Bookstore Day lands Saturday and everyone’s celebrating in their own ways – at Green Apple Books on the Park there’s a star-studded karaoke night in the works. Konnor-with-a-K is a new ORB subscriber who was overawed by the maximalism of the senses launch so decided to reward us with his money for bowling him over and came to the happy hour last week, so I am sneaking Ks into the kalendar so he gets his money’s worth. Sign up for the paid tier and get random favors we feel like delivering on top of whatever official rewards we're in the process of getting out (honest, we are!). We’re halfway through poetry month so sorry not sorry, it’s all lyrics and line breaks all week long: you can go back to watching movies in May. -MS, XL
Tuesday, April 21
Kan You Grow a Striped Banana, all day, A Great Good Place for Books (The Hills). Publication day for a picture book about children's hopes crashing on the cold hard pavement of parents disappointing them. [A Great Good Place for Books]
Supply Chain Solidarity: Lessons from the Lithium Frontlines, noon, Student Environmental Resource Center (Cal). Watch the short film Supply Chain Solidarity about workers in the transportation industry coming together to learn about the environmental impacts of lithium mining for batteries, and stay for a conversation about what a "just transition" looks like and how we can combat climate change without destroying the world to get there. [UCB]
Good Woman: A Reckoning Book Talk, 1pm, Berkeley Law (Cal). For writer and law professor Savala Nolan, the experience and therefore politics of womanhood are complicated by an embodiment that doesn't fit into the containers of mainstream femininity. In this book, she explodes out of them, exploring her experiences of fatness and Blackness, alongside the decision to divorce and reject a wifedom that had crystallized so many expectations of how a good woman should be. A good woman is not divorced, not fat, not writing her way to self-assuredness – but who wants to be good instead of free in the first place. [UCB]
Staging Encounters with Landscape Matter, 4pm, Dwinelle (Cal). Looking in this talk to remnants of ancestral Armenian cosmologies to understand ourselves not as users of the world but part of it, maker of “creative works, writings, and applied research” that will open “environmental imaginaries” about how we can live better with the nonhuman world. Let the worms crawl, the spiders hunt, the raccoons climb, and the compost rot, for starters. [UCB]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Earth, Air, Fire, Water: Climate Week Art Exhibition at the Mills Building, 5pm, KALW (FiDi). Artists talk about their new installation that translates climate data, observation, and natural materials into art in the Mills Building, where KALW reporters hang out. Notable local artists Tanja Geis, Andrew Owen, and Lordy Rodriguez will be in conversation. Go look, go listen. [eventbrite]
Margaret Atwood Documentary, 5pm, West Branch BPL (Berkeley). Watch a movie about a writer we all love, Margaret Atwood: “A word after a word after a word is power,” directed by Peter Raymont. Some Canadian wilderness, some light exegesis of her novels, and I hope a discussion of one of my favorite Atwood facts: she wrote a bookthat will not be read for another 100 years: it lives in a drawer in Norway, inside a building that's inside a spruce forest. Tell your children to tell their children. [BPL]
East Oakland Community Meeting, 5:30pm, CBE East Oakland Office (Hegenberger). Learn about lead paint in old houses and how the city can help with abatement. You might also want to ask about the impact of exhaust from leaded gasoline on the neighborhoods close to 880, and in old pipes. Lead never breaks down, it just stays around. For some reason, this presentation on heavy metals is followed by an herbalism class, which will not help with lead poisoning but might help you make a calming tea to deal with the stress of knowing our lives here are haunted by decisions made in this place generations ago. The organizers are providing dinner and translation, even transportation and childcare if you ping them. [action network]
Feast for the Senses: Aimee Nezhukumatathil on Poetry and Food, 6pm, Book Society (College Ave). I first read Filipina/Keralan-American Aimee Nezhukumatathil's poetry on the late, lamented website The Toast, but even though that site is forever down, it turns out her poems are in books too. New one is about food! She's left Milkweed for Ecco, which is part of HarperCollins and is owned by the Murdochs. Because it's Book Society, you fork out $75 for the pleasure of her company and the book; poetry does pay off for some folks. [Litquake]
Albany Reads Discussion Group with Kiku Hughes & Satsuki Ina, 6pm, Albany Library (Albany). Join Albany local and Heyday author Satsuki Ina for a discussion of her memoir about the impact of Japanese internment on her family and her subsequent commitment to fighting against racist treatment of all immigrants. She is in conversation with comics artist Kiku Hughes, author of Displacement. History rhymes and stutters, repeats repeats repeats. [AC Library]
Transit Book Club Salon: The Abyss with Jeyamohan, 6:30pm, Transit Books (West Berkeley). Come behind the scenes of a local small press and meet Jeyamohan, author of The Abyss (translated by Suchitra–love these South Indian divas with their mononyms), who will talk with publisher Adam Levy about his novel, only his second book published in English. If you haven't been to a Transit gathering, get a taste here, but no promises on the pizza. See you there? [luma]
Kiss & Tell Literary Salon: REBECCA HUNTER , 6:30pm, Books Inc. (Alameda). Salon host Rebecca Hunter launches her new romance novel: Convenient Wife Conditions which involves a snowbound Italian couple, and since it's a romance, you know everyone orgasms and it won't end in an alpine divorce but maybe she'll write a thriller next that does. [eventbrite]
When We Win Double Film Screening, 7pm, La Peña Cultural Center (Berkeley). Paired films about Indigenous reclamation of land and language: In the Land of My Ancestor, by Rucha Chitnis abut Ohlone elder Ann-Marie Sayers, and Zuguleaiñ: hablaremos (we will speak), about Indigenous youth in Chile reconnecting with their ancestral language. We're hella into the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis here at ORB, so show us your language and we'll see your world. [eventbrite]
Truth Demands, 7pm, Klio’s Books (The Lake). In her memoir, Abby Reyes remembers her partner, killed in 1999 as he sought to support Indigenous defenders of their land in Venezuela fighting multinational oil companies. Seeking truth and accountability, supporting environmental justice against the rapacity of extractive climate destroyers, across decades, she tells stories about the work they did together and how she carried that legacy into the present. Hear about how to build community movements and build solidarity on the front lines with the people whose roots are in the soil. [eventbrite]
Also: Cayetano Lanuza: A “médico-filósofo” in the Latinx Archive by Carmen E. Lamas at Wheeler Hall (Cal) / Close to Home: Film Screening & Panel on Homelessness at Berkeley Law (Cal) / Trivia Night: Persia & South Asia Connections at Middle East Market (San Pablo Corridor)
Wednesday, April 22
Poetry + Local Vendors, 1pm, To Ma Ro Gallery (West Oakland). Bookslinging starts at 1 pm, the poetry etc reading at 5pm. Go local and go long for poetry month. [insta]
Suburban blues: The clash of local and national politics in America’s suburbs, 4pm, Social Sciences Building (Cal). Suburban Democrats like the idea of equal rights when they hear Rachel Maddow talk about them, but fumble it on the ground and fall back into NIMBYism, goes Stephanie Ternullo's argument. Gotta move to people taking action locally, with real people they know, she says, to get them out of the hypocritical bind of electing folks like Swalwell. [UCB]
Whale Song, Whale Speech: Understanding How Whales Kommunicate with Each Other (and Us), 6pm, Local Economy (College Ave). The other day, at a seaweed talk, I learned about humpbacks' cultural practice of bubble net feeding, which is basically a team sport they created to confuse and trap swirling schools of fish. That, and apparently quite a bit of whalesong is dedicated to saying their names over and over as they go around the ocean, like they're vibrationally tagging the marine city they're moving through. More fun whale language facts await you, plus, maybe a use of machine learning that even the AI doomers can support. [luma]
BOOK CLUB BIPOC, 6:30pm, Nomadic Bookshop (Uptown). What it says on the tin: Alana Oktay (they/them) leads the conversation about this month's selection: Only This Beautiful Moment, by Abdi Nazemian. [Nomadic]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Chris Cosentino and Dillon Osleger with POW and Patagonia for Earth Day, 6:30pm, Cartoon Art Museum (Embarcadero). Mountain bikers and environmental advocates Chris Cosentino and Dillon Osleger (Trail Work) will be joined by special guests from Hog Island Oyster Company and the local fishing community to talk land and sea, climate and stewardship, and how to balance of joy, pleasure, and responsibility in our relationship with the earth. With oysters to eat and beer to drink! [Protect Our Winters]
[West Bay Bonus Event Holy Edition] Grace Notes: Poetry at Grace Cathedral, 7pm, Grace Cathedral (Nob Hill). Free and in the gorgeous Grace Cathedral! Litquake brings together a poetic celebration with Thea Matthews, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Preeti Vangani, and Devon Walker-Figueroa, moderated by DA Powell (author of one of my favorite California poems ever). [eventbrite]
What Flows, What’s Hidden, 7pm, Clio’s Books (The Lake). Chiara Barzini, whose memoir-cum-LA-water-history Aqua is out from the coolest LA independent press Unnamed (her first novel was about a '90s girlhood in California and was full of gut-wrenching flashbacks for those of us who lived that too) and Bay Area fave Kate Schatz talk water and LA and women, who is erased and what is revealed. [eventbrite]
Planetary Dance: A Participatory Ritual on the Glade, 7pm, Memorial Glade (Cal). Dance and stomp and touch grass in Anna Halprin's yearly ritual of renewal, now in its 41st year. Run by the Eco-Performance Lab and facilitated by Dohee Lee. [UCB]
Berkeley Poetry Slam Semi Finals Night #2 ft. sam sax, 8pm, The Starry Plough Pub (Berkeley). Come see sam sax, the best reader in the Bay Area, and give yourself a thrill. Then hang out and see if there are some new up and comers nipping at their heels. [eventbrite]
Also: Climate-Focused Local Writers Reading at Kafe Suspiro (West Bay) / COAPAN: Smuggling, Fire, and Resistance by Federico Cuatlacuatl at Doe Library (Cal) / Dreams Are Colder Than Death at BAMPFA (Berkeley)
Thursday, April 23
May Day Art Build, 3pm, 2310 E 12th St (San Antonio). Are you ready for the real labor day? Friday May 1st, Workers' Day, is almost here, and you can celebrate together by making banners today and holding them up together next week. [EastSide Arts Alliance]
When the Stars Bloom in Oakland Release Celebration at OUSD Lit Fest, 4pm, La Escuelita (East Lake). The OUSD Elementary Lit Fest celebrates reading and writing projects by students across Oakland's public schools. Relatedly, Chapter 510 has collected poems by Oakland 4th graders into an anthology titled When the Stars Bloom in Oakland. Now you too can read odes to, we’re guessing, pet turtles, hardworking moms, and Alyssa Liu. [Chapter 510]
Poet's Bookshelf Gathering, 5pm, Nomadic Bookshop (Uptown). Come in and read, discuss, bathe in the phenomenal collection “[...]” by Palestinian-American poet and physician Fady Joudah (Milkweed). From the collection: “The siege said, no, it’s ill-advised / for my heart to get too close to those / the siege will kill. Did I stay away? / How away? How alone, my alone.” And for more on being a Palestinian poet in America, this essay by the poet in LARB. [insta]
Han Kang, World Literature, and the Contemporary Age of Authoritarianism, 5:10pm, Banway Building (Cal). Nayoung Aimee Kwon digs into the background of Han Kang, author of, according to the Center for Translation's ill nippashi, the most depressing book in the world, Human Acts, which is still on my bookshelf, waiting for the day when I need to bring myself down even lower. But Kwon points out that before the Booker and the Nobel, Han was on a national blacklist in South Korea, banned from receiving government funds to travel abroad. Discuss state control over art in the time of the government funding this instead of actual art. [UCB]
[North Bay Bonus Event] Jean Gordon Kocienda with Dr. Judy Halebsky: Girl in a Box, 6pm, Dominican University (North Bay). Girl in a Box tells the story of Japanese poet Yosano Akiko as reimagined by author Jean Gordon Kocienda. An early art monster mother who married another poet but never allowed him or her maternal role to eclipse her artistic self or ambitions, this work of historical fiction traces my new historical idol across continents and time, and includes her poetry as well. Kocienda will be in conversation with Dr. Judy Halebsky, poet and Director of the MFA Program at Dominican. [Book Passage]
The Oskis Film Festival, 6pm, Grand Lake Theatre (Grand Lake). See the best of Bay Area student film at the CalTV annual screening and festival, in the movie palace! [GLT]
SERC Book Club: Food, Farms, and Friends, 6pm, Oxford Tract Gardens (Berkeley). Discuss some food writing while learning to get in a pickle with veggies. Books to talk about: Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada and Food-Related Stories and you can try to pickle them too and see what happens. [UCB]
General Plan Update Workshop: Artists and Cultural Workers, 6pm, RBA Creative (The Laurel). Oakland is a city of working artists and workers who make art, and communities who need all of us to keep the Town lively. Come speak your piece to City staffers about how arts and culture should be supported in the General Plan's Draft Land Use Framework. Last year philanthropists had to swoop in to fund arts orgs that the city cut from the budget after promising funds: that's a one-time fix: what's the long term vision, and how does it speak to the history and diversity of Oakland's people and our rich cultural legacies? [City of Oakland]
People's Park 57th Anniversary Cafe Night, 6pm, Long Haul Infoshop (Berkeley). Gathering to listen to stories of fighting the state and the university to establish People's Park, which has finally been lost after 50 years. Eat, drink, and learn from your elders about what we can do to claim property for the people. [insta]
Meet the Author: Crystal Wahpepah, 6:30pm, Main Oakland Library (The Lake-ish). Chef Crystal Wahpepah (Kickapoo) has been running her restaurant Wahpepah's Kitchen in her hometown of Oakland the last several years, and now her cookbook, full of recipes and stories, is out. A Feather and a Fork: 125 Intertribal Dishes from an Indigenous Food Warrior brings nutrition, connection to plants and animals and people, and intertribal connections to your kitchen. Meet the chef and hear the stories, like ORB did at the launch a few weeks back. [OPL]
The Book of Light Poetry Series: Connie Mae Oliver, 6:30pm, Books Inc. (The Island that used to be A Peninsula). Dormilona, the Bishop O'Dowd English teacher's third book of poetry, is a geography of dreams, is bilingual, is both a nightgown and a sleepyhead. The Venezuelas of memory and story coruscate in crashing waves, and besides, “Time the mother, time the story, time the amniotic vertigo.” It's poetry month, what are you waiting for? [eventbrite]
Talkin’ Trash with the Trash Falcons, 7pm, Clio’s Books (The Lake). Trash Falcons Trash Museum of Trash (TFTMoT) is a community, a dream, an excavation, an exhibition, and now, an honest to goodness museum catalogue. Curated by neighbors who pulled ten tons of trash from the lake over the past six years, the creative histories of found objects are as much the art as the lake-delivered readymades. Hear fantastic stories of dredging for wonder in the former slough and its environs. [eventbrite]
[West Bay Bonus Event] PERFORMANCE EVENT, 7pm, Et al Gallery (The Mission). All the folks here are East Bayers bringing their weird to the West Bay. Kevin organizes Tritone's monthly reading at Tamarack and Laura Moriarty is a stalwart of the East Bay poetry scene. OK now to what's happening tonight: unclear! "Poetry & performance by Kevin Lo, puppet theatre by Laura Moriarty, something weird by Jasmine Zhang & Liam Herb. There’s no idea in PERFORMANCE EVENT. No ideas but in actions. Please bring an idea! There’ll be an idea lottery." [insta]
[West Bay Bonus Event Part Two] Scott Kurashige in conversation with Jeff Chang, 7pm, City Lights (North Beach). Historian and president of the James and Grace Lee Boggs Foundation Scott Kurashige's new book, American Peril: The Violent History of Anti-Asian Racism (UC Press) draws on the ongoing inspiration of the Third World Liberation Front's message of cross-ethnic and interracial solidarity, as a counter to aligning with cops and white supremacy to try to hide from anti-Asian hate. In conversation with Jeff Chang, right next to the oldest Chinatown in North America, which has seen some things. [City Lights]
SpokenDuets: Taking Flight, 7pm, 2727 California (Berkeley). Susan Dambroff & Chris Kammler duet and collaborate in this harmonizing poetic performance that's actually pretty great for weirding the poetry reading form (see example). Followed by an open mic. [insta]
Also: Poetry Reading with Thea Matthews at CCSF (West Bay) / Family Haiku Workshop at Dublin Library (Hot Side of the Hills)
Friday, April 24
P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance, 12 noon, Social Sciences Building (Cal). So you like reggaeton, and you shook your moneymaker during the super bowl halftime show, but now you want to know how a pop star from Puerto Rico became a decolonizing icon and also why his superhero name is Bad Bunny. That's what the book is for. And of course there's a matching playlist; what's a music book without a soundtrack these days. [UCB]
Anti-Asian Racism, Labor, and Kapital, 12 noon, Labor Center (Cal). Scott Kurashige comes east to join our favorite Marxist who also owns a craftsman cottage, Geography Professor Charmaine Chua, for a conversation about anti-Asian violence and the history of pan-ethnic coalition. What I love about the Third World Liberation Front and its descendants is that “identity politics” is not an alternative to class critique or solidarity across other commonalities–it’s a place from which to look at each other and say “oh yeah, Bad Bunny speaks for me too and let’s crash the American Empire together.” Somehow they're also planning to squeeze a critique of the tech-driven world economy in here too, appropriately. [eventbrite]
100 Year Fight: Documenting a family’s battle to free the Klamath River, 6pm, Local Economy (Kollege Ave near the Kursed Intersection). Amy Bowers Cordalis (Yurok), tribal attorney and author of The Water Remembers, joins local photojournalist Brontë Wittpenn to talk about the undamming of the Klamath, and to screen Wittpenn's short film about kayaking the entire length of the free flowing river, which chinook salmon have recently, after a century of being blocked from the upper basin, found their way back to. [Local Economy]
Undisciplining the Fields: Poetry Reading, 6pm, Tamarack (Downtown). I think this is a merging of West Bay and East Bay poetic fields, with the wonderful, long long long established but recently in abeyance Poetry Center at SFSU finding some new life off campus and joining in for Tamarack's Friday Poetry. Featuring local writers Aja Couchois Duncan (“every day dawn finds herself naked and wonders if she has not in fact lost herself entirely in the night”), Robin Tremblay-McGaw (“I woke among the words of others”), Angela Liu who is hiding in plain sight, and Marcella Durand, who is into ecopoetics, into feminist avant-gardes, and into “When walking in the park we find a book / laid out as if to take a little sun...” [insta]
Healing Terroirs, 6:30pm, Bathers Library (Telegraph). Wrapping up the four part series on Poetics and Plant Medicine, this final discussion on psychedelics turns to healing practices rooted in place. Who do we share space with, what and who are the specifics of place, and how does recognizing our connection with others help us all get better? Mary Carreón (Editor-in-Chief at DoubleBlind), novelist Patricia Powell, psychedelics researcher Marlena Robbins (Diné), and Joanna Steinhardt, editor at Ayin Press and anthropologist speak to Black and Indigenous traditions that might guide our way. [insta]
Winter in America: The SpeakEasy: Version- Words and Razors, 7pm, BAM HOUSE (Downtown). OPEN MIC! Hosted by Ayodele Nzinga. Blues by Avoctja & Modupe, rhymes thrown by Papi Grandisimo, the rest of the night made by YOU! [insta]
The Gods of Comedy, 8pm, Masquers Playhouse (Point Richmond). Two classics professors end up conjuring Dionysus when they try to save themselves from disaster in this fun farce. Deus ex machina, but meta, and playing in Greater North Oakland through May. [Masquers Playhouse]
Also: Grand Opening: Ocean Photographer of the Year and Bay Photo’s 50th Anniversary Gala at 650 W Tower Ave (Alameda)
Saturday, April 25
Indie Bookstore Day, all day, Your Local Bookstore (Oakland of the Mind). The East Bay lit community, including ORB itself, would be completely impossible to maintain without independent bookstores. Which means that by reading this you (yes, you) are morally obligated to celebrate Indie Bookstore Day at one or more of the participating locations throughout the East Bay, from East Bay Booksellers to Banter Books in Fremont. Do your duty, soldier! But seriously, it actually looks fun. [Indiebound]
Friends of Sausal Creek: Monterey Redwood Habitat Restoration, 9am, Monterey Boulevard entrance to the Bridgeview Trail (The Hills). Remember how you were supposed to get that check engine light fixed in your car? Yeah, don't do that, go help fix an ecosystem instead! The Friends of Sausal Kreek are meeting at the Monterey Boulevard entrance to the Bridgeview Trail this Saturday to care for and protect Oakland's ancient redwoods and this rich ecological watershed. Please bring a water bottle, and wear long pants, closed toed shoes, sun protection, and a snack to help power you through the actual labor of preparing for climate change. [Friends of Sausal Creek]
Friends of the Albany Library Book Sale, 9am, Edith Stone Room and The Community Center (Albany). In all likelihood, you, reader of ORB, do not own enough books. The stacks on the floor you use as a nightstand need friends, lots more friends. Go spend too much money at the Friends of Albany Library Book Sale. [Friends of the Albany Library]
Third Annual Eco Afro Futures Summit, 10:30am, Oakland Museum of California (The Lake). This is the greatest gathering of nature blerds, cross-fertilizing academics and community activism, plant lovers and everyone's imaginations of a future that's more just, more equitable, more ecologically rich. Centering Black wisdom, storytelling with data, and a speculative lens on science. [luma]
Indie Bookstore Day, Tamika D. Thompson Signing, 1pm, Tally Ho! Bookstore (Piedmont Ave). Celebrate the immense range of independent bookstores by buying local author Tamika Thompson's horror novel, The Curse of Hester Gardens, about a Black mother dealing with one son's death by gun violence, another's secret transformation, affairs, prison, and supernatural spookiness. [insta]
Strawberry Creek Restoration, 1pm, Central Library (Berkeley). If you haven’t noticed, we are trying to FIX stuff around here, namely some ecosystems, especially creeks and rivers if you've got them. This one is about restoring Strawberry Creek, which used to be completely culverted and at least now has been daylighted in some areas. Come get taught by the youth about their work on campus to bring life back into the creek. [BPL]
Discussion on Negro Liberation, 2pm, La Peña Cultural Center (Berkeley). Continuing the work of bringing class and race into conversation this week, a new edition of the classic Black Communist text Negro Liberation by Harry Haywood, is coming out from Haymarket, everyone's favorite lefty press (unless you prefer full anarchism over at PM or AK, but we can all be friends). In conversation about Haywood's legacy are Haywood's daughter, Dr. Rebecca Hall, Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly, and Dr. Robin D.G. Kelley, bringing three scoops of radical Black thought to table. [La Peña]
Poetry Reading: A. Van Jordan and Julia Levine, 3pm, Northbrae Community Church (Berkeley). Readings by two very established poets: A. Van Jordan, Creative Writing Professor at Stanford and author of many books and the poem "1999" for Prince which begins, “By the time I got here, the album / was already history. 1999 dropped in 1982, / when I worried about what I’d do with my life,” and Davis Poet Laureate Julia Levine, who writes psalms for the ordinary and terrible parts of life, and occasionally about birds: “The day dies and comes back as fog. / A dove stands on my fencepost. Motionless, / as if wounded. Too close to be safe. Not that I’d hurt her, / but I’ve read humans are the most dangerous animals.” [insta]
Sinister Wisdom 50th Anniversary Celebration, 4pm, Nomadic Book Shop (Uptown). Fifty years of multi-racial lesbians loving books and poetry and writing in Sinister Wisdom, hurrah! That little literary magazine has lasted half a century and definitely earned its title. To celebrate: readings from Canyon Sam, Tijanna O. Eaton, Ajuan Mance, Karen Poppy, and Caro De Robertis. Bring some funds to throw in to keep the wisdom turning left for another five decades. [insta]
LONE GLEN forty seven, 5pm, Derby Street (Berkeley). The first Lone Glen reading of the year! A book launch for West Bay poet Preeti Vangani, whose book Fifty Mothers is baby fresh–also featuring local fave Gabriel Cortez (“This small sliver of Oakland, / where the children ask you your favorite animal / and the animal becomes your name”), Cate Lycurgus (“we needed proof after proof. That this was not / remarkable: to be wrecked beyond use, past all recognition & still worth scooping / up. We who were A Part of All We Had Touched. We who were Apart From Nothing”), and poetic eminence, Omnidawn poet Maw Shein Win. [Lone Glen]
Hammer & Hope Issue No. 10 Launch Party, 6pm, RSVP for Venue Info (Oakland). If you liked seeing Robin D.G. Kelley speak at La Peña, you can almost certainly party with him afterwards at the issue release for Hammer & Hope, a journal of Black culture and politics he co-edits. [insta]
[West Bay Bonus Event] An Evening with Terrence Arjoon, Sophia Dahlin, and Ronaldo Wilson, 7pm, Et al. Gallery (The Mission). Small Press Traffic greets the spring with poets! All the poets! Terrence Arjoon, whose poetry is “tilty, surprising, lively, terminal, decadent, elegant, devotional,” Ronaldo Wilson who has a poem that begins “Is the way xxxxxxxxxxx / B when the meetingxxxxxxx / went down in the square bizxxx” and gets less legible from there, and the delightful, effervescently cheerfully pro-poems-favoring-healthcare-CEO-assassinations, also, relatedly, pro-lesbian, even occasional-explainer-of-Stein-on-Oakland-street-corners Sophia Dahlin. Introducing the trio of poets, another trio: Ebti Shedid, Jacob Kahn, & Kristen Nelson. [insta]
The 2026 Wild and Scenic Film Festival, 7pm, Brower Center (Downtown Berkeley). Screening of six audience favorite short films from the 2025 Wild and Scenic Film Festival (theme: "Mobilize") including an animation about red wolves and mini-docs on foraging in SoCal and California's native bees. Then go back outside and plant something, get your hands in the soil, and let the caterpillars eat the leaves so the birds will come feast and it keeps going round and round. [Citizens Climate Lobby]
Also: Master Gardener of Alameda County Plant Sale at The Center (Oakland Unified School District) (Hoover Foster) / Peralta Hacienda Park Community Cleanup at Peralta Hacienda Park (East Oakland) / A Book is a Journey: A Zine Making Workshop with MUNI Raised Me at SFAC Main Gallery (Civic Center) / The Movement Book Club Reads Mutual Aid, by Dean Spade at North Branch Library (Berkeley) / Reimagining History: Coit Tower and Columbus with Lauren Bartone at Coit Tower (North Beach) / Mend: Hand Mending Workshop for the Homies with Vida Vasquez. at Couchdate (Temescal) / Hair, Paper, Water . . . at BAMPFA (Berkeley) / Sink or Burn Book Talk: Cristy Road Carrera in conversation with Ariel Gore at Medicine For Nightmares (The Mission) / No Buy Your Wardrobe – Sewing with Artist M Eilo at Berkeley Arts Center (North Berkeley) / A Través de Nuestros Ojos: Displacement & Discovery at Medicine for Nightmares (The Mission) / An Evening of Playback Theatre at Live Oak Theatre (Berkeley)
Sunday, April 26
Walking Tour: The Town of Alameda, 10am, Fillmore Street & High Street (The Former Peninsula of Oakland Now Temporarily An Island). Walk the flattest town in the Bay courtesy of the Alameda Post and local historian Dennis Evanosky. This tour, the second of eight slated for 2026, focuses on the town's early development, including an explanation of how High Street got its name and something about a (possibly empty?!?) cemetery. [square]
SOLD OUT Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour, 10am, near BART (Downtown Berkeley). You are TOO LATE once again! But Marthine finally plans to walk the talk and snagged tickets, so if you got lucky too, see you near the BART station with walking shoes on. [Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour]
The Climate Future Film Festival, 1:30pm, Alameda Kounty Library (Fremont). A lineup of ten short films on climate change selected by guest judges Bill McKibben and Edward Norton (yes, that Ed Norton, though no guarantees he'll be dropping in for the library screening). The program promises a mix of tragic, incendiary, and inspiring films, so this won't be two straight hours of bummer vibes. [Alameda County Library]
Participatory Discussion of Edward Albee's The Goat, 2pm, Ashby Theater (South Berkeley). My first experience watching an Edward Albee play left me feeling so throttled that finding a shrink seemed like an urgent next step. Fortunately the Shotgun Players have covered their bases by inviting therapist Daniel Yu (LCSW) after their performance of Edward Albee's The Goat, or Who Is Silvia for a psychoanalytic digestif. [insta]
Time and Water, 4:45pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). Sara Dosa won wide acclaim several years ago as director of Fire of Love, which is easily one of my favorite documentaries of the 2020s so far. Her new film profiles Andri Snær Magnason, one of Iceland's leading writers and the author of the book On Time and Water, as he composes an obituary for the first glacier to be destroyed by climate change: Okjökull. Dosa and Magnason themselves will be present for a discussion after the film. [BAMPFA]
Book Talk: Jordan Ritter Conn on “American Men,” 6pm, Mrs. Dalloway's Bookstore (Elmwood). Journalist (and former Bay Area resident) Jordan Ritter Conn spent five years investigating what the hell is up with the fellas lately, and this book is the result. Welcome him home as he discusses four dudes he met along his journey, from a closeted amateur MMA fighter to a traumatized law student in a spiraling marriage to a Black trans man trying to make ends meet in rural Ohio. Konn will be joined in conversation with Elsie Kraig, the editorial director at IDEO, for some reason. [Mrs. Dalloway's]
Also: Birding Day Trip to Alcatraz Island with QTPOC Birders at Alcatraz Island (The Bay) / Hem Those Pants! at Tempyl Skin (Emeryville) / Yo (Love Is a Rebellious Bird) at BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley) / Cat Trivia at Temescal Brewing (Temescal) / Risa and the Wind Phone at BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley) / Drag Out ICE: Drag Show Fundraiser at EastSide Arts Alliance (Oakland) / Gamelan Sari Raras: Javanese Shadow Play at Hertz Concert Hall (Cal)
