​Alia Volz​

Alia Volz is the author of Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography and winner of the 2020 Golden Poppy Nonfiction Book Award. Home Baked was the inaugural pick for the San Francisco Chronicle’s citywide “Total SF Book Club” and an SFPL “On the Same Page” selection. Essays have appeared in venues like The New York Times, Bon Appetit, LitHub, and River Teeth, and in the anthologies The End of the Golden Gate: Writers on Loving and (Sometimes) Leaving San Francisco, The Best Women’s Travel Writing, and The Best American Essays. Volz has shared her unique family story on Snap Judgement, Criminal, and NPR’s Fresh Air.
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Amanda Moore

Amanda Moore’s debut collection of poetry, Requeening (HarperCollins/ECCO), was selected for the National Poetry Series by Ocean Vuong, featured in Oprah Magazine's Favorite Things issue, and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award.  Her poems have appeared widely in journals and anthologies, including Best New Poets, ZZYZVA, Catapult, Ploughshares, and LitHub, and her essays have appeared in Poets & Writers, The Baltimore Review, and Hippocampus Magazine. Former poetry co-editor at Women’s Voices for Change and on staff at Bull City Press, Amanda is a high school English teacher in San Francisco, where she lives by the beach with her husband and daughter.  
 

​Andrew Sean Greer

Andrew Sean Greer is the author of seven works of fiction, including the bestsellers The Confessions of Max Tivoli and Less. Greer has taught at a number of universities, including Stanford and the Iowa Writers Workshop, been a TODAY show pick, a New York Public Library Cullman Center Fellow, a judge for the National Book Award, and a winner of the California Book Award and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. He is the recipient of a NEA grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He lives in San Francisco and Milan. His latest novel is Less Is Lost.
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​Barbara Berman

In the 1970s I was in charge of the poetry series at the Washington Women's Arts Center. June Jordan, Adrienne Rich *, Thulani Davis and Jessica Hagedorn were among the readers who graciously shared bills with lesser-known DC writers. In 1979 I organized one of the first Independent Press festivals in the country. 
 
My poetry and prose have appeared in The Village Voice, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The San Francisco, Lilith, Coracle, Lit Hub, Poetica, 99 Poems for the 99 Per Cent, Narrative Northeast, Curator and other publications.  I reviewed poetry for The Rumpus for 11 years.
 
I served two terms on the Board of Directors of Friends of the San Francisco Public Library. For seven years I served on the jury of the California Book Awards of the Commonwealth Club. I am a member of the Advisory Council of Simply the Basics. 
 
I am the author of a poetry chapbook, THE GENEROSITY OF STARS, from Finishing Line Press, and CURRENTS, a full length collection of poetry from THREE MILE HARBOR PRESS. CURRENTS has a blurb from Eavan Boland, who taught at Stanford.
 
At the age of sixty I performed a memorized monologue outing my father, for Porchlight,
the San Francisco storytelling presenter...During Covid I have participated in literary Zooms and been interviewed by E. Ethelbert Miller, for his radio program, On the Margin. I am at work on essays about contemporary cultural and interfaith issues, and the death of my husband Clifford Lee, an award-winning environmental lawyer.
 
I have lived in San Francisco since 1987. My books can be purchased at Small Press Distribution-SPD and at some San Francisco Bay Area independent bookstores. For signed copies, contact me directly at [email protected].

Bonnie Tsui

​Bonnie Tsui is a longtime contributor to The New York Times and the author of American Chinatown, winner of the 2010 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. Her latest book, Why We Swim, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a Time magazine and NPR Best Book of 2020; it is currently being translated into nine languages. Her first children’s book, Sarah and the Big Wave, about the first woman to surf Northern California’s Mavericks, was published in 2021. Her work has been recognized and supported by Harvard University, the National Press Foundation, and the Mesa Refuge. She is writing a new book about muscle.

Byron Spooner

Byron Spooner is the author of Rounding Up a Bison: Stories (Andover Street Archives Press, 2021). He is retired as the Literary Director of the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library after 21 years. There he produced literary events including a weekly poetry series featuring a diverse array of California poets, with co-producer San Francisco Poet Laureate Emeritus Jack Hirschman; three San Francisco International Poetry Festivals; and Latinx and Vietnamese poetry festivals. He founded and edited The Readers Review, the Friends’ literary blog, where he wrote about books, music, film and bookselling. His writing has been published widely and won Honorable Mention in the 2021 Dillydoun International Fiction Prize competition for his story The Acrobat Rides the Horse in Sequins and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for his story Elvis Walks the Earth. He was invited to the Napa Valley Writers Conference in 2017. He served on the San Francisco Poet Laureate Nominating Committee and the One City, One Book Selection Committee of the SFPL and on the Boards of Litquake, California Public Library Advocates and the Advisory Board of the Beat Museum. He is also an adventurer, a naturalist and a partner in Andover Street Archives, brokering literary and cultural archives to university libraries. From 1982 to 1996 he owned and operated Books Revisited, an award-winning outlaw bookstore in San Rafael, California. Back in the seventies he was a founder, editor and writer of The Paper Tiger, the underground newspaper of the New Jersey Student Union. He lives with his wife, writer Judith Ayn Bernhard, in San Francisco. Visit his web site at: https://byronspoonerjudithaynbernhard.godaddysites.com/ 
​Email: [email protected] 

​Chun Yu

​Chun Yu, Ph.D., is an award-winning bilingual (English and Chinese) poet, graphic novelist, scientist, and translator. She is the author of the multi-award winning memoir in verse Little Green: Growing Up During the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Simon & Schuster) and a historical graphic novel in progress (Macmillan). Her bilingual poetry and translations have been widely published in the U.S., China, and internationally. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee (2021 & 2022) and an awardee of China’s Xu Zhimo Micro Poem Competition (2022). She is a Library Laureate 2023 of the San Francisco Public Library. She is a YBCA 100 awardee (2020) for creative changemakers. Her work is taught in world history and culture classes. She has won grants from San Francisco Arts Commission, Zellerbach, Poets & Writers, and Sankofa Fund. Chun holds a B.S. and M.S. from Peking University and a Ph.D. from Rutgers University. She was a post-doctoral fellow in a Harvard-MIT joint program. Her websites: www.chunyu.org, Two Languages/One Community, and Chinese American Stories.

​Cory Doctorow

​Cory Doctorow is a regular contributor to the Guardian, Locus, and many other publications. He is a special consultant to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an MIT Media Lab Research Associate and a visiting professor of Computer Science at the Open University. His award-winning novel Little Brother and its sequel Homeland were a New York Times bestsellers. His novella collection Radicalized was a CBC Best Fiction of 2019 selection. Born and raised in Canada, he lives in Los Angeles.

​Daniel Handler

​Daniel Handler is the author of seven novels, including Why We Broke Up, We Are Pirates, All The Dirty Parts and, most recently, Bottle Grove.  As Lemony Snicket, he is responsible for numerous books for children, including the thirteen-volume A Series Of Unfortunate Events, the four-volume All The Wrong Questions, and The Dark, which won the Charlotte Zolotow Award.  He has received commissions from the San Francisco Symphony, Berkeley Reperatory Theater and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and has collaborated with artist Maira Kalman on a series of books for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and with musicians Stephin Merritt (of the Magnetic Fields), Benjamin Gibbard (of Death Cab for Cutie), Colin Meloy (of the Decemberists) and Torquil Campbell (of Stars).  His books have sold more than 70 million copies and have been translated into 40 languages, and have been adapted for film, stage and television, including the recent adaptation of A Series of Unfortunate Events for which he was awarded both the Peabody and the Writers Guild of America awards.  He lives in San Francisco with the illustrator Lisa Brown, to whom he is married and with whom he has collaborated on several books and one son.

​Earlonne Woods

​Earlonne Woods was born and raised in South Central Los Angeles. In 1997, he was sentenced to 31-years-to-life in prison. While incarcerated, he received his GED, attended Coastline Community College, and completed many vocational trade programs. He also founded CHOOSE1, which aims to repeal the California Three Strikes Law, the statute under which he was sentenced. In November 2018, California Governor Jerry Brown commuted Earlonne’s sentence after 21 years of incarceration. He is the co-creator and co-host of the Pulitzer Prize finalist prison-based podcast Ear Hustle and the co-author of This Is Ear Hustle: Unflinching Stories of Everyday Prison Life (Crown Publishing).

Evette Davis

Evette Davis, a science fiction and fantasy writer, is the author of 48 States, which Kirkus named one of the Best Indie Books of 2022. 
Davis is also the author of Woman King and Dark Horse, the first two installments of the Dark Horse Trilogy. In 2014 Davis founded Flesh & Bone, an independent publishing imprint. In 2015 Dark Horse was honored at the San Francisco Book Festival. In 2023 and 2017, Friends of the San Francisco Public Library honored Davis as a Library Laureate. Her work has also been published in the San Francisco Chronicle. 
When she's not writing novels, Davis advises some of the country’s largest corporations, non-profits, and institutions as a consultant and co-owner of BergDavis Public Affairs, an award-winning San Francisco-based consulting firm. Before establishing her firm, Davis worked in Washington as a press secretary for a member of Congress. She previously was a reporter for daily newspapers in the San Francisco Bay Area.  
 
Davis splits her time between San Francisco and Sun Valley, Idaho. For more information or to sign up for her newsletter, visit www.evettedavis.com. 

​Gary Pomerantz

​Gary M. Pomerantz, historian, journalist, and Stanford University lecturer, is the author of six nonfiction books on topics ranging from history to sports to civil rights. His most recent, The Last Pass, a New York Times bestseller about coming to terms with racial regret, centers on Boston Celtics legends Bob Cousy and Bill Russell, both Presidential Medal of Freedom winners. Pomerantz’s first book, Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn, a biography of Atlanta and its racial conscience, was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and recently was optioned for adaptation to television. He also authored WILT, 1962, about Wilt Chamberlain’s legendary 100-point game; Nine Minutes, Twenty Seconds, about an aviation crash; The Devil’s Tickets about a Jazz Age murder and trial; and Their Life’s Work, a narrative about the 1970’s Pittsburgh Steelers that explores football’s gifts and costs. He spent nearly two decades as a daily journalist, first as a sports reporter at The Washington Post and then at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution where he wrote profiles, columns, special projects, and served on the newspaper's editorial board. For the past sixteen years, he has taught reporting and writing at Stanford’s Graduate Program in Journalism. He is married to Carrie Schwab Pomerantz, and they have three grown children.  

Jewelle Gomez

Jewelle Gomez, (Cabo Verdean/Wampanoag/Ioway; she/her), a former president of the SF Public Library Commission, is a novelist, poet, playwright and cultural worker. Her eight books include four collections of poetry and the first Black Lesbian vampire novel, The Gilda Stories. In print for 30 years, it was recently optioned by  Cheryl Dunye (“Lovecraft Country”) for a TV mini-series. Her new collection of poetry, Still Water, was published by BLF Press. 
Her plays “Waiting for Giovanni” about James Baldwin and “Leaving the Blues,” about Alberta Hunter were produced in San Francisco and New York City. Her new play, “Unpacking in P’town,” will premiere at New Conservatory Theatre Center in San Francisco in 2024. 
Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies including: “Red Indian Road West,” “Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora,” “Oxford Treasury of Love Stories,” and “Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia Butler.” 
She was on the founding boards of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) and the Astraea Lesbian Foundation. She was also a grant maker for the SF Arts Commission, the NY State Council on the Arts and Horizons Foundation in San Francisco.  
Twitter & Instagram: @VampyreVamp 

​Jorge Argueta

​Jorge Argueta, a Pipil Nahua Indian from El Salvador and the 2023 Poet Laureate of San Mateo County, is a prize-winning poet and author of more than twenty children’s picture books. They include Una película en mi almohada / A Movie in My Pillow (Children’s Book Press, 2001) and Somos como las nubes / We Are Like the Clouds (Groundwood Books, 2016), which won the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award and was named to USBBY’s Outstanding International Book List, the ALA Notable Children’s Books and the Cooperative Children’s Book Center Choices. His Madre Tierra / Mother Earth series celebrates the natural world and is made up of four installments: Tierra, Tierrita / Earth, Little Earth (Piñata Books, 2023), winner of the Salinas de Alba Award for Latino Children’s Literature; Viento, Vientito / Wind, Little Wind (Piñata Books, 2022), winner of the Premio Campoy-Ada given by the Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española; Fuego, Fueguito / Fire, Little Fire (Piñata Books, 2019); and Agua, Agüita / Water, Little Water (Piñata Books, 2017), winner of the inaugural Campoy-Ada Award in Children’s Poetry.  His poetry collection, En carne propia: Memoria poética / Flesh Wounds: A Poetic Memoir (Arte Público Press, 2017), focuses on his experiences with civil war and living in exile. The California Association for Bilingual Education honored him with its Courage to Act Award. In addition, Jorge Argueta is the founder of The International Children's Poetry Festival Manyula and The Library of Dreams, a non-profit organization that promotes literacy in rural and metropolitan areas of El Salvador. Jorge divides his time between San Francisco, California, and El Salvador.]

​Kathy Seligman

​Katherine Seligman is an award-winning journalist and author in San Francisco. She has been a reporter at USA Today, the San Francisco Examiner and a staff writer at the San Francisco Chronicle Sunday Magazine. Her work has been featured on NPR, and in Life, Redbook, The Sun Magazine, the anthology “Fresh Takes,” Best American Essays, and elsewhere. Her debut novel, At the Edge of the Haight (published by Algonquin Books in 2021), won the PEN/Bellwether Prize. 

Katie Hafner

​Katie Hafner is a journalist and author who writes for The New York Times and The Washington Post.  She is the author of six non-fiction books, including the memoir, Mother Daughter Me; A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould's Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano (which Kirkus called "the musical version of Seabiscuit"); The House at the Bridge: A Story of Modern Germany; Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet (with Matthew Lyon). She is host and co-executive producer of the popular podcast, Lost Women of Science. Her first novel,The Boys, was published in July 2022. She lives in San Francisco with her husband, Bob Wachter.

Lisa Brown

​Lisa Brown is a New York Times bestselling illustrator, author and cartoonist. Some of her award-winning picture books include: How to Be, The Airport Book, Mummy Cat by Marcus Ewert, and Emily’s Blue Period by Cathleen Daly. She is a frequent collaborator with author Lemony Snicket, including on: The Latke Who Couldn’t Stop Screaming and Goldfish Ghost. Her first graphic novel, The Phantom Twin, and Long Story Short, her first collection of comics, both came out in 2020, right before the world locked down. Therefore, her latest book for young children is The Hospital Book.
Lisa lives in San Francisco with her husband, the writer Daniel Handler. where she teaches in the illustration department of the California College of the Arts, and chairs the board of 826 Valencia. In her down time she drinks coffee.

Lol Tolhurst

Lol Tolhurst co-founded The Cure, one of his generation's most influential, successful, and critically acclaimed bands. He is an inductee to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the author of Cured: A Tale of Two Imaginary Boys.

​His forthcoming book Goth-A History will be published on September 26, 2023
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Maggie Tokuda-Hall

​Maggie Tokuda-Hall has an MFA in creative writing from USF, and a strong cake-decorating game. She is the author of the 2017 Parent's Choice Gold Medal winning picture book, Also an Octopus, illustrated by Benji Davies. The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea is her debut young adult novel, which was an NPR, Kirkus, School Library Journal and Book Page Best Book of 2020. Her graphic novel, Squad, is an Ignyte and Locus Award nominated comic book, and her newest picture book, Love in the Library, has been named a Best Picture Book of 2022 by Book Page, School Library Journal, Booklist, and Publisher’s Weekly. She lives in Oakland, California with her husband, son, and objectively perfect dog.

​Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

​Margaret Wilkerson Sexton was born and raised in New Orleans, studied creative writing at Dartmouth College and law at UC Berkeley. Her most recent novel, On the Rooftop was the Reese Book Club Pick for September 2022. The Revisioners, won a 2020 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work and a George Garrett New Writing Award; was a California and Northern California Book Award finalist, a 2020 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award Finalist and a Willie Morris Award for Southern Writing finalist; was nominated for the 2020 Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize; and was a national bestseller as well as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her debut novel, A Kind of Freedom, was long-listed for the National Book Award and the Northern California Book Award, won the Crook's Corner Book Prize, and was the recipient of the First Novelist Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Zyzzyva, The Paris Review; O, The Oprah Magazine; The New York Times Book Review; and other publications. She lives in Oakland with her family.

Meena Harris

​Meena Harris is a powerful and dynamic creative poised to shake up the media landscape. As founder of the groundbreaking and Tony Award®-winning company, Phenomenal Media, as well as an author, and lawyer, Harris is a respected business leader and an influential voice for gender and racial equity.  
 
A 360-degree media company, Phenomenal Media aims to amplify the stories and experiences of women and historically excluded communities. Through content creation, brand partnerships, book clubs and more, Harris and Phenomenal Media are leading a cultural shift to a more inclusive and equitable media landscape and world. They recently co-produced the critically acclaimed Broadway musical A STRANGE LOOP, which won 2 Tonys at the 2022 Tony Awards, as well as the hit revival of DEATH OF A SALESMAN. 
 
In August 2022, Phenomenal Media announced its acquisition of Reductress, the first and only satirical women's digital magazine. Reductress was founded in 2013 to highlight women and marginalized writers in the entertainment industry by producing culture-defining content on the web and beyond. With the acquisition of Reductress, Phenomenal Media will continue to cultivate and support bold comedic talent across digital content, entertainment, and live events, as well as bolster its existing brand partnerships.  
 
Harris released her latest children's book, The Truth About Mrs. Claus, on October 18, 2022, and has her next book A Is For Ambitious coming out on March 14. In January 2021, Harris released her second book, Ambitious Girl, becoming a #1 New York Times bestselling author.  
 
Harris' legal expertise is in the areas of consumer protection, data privacy, and cybersecurity. She is a graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Law School, and currently resides in the Bay Area with her husband and two daughters.  

Meron Hadero

​Meron Hadero is the first Ethiopian-born winner of the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing whose debut story collection, A DOWN HOME MEAL FOR THESE DIFFICULT TIMES, is a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection, was longlisted for the Story Prize, won the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing and was listed in NPR’s Best Books of 2022. Meron’s stories appear in Best American Short Stories, Ploughshares, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Zyzzyva, The Iowa Review, 40 Short Stories: A Portable Anthology, and others. Her writing has also been published in The New York Times Book Review, The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives, among others. A former Steinbeck fellow, Meron has been awarded residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell, and holds an MFA from the University of Michigan, a JD from Yale, and a BA in history from Princeton with a certificate in American studies.

Michael Warr

Michael Warr's books include Of Poetry and Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin (W.W. Norton), and The Armageddon of Funk, and We Are All The Black Boy from Tia Chucha Press. He has been honored with a 2021 San Francisco Arts Commission Artist Award, 2020 Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime Achievement Award, San Francisco Public Library Laureate, Creative Work Fund Award, PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature, Black Caucus of the American Library Association Award, Gwendolyn Brooks Significant Illinois Poets Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. Michael is the former Deputy Director of the Museum of the African Diaspora and is a board member of the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library. He is co-founder of Two Languages / One Community with poet/translator Chun Yu. Follow his creative work at https://michaelwarr-creativework.tumblr.com/ ​

Nigel Poor

​Nigel Poor is a visual artist whose work explores the various ways people make a mark and leave behind evidence of their existence. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and can be found in various museum collections including the SFMOMA, the M.H. deYoung Museum, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. She is also a professor of photography at California State University, Sacramento. In 2011, Nigel got involved with San Quentin State Prison as a volunteer teacher for Mount Tamalpais College (formerly the Prison University Project). She is the co-creator and co-host of the Pulitzer Prize finalist prison-based podcast Ear Hustle and the co-author of This Is Ear Hustle: Unflinching Stories of Everyday Prison Life (Crown Publishing).

​Polina Barskova

​Polina Barskova is a scholar and a poet, author of thirteen collections of poems and three books of prose in Russian. Her collection of creative nonfiction, “Living Pictures,” received the Andrey Bely Prize in 2015 and is forthcoming in German with Suhrkamp Verlag and in English with NYRB. She edited the Leningrad Siege poetry anthology Written in the Dark (UDP) and has four collections of poetry published in English translation: This Lamentable City (Tupelo Press), The Zoo in Winter (Melville House), Relocations (Zephyr Press) and AirRaid (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021). Barskova also authored a monograph Besieged Leningrad: Aesthetic Responses to Urban Disaster (NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, 2016) and multiple edited volumes on the culture of the besieged Leningrad.

Rita Bullwinkel

Rita Bullwinkel is the author of Headshot (Viking 2024) and Belly Up, which garnered a 2022 Whiting Award. Bullwinkel’s writing has been published in ZYZZYVA, Tin House, The White Review, Conjunctions, BOMB, Vice, NOON, and Guernica. She is a recipient of grants and fellowships from MacDowell, Brown University, Vanderbilt University, Hawthornden Castle, and The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. Her work has been translated into Italian, Greek and Dutch. Both her fiction and translation have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. She is an Editor at Large for McSweeney’s, the Deputy Editor of The Believer, a Contributing Editor for NOON, and the creator of Oral Florist. She lives in San Francisco and teaches at the California College of the Arts and University of San Francisco.

Robert Anderson

​Robert Mailer Anderson is a writer, producer, activist, father of four, and 9th generation Californio. Anderson is the author of the best-selling novel “Boonville,” co-writer/producer of the films “Windows on the World” (also a graphic novel published by Fantagraphics, translated into French by Komics Iniative) and cult horror classic “Pig Hunt”, the forthcoming graphic novel “My Fairy Godfather,” the play “The Death of Teddy Ballgame,” and has been a contributor to The Anderson Valley Advertiser for almost 40 years, among publishing work in other numerous publications. Anderson served on the SFJAZZ board and lead the $69 million capital campaign to build the SFJAZZ Center. He was appointed by Governor Newsom to the California Humanities Board in 2020, is a board member of PEN Oakland, and on the advisory board of Los Cenzontles. As a music producer, he has been nominated for three Grammy Awards and won two NAACP Image Awards. He was a member of President Obama’s 2012 National Finance Committee, the 2013 Colonial Standard Bearer for the Selkirk Common Ride, and received the San Francisco Arts Medallion in 2016.

Roberto Lovato

Roberto Lovato is the author of Unforgetting (Harper Collins), a “groundbreaking” memoir the New York Times picked as an “Editor’s Choice.” Newsweek listed Lovato’s memoir as a “must read” 2020 book while the Los Angeles Times listed it as one of its 20 Best Books of 2020. Lovato is also an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Guernica,  Le Monde Diplomatique, La Opinion, Der Spiegel and other national and international media outlets. A recipient of a reporting grant from the Pulitzer Center, Lovato has reported on numerous issues—violence, terrorism, the drug war and the refugee crisis—from Mexico, Venezuela, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, Haiti, France and the United States, among other countries.

Sarah Ladipo Manyika

​Sarah Ladipo Manyika writes novels, short stories, and essays translated into several languages. She is the author of the best-selling novel g novel In Dependence (2009) and multiple shortlisted novels Like A Mule Bringing Ice Cream To The Sun (2016), and has had work published in publications including Granta, The Guardian, the Washington Post and Transfuge among others. Named one of the "100 Most Influential Africans” by New African in 2022, Sarah has served on a number of non profit Boards including as Board Director for the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, and as Board Chair for the women’s writing residency, Hedgebrook. She has been a judge for the Goldsmiths Prize, California Book Awards, Aspen Words Literary Prize, and Chair of judges for the Pan-African Etisalat Prize. Sarah is a San Francisco Library Laureate, an Audie finalist, a Mary Carswell MacDowell fellow, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Her most recent book is Between Starshine and Clay: Conversations from the African Diaspora.

Susanne Pari

​Susanne Pari is an Iranian American novelist, journalist, essayist, and book reviewer. Born in New Jersey to an Iranian father and an American mother, she grew up both in the United States and Iran until the 1979 Islamic Revolution forced her family into permanent exile. Her first novel, The Fortune Catcher has been translated into six languages and her non-fiction writing has appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, National Public Radio, and Medium. A former Program Director for Book Expo, she is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, the Author's Guild, the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, and the Castro Writers' Cooperative, she serves on the board of the Lakota Children's Enrichment Writing Project and is an alumna of the Hedgebrook Writing Residency. She blogs occasionally for the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies and divides her time between Northern California and New York.

​Tom Lin

​Tom Lin is the author of The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu, which won the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was a finalist for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Award. He is a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Davis, where he studies the relation between complex technologies and speculative fiction.

​Tongo Eisen-Martin

Originally from San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin is a poet, movement worker, and educator. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. His book titled, Someone's Dead Already was nominated for a California Bookstore Award. His book Heaven Is All Goodbyes was published by the City Lights Pocket Poets series, was shortlisted for the Griffins Poetry Prize and won a California Book Award and an American Book Award. His latest book Blood On The Fog was released this fall in the City Lights Pocket Poets series and named one of the New York Times poetry books of the year. In 2020, he co-founded Black Freighter Press to publish revolutionary works. He is San Francisco’s eighth poet laureate. ​

Vanessa Hua

​Vanessa Hua is the author of the national bestsellers A River of Stars and Forbidden City, as well as Deceit and Other Possibilities, a New York Times Editors Pick. A National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, she has also received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and a Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing, as well as awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Asian American Journalists Association, among others. A former longtime columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, her work has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Atlantic. She is a Visiting Writer at Saint Mary’s College of California, and has taught at the Warren Wilson MFA Program, Sewanee Writers Conference, and elsewhere. The daughter of Chinese immigrants, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.