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11:30am PDT
OTRS - Jungle of Stone: Discovering the Maya with William Carlsen
Moderators/Hosts 
Mary Jo McConahay is the author of the award-winning Maya Roads, One Woman’s Journey among the People of the Rainforest. She is an award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker whose coverage of war, politics and international justice issues has appeared on PBS and in Time...
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William Carlsen was a reporter for two decades at the San Francisco Chronicle, where he was a finalist for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting. He has also worked for the New York Times and taught journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He and his wife...
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12:45pm PDT
OTRS - Anon Was a Woman: A Celebration of Female Poets
Participants 
Teow Lim Goh is the author of Islanders (Conundrum Press, 2016), a volume of poems on the history of the Angel Island Immigration Station. She lives in Denver.
Margaret Ross is the author of A Timeshare, selected by Timothy Donnelly for the Omnidawn Poetry Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, Fence, The New Republic and The New Yorker and have been recognized by scholarships and fellowships from the Fulbright Program...
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Born in Istanbul to Iranian parents, Solmaz Sharif holds degrees from U.C. Berkeley, where she studied and taught with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, and New York University. Her work has appeared in The New Republic, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, jubilat, Gulf Coast, Boston...
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Poet
A widely published critic, poet and essayist, and on-air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered, Tess Taylor’s five books of poems blend the lyric and the reportorial in unexpected ways, leading to what Nate Dixon of the Georgia Review recently hailed as “rich investigative...
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2:00pm PDT
OTRS - Debut Fiction: Daring and Inventive First-Time Novelists
Participants 
Cassandra Dunn is the author of The Art of Adapting (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster). She received her MFA in creative writing from Mills College. She was a semifinalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award and a finalist in Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers. Her...
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Midge Raymond is the author of MY LAST CONTINENT (Scribner, June 2016), a novel about two penguin researchers, set in Antarctica, and what happens when one of their ships strikes ice in the Southern Ocean.
Midge is also the author of the award-winning short story collection FORGETTING...
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Robert Thomas’s BRIDGE (BOA Editions) received the 2015 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction. Frances Lefkowitz said in the San Francisco Chronicle: “The rushing thoughts, sense impressions, quirky language and crumbling boundaries all work to convey agonizing universal truths...
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Shawn Vestal’s debut novel,
Daredevils, was published in spring 2016 by Penguin Press. Liesl Schillinger called the novel "breathtaking and brash," and wrote: "Vestal sends his characters soaring across the gulf that separates the identity that confines them and the identity they would choose, letting them land roughly b...
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Variny Yim is a first generation, Cambodian-American author who brings over 20 years of experience in the fields of communications, nonprofit management, coalition building, and financial education. Variny began her career as a print and broadcast journalist at USA WEEKEND, USA...
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3:15pm PDT
OTRS - Each Unhappy Family: Helen Klein Ross and Elizabeth Percer
Participants 
Anne Germanacos is the author of the short-story collection In the Time of the Girls (BOA Editions, 2010) and Tribute (Rescue Press, 2014). Together with her husband, Nick Germanacos, she ran the Ithaka Cultural Studies Program on the islands of Kalymnos and Crete. She runs the...
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Elizabeth Percer is the author of All Stories Are Love Stories (HarperCollins, 2016), a novel that follows three survivors in the aftermath of two devastating earthquakes hitting modern day San Francisco. Named a Best Book of 2016 by Amazon, All Stories Are Love Stories is "a moving...
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Helen Klein Ross is a poet and novelist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Iowa Review where it won The Iowa Review 2014 award in poetry. She is author of What Was Mine (Simon & Schuster/Gallery, 2016) and editor of Traveler's Vade Mecum, an...
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11:30am PDT
OTRS - That Really Happened: Four Memoirists Share Stories
Moderators/Hosts 
Author
Joshua Mohr is the author of the memoir "Sirens" (2017), as well as five novels including "Damascus", which The New York Times called "Beat-poet cool." He’s also written "Fight Song" and "Some Things that Meant the World to Me," one of O Magazine’s Top 10 reads of 2009 and a San...
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Prisoner in the kitchen
Born and raised in Seattle, William Bonham spent the first fifteen years of his working life as a professional cook. One of those years was as a cook, on staff, at Montana State Prison. At the age of thirty-one, while working in a restaurant in San Francisco, he almost literally stumbled...
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English Professor, Las Positas College
Michelle Cruz Gonzales is the author of The Spitboy Rule: Tales of a Xicana in a Female Punk Band. Gonzales has published in Longreads, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Latino Rebels. She has work in two upcoming anthologies Hexing the Patriarchy (Seal) and All Of Me: Love Anger...
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Tracey Helton Mitchell is a recovering heroin addict. After completing rehab in 1998, she dedicated her life to the care and treatment of heroin users. Tracey entered school through an ex-offender's program where she earned a bachelors of business administration and masters of public...
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12:45pm PDT
OTRS - Making Literature Now: The Art and Business of Contemporary Lit
Moderators/Hosts 
Amy Hungerford is Professor of English and Divisional Director of Humanities at Yale. She specializes in 20th- and 21st-century American literature, especially the period since 1945. Her new monograph, Making Literature Now (Stanford, 2016) is about the social networks that support...
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Writing fiction, writing novels, plot plot plot, alternative structures in fiction, alt-history, steampunk, dieselpunk, feminism, women in lit, Jewish themes in contemporary lit
Chiyuma Elliott is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her scholarly work and teaching focus on poetry and poetics, visual culture, and intellectual history from the 1920s to the present. Before joining the Berkeley faculty, Elliott...
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Eli Horowitz is the co-creator of The Silent History, a digital novel; The Clock Without a Face, a treasure-hunt mystery; andEverything You Know Is Pong, an illustrated cultural history of table tennis. He was the managing editor and then publisher of McSweeney’s; his design work...
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Juliana Spahr edits the book series Chain Links with Jena Osman and the collectively funded Subpress with nineteen other people and Commune Editions with Joshua Clover and Jasper Bernes. With David Buuck she wrote Army of Lovers. She has edited with Stephanie Young A Megaphone: Some...
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2:00pm PDT
OTRS - Equality or Progress: Urban Development in the Bay Area
Moderators/Hosts 
Chair, Literary Council, Oakland Book Festival
Rebekah Otto is the Chair of the Literary Council for the Oakland Book Festival. She lives in Oakland with her family and works in online content.
Managing Editor, East Bay Express
Sarah Burke is an art critic, culture writer, and occasional curator who lives and works in Oakland, California. She is the Managing Editor at the East Bay Express, where she reports on the East Bay’s affordability crisis, shifting demographics and social justice through the lens...
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Chancellors Professor of City and Regional Planning, University of California at Berkeley
Malo André Hutson is an academic scholar and practitioner in the areas of community development and urban sustainability/equity; racial and ethnic inequalities and urban policy (metropolitan fragmentation, segregation and health); built environment and health. He is currently an...
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founder, YIMBY Party or CaRLA
Sonja Trauss is the founder of the Bay Area Renter's Federation, a pro-housing advocacy organization that recently sued the city of Lafayette after downzoning a planned housing development.
3:15pm PDT
OTRS - Latina Fiction: Politics, Social Justice, and Sexuality
Moderators/Hosts 
María Poblet (@mariadelpueblo) is Executive Director of Causa Justa :: Just Cause (www.cjjc.org). She is Chicana and Argentine, with extensive Latino community organizing experience. She led the strategic mergers that built Causa Justa, aggregating the power of 3 different neighborhood-based...
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Yalitza Ferreras was recently a Steinbeck Fellow in Creative Writing at San Jose State University. Her writing is forthcoming in Best American Short Stories 2016 and appears in Colorado Review, and the anthologies: Wise Latinas: Writers on Higher Education and Daring to Write...
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Lecturer, African American Studies
Aya de León teaches creative writing in the African American Studies Department at UC Berkeley. She is acquiring editor for a new climate justice fiction imprint Fighting Chance Books, which will publish stories of people taking collective action in the here and now to solve the...
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Carolina De Robertis is the internationally bestselling author of the the novels The Gods of Tango, Perla, and The Invisible Mountain. Her books have been translated into seventeen languages. She is the recipient of a Stonewall Book Award, the Italian Rhegium Julii Prize, and...
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12:00pm PDT
Literary Lunch: Miguel de Cervantes
Participants 
Roland Greene is the author and editor of several books, most recently Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes (2013). He teaches at Stanford University, and until January 2016 served as President of the Modern Language Association of America.
6:30pm PDT
In My Humble Opinion: Peter Orner and Mark Greif
Participants 
As the New York Times wrote of his new book, Against Everything, "[Mark Greif] embodies a return to the pleasures of critical discourse at its most cerebral and personable… writing about the culture with a reverence for language and a passion for what has come before." Greif received...
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Peter Orner is the author of two collections of stories, Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge and Esther Stories, and two novels, Love and Shame and Love and The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo. His stories have appeared in many periodicals, including the Atlantic Monthly, The New York...
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6:30pm PDT
Literary Science: The Good, the Bad, and the Bestseller
Moderators/Hosts 
Ransom Stephens’ novels mix science and religion, environmentalism and technology, oligarchy and anarchy, and his latest, Too Rich to Die, is set at the intersection of love and money. www.ransomstephens.com
Leilani Clark writes about books for KQED Arts. Her journalism and essays have been published at Mother Jones, The Guardian, Civil Eats, The Rumpus, and other places. She is also the editor of Made Local Magazine, a print publication all about the Sonoma County food system.
Terrence Deacon is a professor of biological anthropology at UC Berkeley. His research combines human evolutionary biology and neuroscience with the aim of investigating the evolution of human cognition: Brain development and evolution, origins of language, bio-cultural evolution...
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Andy Ross is a bookseller turned literary agent in Oakland. For 30 years Andy owned the legendary Cody's Books in Berkeley. He's now a literary agent who represents books in a wide range of non-fiction genres: narrative non-fiction, science, journalism, history, popular culture...
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Publisher, Tachyon Publications
Jacob Weisman is the editor and publisher at Tachyon Publications, which he founded in 1995. He has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award three times for his work at Tachyon and is the series editor of Tachyon’s Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, and Shirley Jackson Award-winning novella...
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6:30pm PDT
Global Fiction: Litquake's International Night
Moderators/Hosts 
Publisher, Transit Books
Adam Z. Levy is publisher of Transit Books, a nonprofit publishing house based in Oakland, California. His translation from the Hungarian of Gábor Schein's The Book of Mordechai is forthcoming from Seagull Books.
Carmen-Francesca Banciu was born in Lipova, Romania and studied religious painting and foreign trade in Bucharest. As a result of being awarded the International Short Story Award of the City of Arnsberg for the story "Das strahlende Ghetto" (“The Radiant Ghetto,” 1985), she...
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Mauro Javier Cardenas is author of the novel The Revoutionaries Try Again. He grew up in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and graduated with a degree in economics from Stanford University. His fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, Guernica, ZYZZYVA, Witness, BOMB, and the Antioch Review. His interviews...
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David Francis, based in Los Angeles where he works for the Norton Rose law firm, spends part of each year back on his family’s farm in Australia. He is author of The Great Inland Sea, published to acclaim in seven countries, and Stray Dog Winter, Book of the Year in The Advocate, winner...
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Antoine Volodine is the principal pseudonym of a French novelist, who has published 20 books under this name, several of which are available in English translation. After studying literature, Volodine taught Russian for 15 years, and has devoted himself to writing and translating...
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11:30am PDT
Art of the YA Novel
Moderators/Hosts 
Children's/Teen Specialist, Books Inc
kids and teen events
Michael Grant is the author or co-author with his wife, Katherine Applegate, of more than 150 books, some of which he still remembers. Works include the Animorphs, Gone, BZRK and Front Lines series.
Nina LaCour is the author of three critically acclaimed young adult novels published by Dutton Books: Hold Still, The Disenchantments, and Everything Leads to You. You Know Me Well, a novel written in collaboration with David Levithan, is forthcoming from St. Martin's Griffin...
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Stacey Lee is a fourth generation Chinese-American whose people came to California during the heydays of the cowboys. She believes she still has a bit of cowboy dust in her soul. A native of southern California, she graduated from UCLA then got her law degree at UC Davis King...
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Jandy Nelson's New York Times bestselling novel, I'll Give You the Sun, received many awards including the 2015 Printz Award. Both Sun and her debut, The Sky Is Everywhere, were on multiple best of the year lists including the NY Times, Time, and NPR. The novels are collectively published...
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Malena Watrous is a novelist, book critic, and instructor at Stanford. Her first novel, If You Follow Me, was published by Harper Perennial. She is the co-author, with Helena Echlin, of Sparked, a supernatural thriller for teens. A native of San Francisco, she lives in the Mission...
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1:00pm PDT
Art of the Thriller
Participants 
I write fiction: light mystery, romantic suspense, thrillers and contemporary fiction. All my life I've struggled with a serious case of career ADD--I've been a business owner, an accountant, a lawyer, a pilot, a mom, and inveterate traveler...and always a storyteller. I've lived...
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Paula Treick DeBoard’s novels include the psychological thriller The Drowning Girls (2016) and the novels The Fragile World (2014) and The Mourning Hours (2013). A graduate of the MFA program at the University of Southern Maine, Paula lectures in creative writing at the University...
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Alex Dolan is the author of The Euthanist and The Empress of Tempera, and the host of the "Thrill Seekers" show on the Authors on the Air Global Radio Network.
Reece Hirsch is the author of four thrillers that draw upon his background as a privacy attorney. His first book, The Insider, was a finalist for the 2011 International Thriller Writers Award for Best First Novel. His next three books, The Adversary, Intrusion and Surveillance...
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Domenic Stansberry is an award-winning novelist known for his dark, innovative crime novels. His North Beach Mystery Series has won praise in The New York Times and other publications for its rich portrayal of the ethnic and political subcultures of San Francisco. An earlier...
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3:00pm PDT
Art of the Novel
Participants 
Ramona Ausubel is the author of Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty (June, 2016) as well as No One is Here Except All of Us, winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction and A Guide to Being Born, a New York Times Notable Book. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker...
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Baszucki Family Foundation
Jan Ellison is the USA Today bestselling author of the debut novel, A Small Indiscretion, which was a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year. Jan won an O. Henry Prize for her first short story, and her essays about writing and parenting have appeared in The New York Times, The...
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Executive Director, National Novel Writing Month
Grant Faulkner is the Executive Director of National Novel Writing Month, the co-founder of 100 Word Story, and a co-founder of the Flash Fiction Collective. His stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Poets & Writers, Writer’s Digest, and dozens of others. His collection...
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Sarah Manyika is a writer, academic and overall lover of stories. She was raised in Nigeria and has lived in Kenya, France, Zimbabwe and England. Her best-selling debut novel, In Dependence (with sales of 3 million and a brand new edition coming out in the US and UK later this year...
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co-founder, co-director, Sonoma County Writers Camp
Ellen Sussman is the New York Times bestselling author of four novels, A Wedding in Provence, The Paradise Guest House, French Lessons, and On a Night Like This. She is the editor of two critically acclaimed anthologies, Bad Girls: 26 Writers Misbehave and Dirty Words: A Literary...
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