Bay Area Book Festival: Maxine Hong Kingston, Rebecca Solnit, many more

6 JUNE 2015 — saturday

The first annual two-day Bay Area Book Festival presents 300 authors, 160 exhibitors, and 145 keynotes, interviews, panels, and performances at eleven venues in a ten-block radius of downtown Berkeley; some Saturday events and participating writers, see website for full schedule: Boston Globe-Horn Book Award-winning children's author Mac Barnett, Extra Yarn, tells stories on the Children's Stage; Children's book authors Gennifer Choldenko, Al Capone Does My Shirts and Marissa Moss, Barbed Wire Baseball, California Book Award-winner; also appearing on Saturday are Molly Antopol, whose debut story collection, The UnAmericans, was long listed for the 2014 National Book Award; Dodie Bellamy, TV Sutras and Cunt Norton, whose feminist writing merges fiction, essay, and poetry; Frances Dinkelspiel, founder and editor of Berkeleyside; Poetry for the People Director Aya de Leon; poet Gloria Frym, Homeless at Home; novelist Karen Joy Fowler, The Jane Austen Book Club; nonfiction author and poet Susan Griffin moderates "Transforming Terror"; novelist Maria Hummel, Motherland; travel essayist Pico Iyer, "On the Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere"; novelist Kevin Killian, Spreadeagle; Maxine Hong Kingston, recipient of the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letter and National Medal of Arts; poet Joseph Lease, Testify; novelist and short story writer Yiyun Li, Kinder Than Solitude; Wendy Lesser, founding editor of The Threepenny Review; novelist Edan Lepucki, California; poet, travel writer, and novelist Linda Watanabe McFerrin, Best Places in Northern California; novelist and memoirist Anchee Min, The Cooked Seed; novelist, poet, and essayist Steven Nightingale, Granada: A Pomegranate in the Hand of God; Graywolf Press editor Ethan Nosowsky; fiction writer Ann Packer, The Dive from Clausen's Pier; Kim Stanley Robinson, science fiction writer and winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards; Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society in New York and journalist Orville Schell; Rebecca Solnit, winner of the Northern California Book Award in Nonfiction 2015, The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness; queer feminist poet, fiction writer, and memoirist Michelle Tea, How to Grow Up: A Memoir; Vendela Vida, The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty; event locations all around downtown Berkeley include the Berkeley Community Theatre, Berkeley Public Library, Magnes Museum, The Marsh, Brown Center, Dharma College, San Francisco Chronicle Stage at Freight and Salvage, East Bay Media Center, City Hall, and Civic Center Park, San Francisco Chronicle editors and reporters will moderate panels, additional events and stages for children and teens, including a reading by WritingCoach Connection's contest winners and a performance by youth from Hip Hop for Change, Poetry Flash exhibits on Literary Lane, visit to see Poetry Flash's Watershed Poetry Festival broadsides; Downtown Berkeley Arts District, Berkeley, indoor sessions free (except for Judy Blume), reserve tickets online, reservations recommended, 10:00 a.m.-6 p.m. (www.baybookfest.org)