📘 Coming up at Litquake: Day 13

The Other America: Finding Common Ground
Tuesday, October 20 • 5:00pm - 6:15pm

The Pulitzer Prize-winning authors Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn's latest bestseller, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope, draws us deep into an “other America,” from the lives of some of the children with whom Kristof grew up, in rural Oregon, to similar stories of needless working-class tragedy from the Dakotas, Oklahoma, New York, and Virginia. With Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of the recent New York Times bestseller Strangers in Their Own Land. FREE, $10-15 suggested donation

The Daily Dose: Feminist Writers Respond to the Climate Emergency
Tuesday, October 20 • 7:00pm - 8:15pm
Co-presented by San Francisco Botanical Garden

In March 2020, three Bay Area women writers started the blog The Daily Dose with a simple mission: to spread the message of the Green New Deal, help other activists stay encouraged in the face of unrelenting challenge, take concrete action, and stay grounded. Join Daily Dose founders for Litquake Out Loud, as they discuss this writing-as-climate-activism project. With Aya de León, Vijaya Nagarajan, Mary DeMocker, Elizabeth Stark, and Susan DeFreitas. FREE, $5-10 suggested donation

Memorial Drive: Natasha Trethewey with Tonya M. Foster
Wednesday, October 21 • 5:00pm - 6:15pm
Co-presented by Museum of the African Diaspora
Supported in part by Poets & Writers

At age 19, Natasha Trethewey had her world turned upside down when her former stepfather shot and killed her mother. Grieving and still new to adulthood, she confronted the twin pulls of life and death in the aftermath of unimaginable trauma and now explores the way this experience lastingly shaped the artist she became. The new memoir Memorial Drive, by the Pulitzer Prize–winning U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey, moves through her mother’s history in the deeply segregated South and through her own girlhood as a “child of miscegenation” in Mississippi, plumbing her sense of dislocation and displacement in the lead-up to the harrowing crime that took place on Memorial Drive in Atlanta in 1985. In conversation with poet and professor Tonya M. Foster. FREE, $5-10 suggested donation

Telling True Stories: Trials by Fire
Wednesday, October 21 • 7:00pm - 8:15pm

As California seeks to recover from yet another horrific summer of fires, Litquake offers two compelling nonfiction accounts on the subject, from Bay Area authors. Fire in Paradise: An American Tragedy, by Guardian journalists Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano, details the disaster which occurred on November 8, 2018, when the Paradise, California community of 27,000 people was swallowed by the ferocious Camp Fire, razing virtually every home and killing at least 85 people. The catastrophe seared the American imagination, and landed in history as the state’s most destructive fire.

On Thursday, February 20, 2003, a pyrotechnics display during a concert by the heavy metal band Great White ignited flammable acoustic foam of Rhode Island’s Station nightclub. The entire building quickly went up in flames, killing 100 and injuring another 230. New York Times journalist Scott James’ upcoming account, Trial by Fire: A Devastating Tragedy, 100 Lives Lost, and a 15-Year Search for Truth, investigates the fire’s origin, interviews the key figures, and explores the local authorities’ rush to judgment about what really happened.

Join Gee, Anguiano, and James as they discuss their books with moderator Frances Dinkelspiel, Berkeleyside co-founder, and author of Tangled Vines: Greed, Murder, Obsession, and an Arsonist in the Vineyards of California. FREE, $5-10 suggested donation

Funeral Diva: Pamela Sneed with Tommy Pico
Friday, October 23 • 5:00pm - 6:15pm
Co-presented by City Lights Booksellers & Publishers

In this collection of personal essays and poetry, acclaimed Brooklyn-based poet/performer Pamela Sneed details her coming of age in New York City during the late 1980s. Funeral Diva (City Lights) captures the impact of AIDS on Black Queer life, and highlights the enduring bonds between the living, the dying, and the dead. With poet and Literary Hub editor Tommy Pico. FREE, $5-10 suggested donation

Fantasy and Dystopia: Cory Doctorow with Richard Kadrey
Friday, October 23 • 7:00pm - 8:15pm
With support from Craig Newmark Philanthropies

Join us for New York Times bestselling author Cory Doctorow and his latest dystopian cyberthriller, Attack Surface, in which high stakes and real-world paranoia keep the pages turning. In her day job as a counterterrorism wizard for an transnational cybersecurity firm, Masha Maximow made the hacks that allowed repressive regimes to spy on dissidents, and manipulate their every move. The perks were fantastic, and the pay was obscene. But Masha sometimes used her mad skills to help those same troublemakers evade detection, if their cause was just. It was a dangerous game and a hell of a rush. But seriously self-destructive. And unsustainable. Cory Doctorow reads from and discusses Attack Surface with San Francisco novelist Richard Kadrey, acclaimed author of the Sandman Slim series. FREE, $5-10 suggested donation

About Litquake
Litquake’s diverse live programs are created with the aim of inspiring critical engagement with the key issues of the day, bringing people together around the common humanity encapsulated in literature, and perpetuating a sense of literary community, as well as a vibrant forum for Bay Area writing. We believe in literature as a public good, so we work to produce events that are accessible to all. www.litquake.org

Litquake is grateful for the support of the following funders who help make our programming possible. Institutional Giving: Adobe Employee Community Fund, Bill Graham Memorial Foundation, California Arts Council, California College of the Arts, California Institute of Integral Studies, Center for the Art of Translation, California Humanities, Chronicle Books, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Fleishhacker Family Foundation, Grants for the Arts, HarperOne, Margaret and William R. Hearst III Foundation, Mary A. Crocker Trust, Miner Anderson Family Foundation, Mystery Writers of America, Northern California Chapter, National Endowment for the Arts, The Bernard Osher Foundation, The Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation, Stanford Continuing Studies, Yerba Buena Gardens Festival, Zellerbach Foundation. Individual Giving: Frances Dinkelspiel and Gary Wayne, Margaret and Will Hearst, Scott James and Gerald Cain, Nion McEvoy, Craig Newmark, and Nicole Miner and Robert Mailer Anderson. Media Sponsors: San Francisco Chronicle, 7 X 7, KQED, Bay Area Reporter, Johnny Funcheap, and KALW 91.7

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