Litquake is pleased to announce a new curatorial program highlighting the Bay Area’s underserved writers and thought leaders—Litquake Out Loud. In 2020, Litquake Out Loud will put Litquake’s full event production resources into the hands of five guest curators with the goal of producing a vibrant, impactful series of festival events.

Litquake Out Loud aims to tackle a glaring, urgent problem: there is a serious lack of accessible literary programming for the broader Bay Area community, especially low-income, marginalized audiences. Too many of the Bay’s arts organizations providing literary programming do not do so free of charge, often asking exorbitant rates, and tend to be culturally exclusive. While Litquake still has much work to do in this vein, we are proud of how we’ve made the festival more accessible and diverse in recent years, and wish to continue our efforts to better reflect the make-up and needs of the San Francisco Bay Area as a whole.

Litquake Out Loud represents our continued investment in ensuring that all people are included in the creation of and access to the Bay Area’s historic, thriving arts scene. Cultural equity is a core goal of Litquake’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion which is laid out publicly for the first time below. 

CURATORS TO BE ANNOUNCED SOON

We at Litquake recognize that a renewed, public commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion is crucial to both our own growth and that of the arts community at large in the Bay Area. We know that by addressing inequity in our organization, we will create a space in which readers and writers of all identities will feel welcome and empowered to participate in our mission—bringing people together around the common humanity encapsulated in literature. 

We commit ourselves programmatically to:

• Support more underserved writers and highlight their stories

• Serve a diverse, intergenerational audience for literature

• Prioritize equitable access to our programs

• Collaborate with our community in order to best understand and respond to its various needs

We commit ourselves administratively to:

• Create a staff, board, and volunteer base reflective of our community

• Function transparently in regards to our journey towards these goals

About Litquake
Words Matter. 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 Humanities, Fleishhacker Family Foundation, Grants for the Arts, Margaret and William R. Hearst III Foundation, Mary A. Crocker Trust, Miner Anderson Family Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, The Bernard Osher Foundation, 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