Ada, Alma Flor — Love, Amalia

Alma Flor Ada, the bi-lingual children’s author, was born in Camagüey, Cuba, in an old house in the outskirts of town, which the neighbors believed was haunted. More…

Agee, Jon — The Other Side of Town

Jon Agee grew up in Nyack, New York, just up the street from the Hudson River. His early drawings were very animated: a lot of stuff zipping around, airplanes, racing cars, football players. More…

Ali-Karamali, Sumbul — Growing Up Muslim

Sumbul Ali-Karamali grew up in Southern California in an ethnically South Asian family. She earned her undergraduate degree in English, with Distinction, from Stanford University. More…

Barbash, Tom — The Last Good Chance: A Novel 

Tom Barbash is an American writer of fiction and nonfiction, educator and critic. He is the author of the novel The Last Good Chance and the bestselling nonfiction work On Top of the World: Cantor Fitzgerald, Howard Lutnick & 9/11: A Story of Loss & Renewal. More…

Barry, Sam — How to Play the Harmonica: and Other Life Lessons

Sam Barry is the author of the humor-inspiration book How to Play the Harmonica: and Other Life Lessons and co-authored the book Write That Book Already! The Tough Love You Need to Get Published Now with his late wife, author and literary provocateur Kathi Kamen Goldmark. More…

Beagle, Peter S. — Sleight of Hand

Peter S. Beagle is a multi-award winning author of novels, nonfiction, and screenplays, especially fantasy fiction. His best-known work is The Last Unicorn (1968), a fantasy novel he wrote in his twenties, which the SF magazine Locus subscribers voted the number five “All-Time Best Fantasy Novel” in 1987. More…

Black, Cara — Murder Below Montparnasse

Cara Black is a bestselling mystery writer best known for her Aimée Léduc mystery novels each set in a different arrondissement in Paris, featuring her intrepid female private investigator. More…

Boas, Nancy — David Park: A Painter’s Life

Nancy Boas traces Bay Area Figurative artist David Park’s (1911–1960) resolute search for a new kind of figuration, one that would penetrate abstract expressionism’s thickly layered surfaces and infuse them with human presence. More…

Brostrom, Caitlin Lempres and Peters, Richard C. — The Houses of William Wurster: Frames for Living

Caitlin Lempres Brostrom, AIA and Richard C. Peters, FAIA, draw upon extensive historical research as well as personal relationships with William Wilson Wurster (1895 – 1973) to tell the story of his career, including both residential and institutional building. Their book, The Houses of William Wurster features new and archival footage of thirty-three of the architect’s best known houses. More…

Cammell, Karima — Pirate and Hoopoe

Karima Cammell is an author, painter, illustrator and publisher. Cammell has a long time love of stories that tell of the fantastic, the beautiful, and the noble. Not satisfied with the existing options for new authors and artists, she founded her own imprint, Dromedary Press. More…

Chabon, Michael — Telegraph Avenue

Michael Chabon, Authors Dinner 2013 honorary co-chair, is the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, screenwriter, and short-story writer of Wonder Boys, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Summerland (a novel for children), The Final Solution, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Gentlemen of the Road as well as his most recent novel, Telegraph Avenue, set on the border between Berkeley and Oakland in the summer of 2004. More…

Chernoff, Maxine — Without

Maxine Chernoff is an award-winning author of fiction, poetry and essays, with an expertise in urban and immigrant poetry and translation of poetry and fiction.

The Professor and Chair of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, Chernoff is the author of six books of fiction and thirteen books of poetry. More…

Dooley, Patrick — Breaking It Down–Shotgun Players at 20

Patrick Dooley, is the founding artistic director of Shotgun Players. Dooley started the company in 1992 with ten eager actors and a bucket of black paint. More…

Eichengreen, Barry — Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar and the Future of the International Monetary System

Barry Eichengreen is the George C. Pardee and Helen N. Pardee Professor of Economics and Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1987. He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (Cambridge, Massachusetts) and Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (London, England). More…

Field, Carol — The Italian Baker, revised

Carol Field is the author of four cookbooks, In Nonna’s Kitchen, Focaccia, Celebrating Italy, and The Italian Baker, as well as The Hill Towns of Italy and Mangoes and Quince, a novel. More…

Gideon, Melanie — Wife 22

Melanie Gideon is the author of the memoir The Slippery Year: A Meditation on Happily Ever After, an NPR and San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2009, and a New York Times bestseller, as well as three young adult novels. More…

Grossinger, Robin — Napa Valley Historical Ecology Atlas

Robin Grossinger is an environmental scientist at the San Francisco Estuary Institute (SFEI), where he directs the Institute’s Historical Ecology Program. The program studies how California landscapes have changed since European contact, using innovative approaches to synthesizing history and science, and materials such as historical maps, travelers’ accounts, photographs, and paintings. More…

Haji, Nafisa — The Sweetness of Tears

Nafisa Haji was born and mostly raised in Los Angeles–mostly, because she also lived in Chicago, Karachi, Manila, and London. Her family migrated from Bombay to Karachi in 1947 during Partition, when the Indian Subcontinent was divided into two states. More…

Hart, Mickey

Mickey Hart is best known for his nearly three decades as an integral part of an extraordinary expedition into the soul and spirit of music, disguised as the rock and roll band the Grateful Dead. An artist and author as well as a musician, he is the author of Songcatchers, Spirit into Sound: The Magic of Music (with Professor Fredric Lieberman), and Planet Drum.

Hoover, Paul — Desolation: Souvenir

Paul Hoover is the author of eleven books of poetry. He is the editor of the anthology Postmodern American Poetry (W. W. Norton, 1994) and, with Maxine Chernoff, the annual literary magazine NEW AMERICAN WRITING. More…

Houston, Pam — Contents May Have Shifted: A Novel

Pam Houston is the author of two collections of linked short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness (W. W. Norton), which was the winner of the 1993 Western States Book Award and has been translated into nine languages, and Waltzing the Cat (W. W. Norton) which won the Willa Award for Contemporary Fiction. More…

LaPlante, Alice — Turn Of Mind

Alice LaPlante is an award-winning writer who teaches creative Writing at San Francisco State University and Stanford University, where she was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and held a Jones Lectureship. More…

Littlejohn, David – The Big One: A Story of San Francisco

David Littlejohn was born in San Francisco, the descendant of 1850 gold-seekers. He taught English and journalism at the University of California at Berkeley for 35 years. More…

Litwack, Leon — How Free Is Free?: The Long Death of Jim Crow

Leon F. Litwack is a historian whose scholarship focuses on slavery, the Reconstruction Era of the United States, and its aftermath into the 20th century. He won a National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Francis Parkman Prize for his 1979 book, Been In the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. More…

Meltzer, David — When I Was a Poet

David Meltzer is an American poet and musician of the Beat Generation and San Francisco Renaissance. Lawrence Ferlinghetti has described him as “one of the greats of post-World-War-Two San Francisco poets and musicians.” More…

Nixon, Cornelia — Angels Go Naked

Cornelia Nixon is a novelist, short-story writer and teacher. She was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and has lived most of her life in the San Francisco Bay Area. Nixon joined the faculty at Mills College in Oakland, in 2000. More…

Owings, Alison — Indian Voices

Alison Owings the author of three stereotype-challenging oral-history based books, her latest being Indian Voices: Listening to Native Americans, a survey of what a wide variety of Native people have to say about contemporary life, and say with passion and humor. More…

Tsukiyama, Gail — A Hundred Flowers: A Novel

Gail Tsukiyama is an American novelist from San Francisco, California. She was one of nine fiction authors to appear during the first Library of Congress National Book Festival. More…

Ullman, Ellen — By Blood

Ellen Ullman is an American computer programmer and author. She has written for various publications, including Harper’s Magazine, Wired, the New York Times and Salon. She owned a consulting firm and worked as technology commentator for NPR’s All Things Considered. Her essays and novels analyze the human side of the world of computer programming. More…

Waldman, Ayelet — Red Hook Road

Ayelet Waldman, Authors Dinner 2013 co-chair, is a novelist and essayist and a former lawyer. She is known for her self-revelatory essays, and for her writing (both fiction and non-fiction) about the changing expectations of motherhood. Waldman has written extensively about juggling the demands of children, partners, career and society, in particular about combining paid work with modern motherhood, and about the ensuing maternal ambivalence. More…

White, Richard — Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America

Richard White is historian and a past President of the Organization of American Historians, and the author of influential books on the American West, Native American history, railroads, and environmental history. He is the Margaret Byrne Professor of American History at Stanford University. More…

Wolfert, Paula — The Food of Morocco

Paula Wolfert, is the author of eight previously published cookbooks, all considered classics. Among them: Couscous and Other Good Food From Morocco, The Cooking of Southwest France, and five books on Mediterranean cuisine including the much praised Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean. More…