Cherilyn Parsons risked it all on Bay Area Book Festival
Last year’s inaugural event brought an estimated 50,000 people through Berkeley’s Civic Center Park and nine surrounding blocks, with 300 authors from around the world giving keynotes, interviews, panels and performances in every conceivable genre.
“They open worlds, they give perspective — you’re able, in a very safe space in a book, to try on other lives and other perspectives, and that can be scary to do in ‘real life,’ and books let you do that,” she said.
There’s this trope in literature, of a secret door, a wardrobe, or a train platform, or a secret garden, whatever it might be — and you enter that world, and a book is like that:
Of particular help were City Lights’ celebrated book buyer Paul Yamazaki and Berkeley Arts & Letters producer Melissa Mytinger, who is now the festival’s full-time program manager.
Everybody on that steering committee is also responsible for listening to other people outside the group, and sort of synthesizing requests and desires, and wishes, and bringing them to the group for conversation.
Among those on the committee are former National Book Critics Circle President Jane Ciabattari, Editorial Director of Graywolf Press Ethan Nosowsky, Google’s Ann Farmer, and Green Apple Books manager Stephen Sparks.
Beginning with a panel on subversive speculative fiction that includes Jewelle Gomez, Ayize Jama-Everett and Charlie Jane Anders, the first day includes a panel on the secret histories of Chinatown and the Tenderloin, a conversation between California’s new Poet Laureate Dana Gioia and U.S. Poet Laureate Emeritus Kay Ryan, and a conversation on time and memory in contemporary fiction, with French writer Jean-Philippe Blondel (“The 6:41 to Paris”), Chilean Norwegian novelist Pedro Carmona-Alvarez (“Rust”), Swedish actor and author Jonas Karlsson (“The Invoice”), and Norwegian writer Kjersti Annesdatter Skomsvold (“The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am”), moderated by the Center for the Art of Translation’s director, Michael Holtmann.
There’s also the return of the popular 50,000-book outdoor library/art installation, Lacuna, and the debut of a film series in partnership with the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
Since so many of last year’s programs were at capacity, with people sometimes turned away for that reason, this year up to half of each session’s tickets may be purchased in advance for $5; the rest of the seats, which are free, are reserved for people standing in line.