At a time when daily news headlines read like science fiction novels, when books are banned, the arts are defunded and citizens are openly persecuted for their identity, the Bay Area Book Festival offers a balm.
Held in downtown Berkeley on Saturday, May 31 and Sunday, June 1, the event offers not just 120 exhibitors but mutual aid and healthcare resources. Political prisoner support group CurbFest will host a conversation about the country’s carceral system. Festival-goers can pen poetic postcards and exchange poems for plant seeds. Two new affinity groups, a Mixed-Race Lit collective and an LGBTQIA+ Lit collective, will join the previously established Women Lit collective.
This is the festival’s 11th year, and the first time it’s led by J.K. Fowler. Founder of the community-based publishing house Nomadic Press and a former member of Oakland’s Cultural Affairs Commission, Fowler takes the reins of the Bay Area Book Festival at a turbulent time.
“It’s a challenging environment to do this in,” says Fowler, acknowledging that many of the individuals and groups working in the literary world have been impacted by cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts. That’s on top of federal book bans, the rewriting of history and efforts to diminish the cultural contributions of those from diverse backgrounds. “It’s shaking the ecosystem in many ways,” he adds.
Instead of responding to the news from Washington D.C., Fowler and company are proactively relying on resources that have existed in literary circles before the “authoritarian regime of the day,” he says.
