Since 1999, the annual literary festival, Litquake, has featured 11,500 authors and performers appearing before an audience total of 315,000. And in 2025, it’s gaining considerable steam in the East Bay. Numerous writers, poets, illustrators, playwrights and other literary artists participating in Litquake make their homes in East Bay communities. Multiple events this year in Oakland and Berkeley showcase the festival’s top local, national and international literary stars.
The festival runs Oct. 9-25 at more than 60 venues, with ambitious programs that include New Yorker writer, journalist and best-selling author of The Orchid Thief, Susan Orlean, with her new book, Joyride; U.S. poet laureate Ada Limón; Saeed Jones (How We Fight For Our Lives); Maggie Smith (You Could Make This Place Beautiful); Tochi Onyebuchi at Block Community Space; and more.
Special programs add pizazz and power: a SongWriter podcast live event with Viet Thanh Nguyen and Thao Nguyen; marathon live readings of Moby-Dick and Bastard Out of Carolina; Word for Word with Edgar Allen Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart; two “Litquake at the Movies” events—one centered on John Candy (with biographer Bay Area-based Paul Myers) and another on Berkeley-based Jeff Chang’s new Bruce Lee biography, Water Mirror Echo, that has Chang in conversation with Oakland-based comedian/writer W. Kamau Bell.
Events held in the East Bay extend the high bar with upper echelon appearances such as Thomas Schlesser, French author of the recently released, #1 international bestseller, Mona’s Eyes. Schlesser appears in conversation with BAMPFA’s Tausif Noor at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley. Also on the roster, Brandon Taylor at the Brower Center and Litquake Aftershocks programs such as Susan Orlean at Montclair Presbyterian Church and Alix E. Harrow at Gilman Brewing.
Forced to choose a single event from the bounty, executive director Norah Piehl selects closing night’s Lit Crawl. During a span of four hours, 60 overlapping free events in the Mission District take place in bookstores, cafés, bars, clubs, barbershops, plant and record stores, and other locations.
“You see the breadth of the literary scene and rediscover these little spaces in the neighborhood,” says Piehl. “The lineup is diverse. It’s a wonderful reminder of how active the Bay Area literary community is and has been for decades.”
About the festival’s deeper push into the East Bay, she notes that investing more energy is not only because many Litquake followers live and work there—including Piehl, who lives in Rockridge—but due to the high number of literary-affiliated artists who are the area’s residents. “It’s an opportunity to come together. I paint with a broad brush, and it’s important to remember we’re all one literary community,” she says.
The opportunity to highlight East Bay institutions, she says, is equally valuable. Holding Schlesser’s conversation with BAMPFA art history expert Noor is a nod not to the museum and host venues like the Berkeley church. The two Aftershock events, Piehl explains, open up windows on not only Orlean’s master class-worthy writing process—and, with Harrow, the burgeoning romantasy genre—but on Montclair Presbyterian Church and Gilman Brewing.
In choosing and curating every event, Litquake’s intentional focus was on political topics—and on fun. “We wanted ‘how did we get here’ topics, but also opportunities for release, a break, a chance to remind ourselves about getting together to experience joy, which can be hard to come by right now,” says Piehl.
“One event I’m self-indulgently excited about is with poets writing poems in response to Taylor Swift songs,” she notes. “The caliber of Bay Area poets is prestigious, amazing. They’ll read, we’ll play songs, and people can celebrate. And opening night’s ‘Not so Guilty Pleasures’ party allows people to share every trashy, under-the-radar book or reading material they enjoy.”
Chang’s Bruce Lee biography is about as far from trashy as literature can be. The hefty volume opens up the nuances of the iconic figure Lee came to be as the world’s best-known martial artist and action film hero. His remarkable life was cut short in 1973 at age 32, but his legendary profile remains undiminished.
To tell the story of an Asian American who rose to fame despite colonialist, racist, segregationist, anti-Asian forces, Chang draws from first-person interviews and the special access Lee’s family granted him to thousands of personal documents and photographs. The portrait of Lee the man, not simply Lee the cinematic star, reveals a person who became and remains a powerful symbol of unity, solidarity, strength of purpose and resisting the havoc wreaked by invading forces that bait and alienate people within societies.
“Kamau and I go way back,” says Chang. “Years ago, we both landed on this love of Bruce Lee. He calls himself the world’s number one non-Asian Bruce Lee fan. We’ll be screening Fist of Fury and talk about (early 20th century) colonial power when Japan invaded and occupied Shanghai. It’s hard not to see parallels to now, where we have forces tearing apart families in D.C. and California.”
With themes that springboard organically and frighteningly into current times, Chang says the story is also timeless. History repeatedly shows Asian Americans breaking through opposition to honor their identity, traditions, philosophies and practices such as Asian martial arts. In raising their overall visibility and representation in industries including film and more, he says, “Asian Americans are naming themselves, refusing to be identified as ‘oriental,’ ‘less-than,’ ‘subservient.’
“Lee as a symbol during the pandemic,” Chang adds, “when Asian Americans were victimized—his image started appearing across the country in murals, martial arts demonstrations and actions of solidarity with other people who might be oppressed. He’s a symbol of people rising up to take back their power.”
Chang says many Asian Americans are re-evaluating who they’re fighting and what they’re fighting for. “That goes to Bruce’s efforts to be seen in Hollywood. And yet, there’s still a huge yellowface controversy raging on Broadway. How many steps forward, how many steps back must we take?” he asks.
In Lee’s private papers, Chang recognized a man full of doubt, vulnerability, an inveterate reader. Lee read widely and took voluminous notes. He memorized motivational four-character Chinese idioms and dove into American self-help books, trying to will his dreams into being. Says Chang, “People think of him destined to become this person, but it’s amazing to see what he did in just 32 years. It’s heartbreaking.”
Even so, Chang says Lee’s life and work are ultimately uplifting and demonstrate Asian Americans’ proudest achievements, tremendous pride and Asian Americans’ ability to overcome great odds with grace, intention and determination.
“If people walk away from this book understanding there are millions of people in the U.S. who’ve experienced the same things Bruce did, they will have a better picture of who Asian Americans are,” says Chang. “Lee appears to be above space and time, a superhero, but his is the story of a man, of a people. In all the specificity of his life, we see the universal, which makes him even more a hero.”
For the complete Litquake schedule, visit litquake.org.
