Literary Stars

Samina Ali‘s first book, the novel, Madras on Rainy Days, (FSG) won France’s prestigious Prix Premier Roman Etranger Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award in Fiction. Her writing has been featured in various outlets, from national NPR to The Economist. Her later book, Pieces You’ll Never Get Back, is a harrowing and redemptive memoir chronicling how Samina nearly died after giving birth to her first child. Hailed as one of the most anticipated memoirs of the year by several outlets, including the San Francisco Chronicle, the memoir was selected by Belletrist Stacked, a celebrity book club led by actress Emma Roberts, and the rights are under offer for the screen.

T.L. Bequette is a criminal defense attorney from Lafayette whose practice focuses on defending young men from Oakland who are accused of murder. His 2022 mystery novel Good Lookin’ won multiple awards for crime fiction. His most recent courtroom thriller is A Long Time Dead, the third in his series featuring the exploits of the young defense attorney Joe Turner.

Lucia Barbini Falcone is a Walnut Creek author whose first book, Over Bridges, Across Tables, is a fictionalized memoir about her life on the Italian island of Murano near Venice where she was born and raised. She returned to Murano for her second novel, The Secret of Villa Rosa, which portrays the poignant and the farcical in two distinctly different men, as they struggle to find a car and understand the joys and frailties of human experience. Lucia was an English language tutor at Diablo Valley College for 20 years and a teacher of Italian language at various education centers including Acalanes Adult Education.

Peter Gavette is an archaeologist with the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. His book Archaeology and Bioarchaeology of Anatomical Dissection at a Nineteenth-Century Army Hospital in San Francisco probes a medical waste pit discovered at the former Army hospital in San Francisco. He has been featured on several science-based television programs, including Draining Alcatraz, which uses computer-generated mapping and imaging to explore the secrets of the notorious island prison.

A “recovering” lawyer and longtime legal affairs journalist, Erin Gordon has wanted to be a novelist since she was a child consuming Judy Blume books so voraciously they fell apart. A Bay Area native who graduated from UC Berkeley and Stanford, Erin has written several novels in the book club genre. Also, under a pen name, Erin writes contemporary romance set in a fictional town based on Lake Tahoe. Her most recent book, Look What You Made Me Do, is a is an unflinching memoir of her first year as a lawyer, a searing deep dive into Big Law.

L. John Harris studied art and literature at UC Berkeley in the 1960s. Seduced by Berkeley’s food revolution in the 1970s, he went to work at several iconic shops and restaurants and wrote The Book of Garlic in 1974. He launched his cookbook company, Aris Books, in 1980, and his “Foodoodles” cartoons in Bay Area  magazines led to a series of illustrated memoirs: Café French (2019), Foodoodles (2010), and My Little Plague Journal (2022). He serves as the curator of the Harris Guitar Collection at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and presides over musical events at his Berkeley hills home, Villa Maybeck.

Rex Hesner is the co-author of Funny Stuff: How Great Cartoonists Make Great Cartoons with former neighbor Phil Witte, a professional cartoonist. A devoted denizen of the San Francisco Bay Area, Rex is a jazz musician, writer, and cartoon critic. He established Cartoon Companion, arguably the world’s first website dedicated to reviewing and rating single-panel cartoons, before attracting the attention of New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff. Migrating to Mankoff’s online cartoon treasure trove, CartoonStock.com, provided Rex and Phil with countless cartoons to feed their blog, Anatomy of a Cartoon.

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Phil Witte is a Bay Area cartoonist, author and humor writer whose cartoons have appeared in dozens of publications in the U.S. and England. His latest book, cowritten with Rex Hesner, is Funny Stuff: How Great Cartoonists Make Great Cartoons. Phil also wrote two joke books on aging: What You Don’t Know About Turning 50 and the sequel on turning 60, and has contributed humor pieces to print and online publications. He was a guest cartoonist at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco. and the Charles Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa.

Amy Kurzweil is a New Yorker cartoonist and the author of Artificial: A Love Story, which documents her father’s quest to preserve his father through AI and was named a best book of 2023 by NPR, The New Yorker, and Kirkus Reviews. Her award-winning memoir from 2016, Flying Couch, tells the story of three generations of women in her family. Amy was the recipient of a 2021 Berlin Prize and a 2019 Shearing Fellowship. Her work has also been published in The Believer Magazine, The Verge, The New York Times Book Review, and The LA Times, among others.

Kathryn Ma is the author of the California Book Award winning novel The Chinese Groove, described as, “a charmingly narrated immigrant tale turned upside down,” and “a funny and uniquely American story about where dreams and reality collide.” The Chinese Groove was San Francisco’s One City One Book selection. A lawyer before she became an author, Kathryn’s other titles include the novel The Year She Left Us and the short story collection All That Work, and Still No Boys.

Lauren Markham is a writer based in California whose work regularly appears in outlets such as Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine and VQR, where she is a contributing editor. She has spent nearly two decades working at the intersection of immigration and educated and is the author of the award-winning The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life, the critically-acclaimed A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging (2024) and the recently-released Immemorial.

Robert Aquinas McNally is a Concord-based poet and nonfiction writer who seeks out stories about the connection — sometimes mythic, sometimes scientific, and sometimes both — between the human and the wild. His 2024 book Cast out of Eden: The Untold Story of John Muir, Indigenous Peoples, and the American Wilderness exposes how Muir’s vision of preserving the wilderness came at the cost of dispossessing the indigenous people who had managed the land for generations. His 2017 book The Modoc War: A Story of Genocide at the Dawn of America’s Gilded Age illuminates California’s only full-blown Indian war.

Ginny Kubitz Moyer writes historical fiction set in California. Her 2024 novel A Golden Life takes place in Hollywood and Napa in 1938, and her debut novel, The Seeing Garden, was inspired by the Filoli Estate in Woodside. Her nonfiction book Taste and See: Experiencing the Goodness of God with Our Five Senses was the winner of a Catholic Press Award, as was Mary and Me: Catholic Women Reflect on the Mother of God. Ginny loves researching how people dressed, spoke, ate, and entertained themselves in generations past.

Roger Rapoport is the Michigan based author, film producer, journalist and playwright. He is produced and cowrote three award winning feature films he cowrote: Coming Up For Air, Pilot Error and Waterwalk. His new film, Old Heart, premieres in May across America and the Netherlands in spring 2025 just ahead of the 80th anniversary of World War 2 liberation. A Bay Area journalist and book publisher for many years, he writes for the San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Publisher’s Weekly, Airmail, and Wired. He covered the Patty Hearst case in 1974-75. While the FBI was hunting for Hearst, her fiance, Steve Weed, lived with Roger and his wife for five months in Berkeley and they cowrote a book about their life together that was never published. He wrote the first interview with Hearst’s kidnapper Bill Harris after he was paroled.

Mary Roach is the author of the New York Times bestsellers STIFF, FUZZ, SPOOK, BONK, GULP, GRUNT, and PACKING FOR MARS. Mary has written for National Geographic, Wired, and The New York Times Magazine, among others, and her TED talk made the TED 20 Most Watched list. She has been a guest editor for Best American Science and Nature Writing, a finalist for the Royal Society’s Winton Prize, and a winner of the American Engineering Societies’ journalism award, in a category for which, let’s be honest, she was the sole entrant.

Elizabeth Rosner is an author and teacher whose work focuses on the redemptive power of storytelling and deep listening. Her six books have been translated into twelve languages and have received literary prizes in the US and abroad. Her most recent book, Third Ear: Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening, blends personal stories of growing up in a multilingual household with multidisciplinary research about sound and silence in the natural world. Her previous book, Survivor Cafe: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory, explores the intergenerational aftermath of atrocities while offering hope for individual as well as collective resilience. 

Leta McCollough Seletzky is a National Endowment for the Arts 2022 Creative Writing Fellow whose essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, O: The Oprah Magazine and elsewhere. A former litigator, she is the author of the father-daughter memoir The Kneeling Man: My Father’s Life as a Black Spy Who Witnessed the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., a Library Journal Best Book of 2023 and BookPage Best Nonfiction Book of 2023.

K.X. Song is a diaspora writer with roots in Hong Kong and Shanghai. Raised between cultures and languages, she enjoys telling stories that explore collective memory, translation, and the shifting nature of history. Her debut young adult novel, An Echo in the City, won the Freeman Book Award and was named a Best Book of 2023 by the Financial Times, Kirkus Reviews, and the Chinese American Librarians Association. Her fantasy novel The Night Ends With Fire was an Indie Next Pick and an instant New York Times, USA Today, and Sunday Times bestseller.

Gail Tsukiyama was born in San Francisco, California to a Chinese mother from Hong Kong and a Japanese father from Hawaii. She is the bestselling author of Women of the Silk and The Samurai’s Garden, as well as the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Award and the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award. Gail is also currently the Executive Director of WaterBridge Outreach: Books + Water, a nonprofit organization that provides books and access to water in developing countries. Her latest novel, The Brightest Star, is based on the life of the luminous, groundbreaking actress Anna May Wong–the first and only Asian American woman to gain movie stardom in the early days of Hollywood.

Payam Zamani is an entrepreneur, investor, and founder of One Planet Group, focusing on spiritual capitalism to elevate business and serve humanity. The author of Crossing the Desert, Zamani fled Iran at 16 as a Baha’i refugee. He co-founded the automotive media company AutoWeb, and now manages a portfolio that includes diverse technology, media and hospitality businesses and investments in more than 50 companies. With his wife Gouya, he started the One Planet One People foundation to advocate for the empowerment of women and girls and racial unity.