With the Bay Area Book Festival well-positioned and booming after more than a decade, the 11th annual celebration on the weekend of May 31 and June 1 in downtown Berkeley will include headliner presentations, a family day, a children’s book fair, a “Democracy Dialogues” series, a “Bookworm Block Party,” a writers’ workshop, a small press alley and a new “Health in Community Row.”

Stoked and stocked with mostly free and a handful of ticketed events, six indoor stages and several outside locations will play host to the literary and cultural events presented by the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria and sponsored by multiple local and regional businesses, service providers and organizations.

Local and national headline writers will include Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen, feminist Roxane Gay, philosopher Judith Butler, historian Garrett Felber and Native American storyteller Greg Sarris along with acclaimed poets, journalists, thought-leaders and more.

“Spaces like this are more important than ever,” said J.K. Fowler, the festival’s executive director, in an interview. “Our panels center on creating communities of care, fighting back against authoritarianism and autocracy, facing all of the divisive forces at the moment. We’re losing governmental bodies we once depended on. We only have each other to hold ourselves together.”

A more-than-fun feature this year is Bushwick Book Club Oakland’s musical introductions before each headliner. Fowler says four original compositions “will serenade” the speakers and set the tone for presentations. He came onboard in September and recalls the moments after Donald Trump was determined to have won last fall’s election.

“We had to be responsive, dig in our heels. After 11 years, we aren’t shy about holding necessary, complicated conversations. We hope to foster new ideas rooted in literature and the power of narrative,” Fowler said.

Those conversations are most transparent in the headliner sessions at Berkeley’s Freight & Salvage venue. Among the topics are art and community health partnering to create healing and build interdependence in communities instead of isolating art therapy on an island. Other events addressing complexities unfold under the titles “Writing as an Other,” “Who’s Afraid of Gender?” and “Portable Intersectionality.”

The last of these is a conversation with writer, podcast host and self-proclaimed “bad feminist” Roxane Gay and Alicia Garza, who co-founded the Black Lives Matter movement. In a separate interview, Gay says the discussion labeled as “robust” will move beyond Feminism 101.

“We’re not defining feminism, we’re not defending feminism. Instead, we’re thinking about what feminism is and then we’re actually doing that practice,” Gay said. “There’s less talk and more action. Less focus on theory.

“Robust means making sure a truly diverse range of voices participate in the discussions and discourse. There’s no one voice dominating. We’re not talking for people, we’re talking with people. We’re not assuming we know better than communities we think we’re helping. We’re making space for people to use their voice. Everyone has a voice: we’re not ‘giving’ them one.”

Gay’s writing appears in multiple anthologies and publications, including contributions as an opinion writer for The New York Times. She is the author of “Ayiti, An Untamed State,” “Bad Feminist,” “Difficult Women,” the NYT-bestselling memoir “Hunger,” and more. Her latest collection, “The Portable Feminist Reader,” offers what are said to be selected writings by ancient, historic and contemporary feminist voices.

More than anything, Gay insists that robust discussions must be equitable, open, broad-range and lead to putting ideas into motion in the public realm. She says the work of feminism is ongoing and must avoid focusing on what’s not useful. Putting feminism into practice, she suggests, is measurable, practical and instantly recognizable.

“For example, women need support. How are we working to achieve subsidized child care so people with children have resources and don’t have to go broke making sure their children have adequate care?” Gay asks. “How do we ensure that women in states with restrictive abortion laws can have access at the very least to abortion medicine or have the funds they need to travel to a different state to get the health care they need?

“There are organizations doing this great work, and that’s where our energies are best spent while we are also having the overall conversations about how we change this. How do we change laws, where and when do we protest … and why?”

Her memoir came out in 2012 and was “absolutely the hardest thing I’ve ever written,” Gay said. “So much of my work has been written about, and I don’t feel there’s much that’s been left out, but the rigor I bring to each work is something that can be overlooked.

“Because my writing focused (in ‘Hunger’) on memoir, they say it’s emotional utterance that doesn’t require as much skill or rigor. They say, ‘It happened to you, so how hard can it be to write a memoir?’ They’d be surprised.”

What will not surprise people familiar with her work is that she says that despite being a proponent of change, learning and not being so stubborn in mindset as to be static, she is “still the same Roxane” — older, wiser and “more evolved after having a lot of therapy because ‘Hunger’ showed me things I could look at and improve.” She insists she is “still me.”

Asking Gay for an example leads her to say, “Do I change my mind? It depends on what topics you’re talking about. I will never change my mind about reproductive freedom, ever. I will always believe that if you have a uterus, you have the right to control what goes in and out of it.”

Gay says feminism’s fundamental core is practical and that the foundational elements apply to many lives.

“How do we ensure that the Supreme Court can’t go after marriage equality?” Gay asks. “How do we protect the trans community in sustainable ways? Do we trust that laws don’t change? Democrats had opportunity after opportunity to do this and didn’t, which is frustrating. Those are the questions consuming me.”

Fowler, the festival’s executive director, says expanding the its scope are events framing voters’ rights, media polarization, writers’ tools used to become “authopreneurs” and creating common dialogue and activism.

“Even when we don’t like each other, we need to learn how to move together,” he said.

After the festival, Fowler urges attendees to take away what they’ve learned and shared and, through the power of narrative, create a more humanitarian world.

Go to baybookfest.org/2025-festival.

Lou Fancher is a freelance writer. Reach her at lou@johnsonandfancher.com.