Litquake is San Francisco's annual literary festival. Originally named Litstock, the festival events took place in a single day in Golden Gate Park in the spring of 1999. It now has a two-week run in mid-October, as well as year-round programs and workshops.
Litquake consists of readings, discussions, film screenings, and themed events held at hundreds of Bay Area venues, in an attempt to bring as many disparate types of literary art to as many people as possible. The festival now features over 100 events and around 600 authors, and draws over 21,000 attendees annually. In 2021, 96% of all events were free and open to the public. [1]
Jack Boulware and Jane Ganahl are the co-founders and operate the festival as Executive Director and Artistic Director.
Hatched over beers at the Edinburgh Castle pub in 1999, Litquake debuted as "Litstock" a free one-day reading series in a fog-bound Golden Gate Park. In 2002, the festival was rechristened Litquake and began expanding its programming to include writing from around the world. In 2004, the festival inaugurated a closing night literary pub crawl (Lit Crawl) throughout San Francisco's Mission District. [1]
In the years following, Litquake added more national and international authors, youth programs (Kidquake), workshops for the elderly (Elder Project), a podcast (Lit Cast Live), and special localized editions of the Lit Crawl held each year in Austin, Seattle, Minneapolis, New York City, Los Angeles, Portland, Boston, Chicago, Kells (Ireland), Cheltenham (England), Angers (France), Naples (Italy), and Wellington (New Zealand) with more being added every year.
Litquake is now the largest independent literary festival on the West Coast. [2]
Litquake began hosting online programs in 2020.
In 2004, Litquake launched its first “Lit Crawl,” a literary pub-crawl through the Mission District of San Francisco. Readings and performances were rolled out in three sequential phases over the course of the crawl. In 2005, the crawl closed the festival, a place in the schedule it has maintained ever since. By 2018 the Lit Crawl had expanded to over 100 venues, including bars, cafes, bookstores, theaters, galleries, clothing boutiques, furniture showrooms, parking lots, a laundromat and a bee-keeping store. [4]
The New York Times wrote about the crawl in "In San Francisco, Literature as Carnival" [5] and again in 2013 in an article entitled "A Heady Cocktail of Books and Booze" about Lit Crawl in New York City's Lower East Side. [6]
Other crawls have been added over the years: Lit Crawl NYC debuted in 2008; Lit Crawl Austin in 2011 as a part of Texas Book Festival; Lit Crawl Brooklyn and Lit Crawl Seattle in 2012. Lit Crawl Iowa City and Lit Crawl Los Angeles 2013. Lit Crawl London, Lit Crawl Portland (Portland Book Festival), and Lit Crawl Boston (Boston Book Festival) was added in 2014. Since 2015, Lit Crawl NYC is a project of Litquake and PEN America, a global community of more than 4,400 writers, translators, and literary professionals dedicated to protecting free expression and promoting literary culture. [7]
The annual Kidquake events bring over 800 K-5 students from 34 classes to the San Francisco Public Library for two days of assemblies and intimate workshops with acclaimed children’s authors, and hundreds of free books and giveaways. [8]
In 20202, Litquake released "virtual classroom visit" videos direct to teachers for use in the classroom. These pre-recorded videos featured authors' presentations paired with writing, illustration, and book-making prompts. Teaching materials were made available for download.
Teenquake partnerships with San Francisco Public Library, NaNoWriMo Young Writer’s Project, and Writopia Labs inspire young writers through public readings and open mics, literary crawls, and awards events. 2018’s Teen Writing Awards brought in 225 entries with ten of the teens featured at an awards ceremony for family and friends during Lit Crawl SF. [9]
The Elder Project brings writing and storytelling workshops to retirement communities across Oakland and San Francisco. After two months of opening new pathways to self-expression and greater socialization, each class publishes an anthology and performs at a live reading for friends and loved ones. The program has even helped several emerging writers to publish their work, perform in local reading series, and even launch careers. [10] [11]
With 164,000 downloads and listeners in over 100 countries, [12] Lit Cast brings select Litquake programming to an enormous, worldwide audience. In 2018, through partnerships with local bookstores and arts organizations, Litquake began broadcasting both emerging and award-winning authors on book tours, as well as various special events.
Initiated in 2007, Litquake’s Barbary Coast Award is given for literary achievement and in recognition of those who value the independent—and sometimes unruly—the spirit of the Bay Area and keep it alive in their work. Its name is meant to evoke San Francisco’s storied pirate and nonconformist beginnings as well as a nod to Armistead Maupin’s quixotic characters who made their home on Barbary Lane. [13] Recipients through 2016:
A literary festival, also known as a book festival or writers' festival, is a regular gathering of writers and readers, typically on an annual basis in a particular city. A literary festival usually features a variety of presentations and readings by authors, as well as other events, delivered over a period of several days, with the primary objectives of promoting the authors' books and fostering a love of literature and writing.
Armistead Jones Maupin, Jr. is an American writer notable for Tales of the City, a series of novels set in San Francisco.
Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti was an American poet, painter, social activist, and co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. An author of poetry, translations, fiction, theatre, art criticism, and film narration, Ferlinghetti was best known for his second collection of poems, A Coney Island of the Mind (1958), which has been translated into nine languages and sold over a million copies. When Ferlinghetti turned 100 in March 2019, the city of San Francisco turned his birthday, March 24, into "Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day".
City Lights is an independent bookstore-publisher combination in San Francisco, California, that specializes in world literature, the arts, and progressive politics. It also houses the nonprofit City Lights Foundation, which publishes selected titles related to San Francisco culture. It was founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin. Both the store and the publishers became widely known following the obscenity trial of Ferlinghetti for publishing Allen Ginsberg's influential collection Howl and Other Poems. Nancy Peters started working there in 1971 and retired as executive director in 2007. In 2001, City Lights was made an official historic landmark. City Lights is located at 261 Columbus Avenue. While formally located in Chinatown, it self-identifies as part of immediately adjacent North Beach.
The term San Francisco Renaissance is used as a global designation for a range of poetic activity centered on San Francisco, which brought it to prominence as a hub of the American poetry avant-garde in the 1950s. However, others felt this renaissance was a broader phenomenon and should be seen as also encompassing the visual and performing arts, philosophy, cross-cultural interests, and new social sensibilities.
Tales of the City is a series of nine novels written by American author Armistead Maupin from 1978 to 2014, depicting the life of a group of friends in San Francisco, many of whom are LGBT. The stories from Tales were originally serialized prior to their novelization, with the first four titles appearing as regular installments in the San Francisco Chronicle, while the fifth appeared in the San Francisco Examiner. The remaining titles were never serialized, but were instead originally written as novels.
Tales of the City is a 1993 television miniseries based on the first of the Tales of the City series of novels by Armistead Maupin.
Significant Others (1987) is the fifth book in the Tales of the City series by American novelist Armistead Maupin. It originally was serialized in the San Francisco Examiner.
Michael Tolliver Lives (2007) is the seventh book in the Tales of the City series by San Francisco novelist Armistead Maupin.
Intersection for the Arts, established in 1965, is the oldest alternative non-profit art space in San Francisco, California. Intersection's reading series is the longest continuous reading series outside of an academic institution in the state of California.
Nancy Joyce Peters is an American publisher, writer, and co-owner with Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books and Publishers in San Francisco until Ferlinghetti's 2021 death.
Jody Weiner is an American novelist, non-fiction author, film producer and lawyer.
The Boston Book Festival (BBF) is an independent nonprofit group based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and also the name of its main event. The nonprofit was founded in 2009 by Deborah Z Porter, and aims to "celebrate the power of words to stimulate, agitate, unite, delight, and inspire by holding year-round events culminating in an annual, free Festival that promotes a culture of reading and ideas and enhances the vibrancy of our city".
Damian Leighton Barr is a Scottish writer and broadcaster. He is the creator and host of the Literary Salon, which started at Shoreditch House in 2008, and he hosts live literary events worldwide. In 2014 and 2015, he presented several editions of the BBC Radio 4 cultural programme Front Row. He has hosted several television series including Shelf Isolation and most recently The Big Scottish Book Club for BBC Scotland. He is the author of the 2013 memoir Maggie & Me, about his 1980s childhood in the west of Scotland, and the 2019 novel You Will Be Safe Here, set in South Africa in 1901 and now. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA).
Logical Family: A Memoir is a 2017 memoir by author Armistead Maupin. In the book, Maupin recounts growing up as a young conservative in the Southeastern United States and becoming a gay writer in San Francisco, California.
Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City is an American drama streaming television miniseries that premiered June 7, 2019, on Netflix, based on the Tales of the City novels by Armistead Maupin. Laura Linney, Paul Gross, Olympia Dukakis, and Barbara Garrick reprise their roles from previous television adaptations of Maupin's books: the original Tales of the City in 1993, and the sequels More Tales of the City (1998) and Further Tales of the City (2001). The series was Dukakis's final television role before her death.
Storybound is a podcast created, produced, and hosted by Jude Brewer, with original music composed for each episode. The show is a collaboration between Lit Hub and The Podglomerate podcast network, featuring household names and Pulitzer Prize winning authors alongside relatively unknown bands, singer-songwriters, and composers. Season 1 debuted on December 3, 2019. Inspired from Brewer's Storytellers Telling Stories, Storybound surpassed a million downloads in its first year, following up with seasons 2 and 3, the latter of which has been recognized for experimental cross-genre music compositions with sampling created and arranged by Brewer.
Jennifer Kroot is an American filmmaker whose films include the documentaries It Came From Kuchar (2009) and To Be Takei (2014).
Scott James is a veteran journalist and bestselling author. His reporting has often appeared in The New York Times, and he is the recipient of three Emmy awards for his work in television news.
Saint Joseph's Arts Society, run by the Saint Joseph's Arts Foundation, is an arts nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization and arts community located at 1401 Howard Street in the South of Market neighborhood of San Francisco, California.