It's a tough time for local bookstores, what with the social distancing and the sheltering in place. So we're raising funds to help local Bay Area bookstores stay in business.

The authors

Myriam Gurba is a writer and artist. She is the author of the true-crime memoir Mean, a New York Times editors’ choice. O, the Oprah Magazine, ranked Mean as one of the best LGBTQ books of all time. Publishers’ Weekly describes Gurba as having a voice like no other. Her essays and criticism have appeared in the Paris Review, TIME.com, and 4Columns. She has shown art in galleries, museums, and community centers. She lives in Long Beach, California, with herself.

Juli Delgado Lopera's latest book is Fiebre Tropical. They are an award-winning Colombian writer and historian based in San Francisco, and they're also the author of Quiéreme (Nomadic Press 2017) and the illustrated, bilingual oral history collection ¡Cuéntamelo! (Aunt Lute Books 2017), which won a 2018 Lambda Literary Award and a 2018 Independent Publisher Book Award. They are the recipient of the 2014 Jackson Literary Award, and have received fellowships from the Brush Creek Foundation of the Arts, Lambda Literary Foundation, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The SF Grotto, and an individual artist grant from the SF Arts Commission. Their work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Eleven Eleven, Foglifter, Four Way Review, Broadly, and TimeOut Mag, among others. Formerly, they served as the creative director of RADAR Productions, a queer literary nonprofit in San Francisco.

Alexander Chee is the author of the novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, and the essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. He is a contributing editor to the New Republic, an editor at large for VQR, and a critic at large at the Los Angeles Times. His essays and stories have appeared in T Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, Slate, The Yale Review and the Sewanee Review, and were recently anthologized in Best American Essays 2016 and 2019, and What My Mother And I Don't Talk About. He is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.

* This event is hosted by Alia Volz, author of the brand new book Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco *

The beneficiary

Dog Eared Books Castro is a general interest bookstore selling new, used, and remaindered books. They have an emphasis on LGBT-oriented titles, but plenty of everything else, including sections just for kids, magazines, blank notebooks, science, social science, social justice, art, graphic novels, cookbooks, and a gigantic wall of fiction.

Every penny you spend on tickets to this event goes directly to Dog Eared Books.

How does it work?

We use the conferencing system Zoom. After you sign up you'll get an email with the Zoom access code. (Check that Eventbrite is using your current email address.) You don’t have to join with video, but it’s nice to see faces.