Authors Dinner 2025

2025 Honorees

A Nobel laureate, a Jeopardy! champion and pioneer, two celebrated chefs, two Emmy-winning journalists, and the author of what Vogue called “the sexiest novel of the year” — these were among the 20 honored authors at our much-anticipated annual gala held on February 23, 2025. Completing the list were naturalists, storytellers, activists, scholars, and commentators on the wildly diverse world around us.

Honorary Chair

  • Carol Christ

    A scholar of Victorian literature, Carol Christ retired last year after seven years as Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley. She spent more than 30 years as a professor of English and academic leader at Berkeley before becoming president of Smith College for more than a decade. The hallmarks of her career have been her work as an advocate for high-quality, accessible public higher education; as a proponent of the value of a broad education in the liberal arts and sciences; and as a champion of women’s issues and diversity on college campuses. She is the author of two books, The Finer Optic: The Aesthetic of Particularity in Victorian Poetry and Victorian and Modern Poetics; she has edited and co-edited several others, including The Norton Anthology of English Literature.

Honorary Chair

  • Carol Christ

    A scholar of Victorian literature, Carol Christ retired last year after seven years as Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley. She spent more than 30 years as a professor of English and academic leader at Berkeley before becoming president of Smith College for more than a decade. The hallmarks of her career have been her work as an advocate for high-quality, accessible public higher education; as a proponent of the value of a broad education in the liberal arts and sciences; and as a champion of women’s issues and diversity on college campuses. She is the author of two books, The Finer Optic: The Aesthetic of Particularity in Victorian Poetry and Victorian and Modern Poetics; she has edited and co-edited several others, including The Norton Anthology of English Literature.

Emcee

  • Alexis Madrigal

    Journalist Alexis Madrigal co-hosts KQED’s current affairs show, Forum, and is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, where he co-founded The COVID Tracking Project. His book, The Pacific Circuit, explores how a logistical revolution that began in Oakland has reshaped American cities. He previously served as editor-in-chief of Fusion and as a staff writer at Wired. He created the eight-part podcast Containers and is the proprietor of Local Economy, a community space in Oakland’s Rockridge neighborhood. He also runs the Oakland Garden Club, a newsletter for people who like to think about plants. He has been a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s School of Information and the university’s Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society.

Emcee

  • Alexis Madrigal

    Journalist Alexis Madrigal co-hosts KQED’s current affairs show, Forum, and is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, where he co-founded The COVID Tracking Project. His book, The Pacific Circuit, explores how a logistical revolution that began in Oakland has reshaped American cities. He previously served as editor-in-chief of Fusion and as a staff writer at Wired. He created the eight-part podcast Containers and is the proprietor of Local Economy, a community space in Oakland’s Rockridge neighborhood. He also runs the Oakland Garden Club, a newsletter for people who like to think about plants. He has been a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s School of Information and the university’s Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society.

Celebrity Hosts

  • Paul Buddenhagen

    Paul Buddenhagen, the City Manager of Berkeley, has more than 25 years of professional management experience in city and county government. He recently returned to the City of Berkeley after serving as the City Manager of Emeryville. Before that, he worked as Berkeley’s Deputy City Manager for five years and for two years as the city’s Director of Health, Housing and Community Services. Prior to his service in Berkeley, he worked for 18 years with the Contra Costa County Employment and Human Services Department. He earned a B.A. in psychology from Macalester College in Minnesota and a master’s in social welfare with a focus on management and planning from UC Berkeley.

  • Alex Filippenko

    A Distinguished Professor of Astronomy at UC Berkeley, Alex Filippenko studies many of the most intriguing subjects in astrophysics: black holes, exploding stars, active galaxies, dark matter, and dark energy. One of the world’s most cited astrophysicists, he is the author of more than 1,160 research papers and of the award-winning textbook, The Cosmos: Astronomy in the New Millennium, with Jay Pasachoff. He has produced five astronomy video courses and appears in more than 120 TV documentaries. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a recipient of Caltech's Distinguished Alumni Award. He was named the 2006 Carnegie/CASE National Professor of the Year, and at UC Berkeley he has been voted the “Best Professor” on campus a record nine times.

  • Peggy Orenstein

    Peggy Orenstein is the New York Times bestselling author of eight books including Boys & Sex, Girls & Sex, Cinderella Ate My Daughter, Waiting for Daisy, and the classic Schoolgirls. A frequent contributor to the New York Times, she has also written for the Washington Post, The Atlantic, New York, and The New Yorker. She has also contributed commentaries to NPR’s All Things Considered and the PBS News Hour. Her TED Talk, “What Young Women Believe About Their Own Sexual Pleasure,” has been viewed more than six million times. Her most recent book, a memoir, is Unraveling: What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World’s Ugliest Sweater.

  • Brian Watt

    Many of us start our day with Brian Watt, KQED’s morning radio news anchor. He joined KQED in 2016 after working as a reporter for KPCC in Los Angeles and as a producer at Marketplace. He has won awards from the Society of Professional Journalists NorCal, the San Francisco Press Club, and the Los Angeles Press Club. He anchored KQED newscasts that won the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Radio Television Digital News Association. He also won two Golden Mike Awards from the Radio and TV News Association of Southern California. He holds degrees in theater from Yale University and the Sorbonne and has worked as an actor abroad and in Hollywood, appearing on The West Wing, Judging Amy, and other TV shows.

Honored Authors

  • Olivia Allen-Price

    Olivia Allen-Price is creator, senior editor, and host of KQED’s award-winning Bay Curious podcast and the author of a book inspired by the show, Bay Curious: Exploring the Hidden True Stories of the San Francisco Bay Area. The book is a fun, quirky guide to the secret stories of the San Francisco Bay Area for visitors, newcomers, and California natives alike. Before joining KQED in 2013, Olivia worked at the Baltimore Sun and the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Virginia. Her work has earned honors from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Hearst Foundation, Hearken, and the Signal Awards. She loves running on the roads and trails around the San Francisco Bay Area and taking weekend trips around California.

  • Sylvan Mishima Brackett

    Sylvan Mishima Brackett is the chef and owner of Rintaro in San Francisco’s Mission District. The restaurant was named one of Bon Appétit’s Top 10 New Restaurants six months after opening in 2015. He was born in Kyoto, Japan, and raised in Northern California. He is the former creative director at Chez Panisse. He trained at Soba Ro in Saitama, a neighboring prefecture of Tokyo, and at a ryotei (a high-end, traditional Japanese restaurant) in Aoyama, Tokyo. His debut cookbook, published in 2023, is Rintaro: Japanese Food from an Izakaya in California.

  • John Campbell

    John Campbell is the Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor of Philosophy at UC Berkeley. He specializes in philosophy of the mind (with an emphasis on questions relating to perception) and has interests in the theory of meaning, metaphysics, and philosophy of psychology. His most recent book is Third Millennium Thinking: Creating Sense in a World of Nonsense, co-authored with Saul Perlmutter and Robert J. MacCoun, which explores the tools scientists use to make the best decisions and solve the hardest problems. He has written two other books, Past, Space, and Self and Reference and Consciousness. He has held Guggenheim and NEH fellowships and has taught at Oxford, Cambridge, and UCLA. In 2023, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

  • Kristina Cho

    Kristina Cho is an award-winning cookbook author, recipe developer, home cook, baker, food stylist, and photographer. Her groundbreaking debut cookbook, Mooncakes and Milk Bread, won two James Beard awards and was described as an instant classic by the New York Times. She was born and raised in Cleveland — there, in her family’s Chinese restaurant and her mother’s kitchen, she cultivated her deep love of food and feeding the people in her life. Her new cookbook, Chinese Enough, offers 125 recipes that blend the flavors of traditional Cantonese cooking with California ingredients and a Midwestern sensibility. She continues to write, develop recipes, and produce her popular blog, Eat Cho Food, in her Bay Area home.

  • Brian Copeland

    Actor, comedian, author, playwright, and TV and radio host Brian Copeland began his career in standup at the tender age of 18. Soon, he was opening for legendary performers, from Ray Charles to Ringo Starr. His first one-man play, Not a Genuine Black Man, debuted in 2004 and became the longest-running solo show in San Francisco theatrical history. He has since written several acclaimed plays, and his first crime fiction novel, Outraged, was released in 2024. He has hosted programs on just about every Bay Area television station, including Mornings on 2 on KTVU and the Emmy award-winning 7Live on ABC7. In 2006, director Rob Reiner cast him in The Bucket List, and he will soon be seen in Reiner’s sequel to This Is Spinal Tap.

  • Elizabeth Farnsworth

    Elizabeth Farnsworth, documentary filmmaker and former chief correspondent of the PBS NewsHour, has written for publications ranging from The Nation to Foreign Policy. Her memoir, A Train Through Time: A Life, Real and Imagined, was published in 2017, and her novella, Last Light, came out in 2024. She has received three Emmy nominations and the Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia Award, one of the highest honors in broadcast journalism. Her documentary, The Judge and the General, co-produced with Patricio Lanfranco, premiered at the 2008 San Francisco Film Festival and aired on POV (PBS) and around the world. She serves on the advisory boards of the Human Rights Center at the UC Berkeley School of Law and the World Affairs Council of Northern California.

  • Arlie Russell Hochschild

    A long-time UC Berkeley sociologist, Arlie Russell Hochschild, now retired, is the author of ten books, including The Managed Heart, The Second Shift, The Time Bind, the Outsourced Self, and Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, which was a New York Times bestseller and finalist for the National Book Award. Her new book is Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right. Her work has focused on family, market culture, global patterns of care work, and social psychology, with a recent focus on the relationship between culture, politics, and emotion. She’s twice been invited to speak to Democratic members of Congress. Her work appears in 18 languages.

  • Obi Kaufmann

    Poet, painter, and naturalist Obi Kaufmann is the author of the bestselling and award-winning California Field Atlas series. Over the past ten years, he has written six books, each describing an aspect of California’s more-than-human, biodiverse landscape. His unique books are full of beautiful, data-driven art, maps, and wildlife renderings juxtaposed with science-based and insightful prose, all presenting a dynamically holistic vision of California. For Obi, California is a magic network of living systems connecting ecology and beauty in a grand quilt, holding enough science, mythology, and language for, he says, a hundred field atlases to come.

  • John King

    John King is the former urban design critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, a post that for more than 20 years gave him the opportunity to write about the Bay Area’s ever-changing landscape in all its forms — from skyscrapers to homeless shelters — plus broader topics like infill housing and sea-level rise. His most recent book is 2023’s Portal: San Francisco's Ferry Building and the Reinvention of American Cities, which is being released in paperback with a new afterword in February 2025. He is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and an honorary member of the American Society of Landscape Architects.

  • R. O. Kwon

    R. O. Kwon’s nationally bestselling Exhibit, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, was published in 2024; among its most enticing accolades, Vogue called it “hands down, the sexiest novel of the year.” Her bestselling first novel, The Incendiaries, has been translated into seven languages, was named a best book of the year by more than 40 publications, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award. She and Garth Greenwell co-edited Kink, a New York Times Notable Book, and her writing has appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, Time, Vanity Fair, the Guardian, and elsewhere. Born in Seoul, Kwon has lived most of her life in the United States.

  • Robert J. MacCoun

    A social psychologist, Robert J. MacCoun is the James and Patricia Kowal Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. He was on the faculty of the UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy from 1993 to 2014. His most recent book is Third Millennium Thinking: Creating Sense in a World of Nonsense, co-authored with Saul Perlmutter and John Campbell, exploring the tools scientists use to make the best decisions and solve the hardest problems in an era of confusing and overwhelming information. His 2001 book with Peter Reuter, Drug War Heresies, is considered a landmark analysis of the drug legalization debate. His writing has appeared in Nature, Science, the New England Journal of Medicine, Psychological Review, and other publications.

  • Tomas Moniz

    Tomas Moniz is a Latinx writer living in east Oakland. His debut novel, Big Familia, was a finalist for the 2020 PEN/Hemingway Award and won a 2019 Lambda Literary Award. His latest novel, All Friends are Necessary, was published in June 2024. He’s the recipient of the San Francisco Foundation’s 2016 Literary Arts Award, and he has been an Artist Affiliate for the Headlands Center for Arts and a Fellow of the Lucas Artists Residency Program. He teaches at Berkeley City College and in the MFA program at Antioch University. He loves pen pals and promises to write back: P.O. Box 3555, Berkeley, CA 94703.

  • Tommy Orange

    Tommy Orange is the author of the bestselling There There, a multi-generational story about a side of America few of us see: the lives of urban Native Americans. A Pulitzer Prize finalist, the book shows us violence and recovery, hope and loss, identity and power, dislocation and communion, and the beauty and despair woven into the history of a nation and its people. His newest work, Wandering Stars, a New York Times bestseller that was longlisted for the Booker Prize, conjures the ancestors of the family from There There, asking what it means to be the children and grandchildren of massacre. Born and raised in Oakland, he is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma.

  • Saul Perlmutter

    A UC Berkeley professor of physics and a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Saul Perlmutter is a Nobel laureate, sharing the 2011 physics prize for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe. His interest in scientific-style critical thinking led to the development of two interdisciplinary undergraduate courses, Physics & Music and Sense & Sensibility & Science, which he has taught for more than a decade. The courses are the foundation of his new book, Third Millennium Thinking: Creating Sense in a World of Nonsense, co-authored with Robert MacCoun and John Campbell. A former member of the U.S. President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, he has written hundreds of articles on cosmology, and has appeared on many PBS, Discovery Channel, and BBC documentaries.

  • Cecilia Rabess

    Cecilia Rabess is a California-based writer and data scientist whose work has appeared in Vogue, the Wall Street Journal, and FiveThirtyEight, among other publications. In her debut novel, Everything’s Fine, she creates what writer Nick Hornby calls a “subtle, ironic, wise, state-of-the-nation novel.” Cecilia worked at Google for ten years and holds a patent for a photo-compression algorithm. She says she’s never read a book she didn’t like — because if she doesn’t like a book, she stops reading it.

  • Greg Sarris

    Greg Sarris is chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria and heads the tribe’s board that oversees its business interests, including the Graton Resort and Casino. He chairs the Board of Trustees of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, and he was appointed by Governor Newsom to the University of California Board of Regents in 2023. Formerly a professor of English and creative writing at UCLA and Loyola Marymount University, he now holds the Distinguished Emeritus Graton Endowed Chair in Native American Studies at Sonoma State University. He has written several books, including Grand Avenue, a collection of short stories, which he adapted for an HBO miniseries and co-executive produced with Robert Redford. His latest book, The Forgetters, was published in April 2024.

  • Amy Schneider

    In 2021, Amy Schneider made her first appearance on the TV show Jeopardy!, going on to win 40 consecutive games, the second most in the show’s history, trailing only Ken Jennings. She is the most successful woman ever to compete on the show, as well as the only out trans person to compete in, and win, the show’s prestigious Tournament of Champions. Since then, she has become a writer and LGBTQ advocate; her recent book is In the Form of a Question: The Joys and Rewards of a Curious Life. She has also spoken at the White House, has been covered in publications from People to the New York Times, and has attended the White House Correspondents Dinner — where she saw Drew Barrymore in the women’s bathroom but didn’t introduce herself.

  • José Vadi

    José Vadi is the author of Chipped: Writing from a Skateboarder’s Lens (released in April 2024) an intimate memoir “about how skateboarding re-defines space, curates culture, confronts mortality, and affords new perspectives on and off the board,” in the words of its publisher. It follows his 2021 book of essays, Inter State: Essays from California. With deep roots in the Bay Area spoken-word scene, José has written and directed live plays, produced short documentaries, and received the San Francisco Foundation’s Shenson Performing Arts Award for his play, a eulogy for three. His work has appeared in the Paris Review, The Atlantic, the San Francisco Chronicle, Free Skate Magazine, Alta Journal, The Yale Review, and on the PBS News Hour.

  • Carvell Wallace

    Carvell Wallace is a writer and podcaster who has contributed to The New Yorker, GQ, the New York Times Magazine, Pitchfork, MTV News, and Al Jazeera. He has written profiles of such luminaries as Riz Ahmed, Michael B. Jordan, Mahershala Ali, Samuel L. Jackson, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Viola Davis, and Steph Curry. His debut memoir, Another Word For Love, is a 2024 Kirkus Finalist for nonfiction; it explores his life, identity, and love through stories of family, friendship, and culture. James McBride called it “a remarkable book by one of the finest young writers I’ve come across in many years.” He is also the author of The Sixth Man, co-written with former Golden State Warrior Andre Iguodala. He co-hosts the Slate advice podcast How To!

  • Ruth Whippman

    Ruth Whippman is a British author, journalist, and cultural critic living in Berkeley. The mother of three sons, she is the author, most recently, of BoyMom, Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity — “a humorous and heartbreaking deep dive into the complexities of raising boys in our fraught political moment,” in the words of her publisher. A former BBC documentary film director, her writing appears in the New York Times, The Guardian, Time magazine, and elsewhere. Fortune described her as “one of the sharpest minds” of the decade. Her first book, America the Anxious, was a New York Post Best Book of the Year and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. She is a regular contributor to radio and podcasts.

Author Presenters

  • T. J. Stiles

    Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner T. J. Stiles has been checking out books at the Berkeley Public Library since 2013. His first biography, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, was reviewed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review and received the Ambassador Book Award. His second, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, was honored with the Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the National Book Award for Nonfiction. His third, Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America, earned a Pulitzer Prize for History. His essays have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Zyzzyva, and the Sewanee Review, among other publications. He is now working on a biography of Theodore Roosevelt — and he still finds himself wondering how authors do it.
  • Vanessa Hua, author

    Vanessa Hua

    Vanessa Hua is the nationally bestselling author of Coyoteland, A River of Stars and Forbidden City, and the story collection Deceit and Other Possibilities, a New York Times Editors’ Pick. A National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, she has also received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, a California Arts Council Fellowship, and a Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing. Previously, she was an award-winning columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. She teaches at the Warren Wilson MFA Program and is an Ann Getty Endowed Visiting Artist-Scholar at the University of San Francisco. Her debut narrative nonfiction, Uprooted, is forthcoming.

  • Linda Schacht Gage

    A two-time Emmy-award-winning reporter, Linda Schacht Gage says she’s lucky to have been born and raised in Berkeley. First on KQED TV’s nightly news show, Newsroom, and then at KPIX in San Francisco, she reported on major stories, including national political campaigns and conventions, the 1984 Mexico City earthquake, the Patty Hearst trial, the assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, and the opening of the Berlin Wall. Her reporting was featured in the films Milk and The Life and Times of Harvey Milk. For many years, she taught at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley. She continues to write scripts for television and documentary films.

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