Authors Dinner 2026
2026 Honorees
Pulitzer Prize finalists, a pop culture connoisseur, an Emmy-winning journalist, a prolific children’s author with two Caldecott Honors, and a San Francisco Chronicle Rising Star Chef — these are among the 20 honored authors at the foundation’s much-anticipated annual gala, set for February 22, 2026. Completing the list are scientists, storytellers, podcasters, artists, and innovators who shape our multi-faceted world.
Scroll down to see biographies and information about this exciting event.
Emcee
Alexis Madrigal
The co-host of KQED radio’s Forum, Alexis Madrigal was born in Mexico City, grew up in rural Washington state, and now lives in Oakland. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, where he co-founded The COVID Tracking Project. His book, The Pacific Circuit, was released in March 2025; he is also the author of Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology. He has been a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s School of Information and Center for the Study of Technology, Science, and Medicine, as well as an affiliate with Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. He is the proprietor of the Oakland Garden Club, a newsletter for people who like to think about plants.
Emcee
Alexis Madrigal
The co-host of KQED radio’s Forum, Alexis Madrigal was born in Mexico City, grew up in rural Washington state, and now lives in Oakland. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, where he co-founded The COVID Tracking Project. His book, The Pacific Circuit, was released in March 2025; he is also the author of Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology. He has been a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s School of Information and Center for the Study of Technology, Science, and Medicine, as well as an affiliate with Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. He is the proprietor of the Oakland Garden Club, a newsletter for people who like to think about plants.
Celebrity Hosts
Annie Barrows
Annie Barrows spent most of her childhood at the library; when she wouldn’t leave, they hired her to shelve books at the age of 12. She is the New York Times-bestselling author of books for both children and adults, including the Ivy and Bean series and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, both of which became feature films by Netflix. Other works for kids include the recent series The Best of Iggy; mid-grade novel The Magic Half; young-adult novel Nothing; and her newest experiment, a picture book entitled Like. Her second novel for adults, The Truth According to Us, was also a national bestseller.
Erwin Chemerinsky
Erwin Chemerinsky became dean of the Berkeley Law and the Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law at UC Berkeley in 2017. He is the author of 19 books on constitutional law, criminal procedure, and federal jurisdiction. His most recent are No Democracy Lasts Forever (published in 2025), Worse than Nothing: The Dangerous Fallacy of Originalism, and Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights. He was the founding dean at UC Irvine School of Law and previously on the faculty at Duke, USC, and DePaul University. In 2024 National Jurist magazine named him the most influential person in legal education in the U.S., an honor he has been awarded multiple times.
Glynn Washington
Glynn Washington is the host and founder of the public radio show and podcast Snap Judgment, recently named one of Time magazine’s 100 Best Podcasts of All Time. Glynn launched the show after winning the Public Radio Talent Quest, a nationwide search conducted by PRX and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Now broadcast on more than 400 public radio stations, Snap’s storytelling reaches more than a million listeners every week. Glynn also created Spooked, the hit supernatural podcast that brings tales of the inexplicable to life. Before founding Snap Studios, he worked as an educator, diplomat, community activist, actor, political strategist, fist-shaker, mountain-hollerer, and foot-stomper. He thinks his stories are best served with cocktails.
Honored Authors
Andrew Alden
Andrew Alden is a geologist and geoscience writer who has worked for the U.S. Geological Survey and reported for KQED and Bay Nature. His blog, Oakland Geology, has documented the city’s wealth of natural features since 2007. Long fascinated with rocks and landscapes, he found inspiration for his book, Deep Oakland: How Geology Shaped a City, in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which, he writes, “ripped the city open and revealed to us its heart and character.” His writing promotes awareness for what he calls the deep present: the ancient underpinnings that form the setting — and govern the long-term prospects — of modern-day daily life.
Mac Barnett
Mac Barnett is the ninth U.S. National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, appointed by the Library of Congress and Every Child a Reader. He is a New York Times bestselling author of stories for children and the writer, with Jon Klassen, of Looking at Picture Books, a newsletter for adults. His latest book is Twenty Questions, for children ages 4 to 8. Mac’s work has been translated into more than 30 languages and has won two Caldecott Honors, three New York Times/New York Public Library Best Illustrated Awards, three E. B. White Read Aloud Awards, the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, and honors from around the world. He is co-creator of Shape Island, a stop-motion animated series on Apple TV+.
Elaine Castillo
Named one of “30 of the Planet’s Most Exciting Young People” by the Financial Times in 2019, Elaine Castillo is the author of the 2025 novel Moderation, about a real romance in a virtual workplace. Her debut novel, America Is Not the Heart, was a finalist for numerous prizes, including the Elle Big Book Award, the Center for Fiction Prize, and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. It was also named a best book of 2018 by NPR, Real Simple, Lit Hub, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Post, Kirkus Reviews, and the New York Public Library. She is a graduate of UC Berkeley and received an M.A. in creative and life writing from Goldsmiths, University of London.
Mike Alvarez Cohen
Mike Alvarez Cohen is the author of Startup Campus: How UC Berkeley Became an Unexpected Leader in Entrepreneurship and Startups. The project arose from his decades-long role as the campus’s director of innovation ecosystem development; it also leveraged Mike’s hobby writing the speculative fiction series, First Contact Last Resort (under the pen name Singularitive Ranch), which draws on his collaborations to commercialize world-changing technologies, such as Nobel-Prize-winning CRISPR gene editing. He is the recipient of three Berkeley Chancellor’s Outstanding Staff Awards and the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce Visionary Award for co-founding the SkyDeck startup accelerator, the Berkeley Startup Cluster, and Peak Democracy Inc., which provides an online platform for government agencies to engage with community members.
Tara Dorabji
Tara Dorabji is the author of the multi-generational novel Call Her Freedom, winner of the Simon & Schuster Books Like Us first novel contest. She is the daughter of Parsi-Indian and German-Italian migrants. She has spoken locally and internationally on cultural strategy, storytelling, and civic media, and she has facilitated workshops on the role of culture in accelerating systems change. Her documentary film series on human rights defenders in Kashmir won awards at more than a dozen film festivals in Asia and the U.S. Her work has appeared in Al Jazeera, The Chicago Quarterly, People.com, and Huizache, as well as in the anthologies Good Girls Marry Doctors and All the Women in My Family Sing.
Aisha Harris
Aisha Harris is the author of the essay collection Wannabe: Reckonings with the Pop Culture That Shapes Me and co-host of the NPR podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour. She previously covered arts and culture for the New York Times and Slate. She is a connoisseur of pop culture — from old movies and TV to viral memes, musical theater, 1990s R&B, and more. She’s been a commentator on docuseries from Netflix and CNN, as well as on PBS, MSNBC, and the BBC. She’s been a speaker at the Sundance Film Festival, SXSW, Tribeca Film Festival, and San Diego Comic-Con. A native of Connecticut, she earned her B.A. in theatre from Northwestern University and M.A. in cinema studies from New York University.
Nat Harry
Nat Harry is a cocktail and spirits professional with more than 20 years of experience in the beverage industry. Nat fell in love with artisan spirits while running a farm-to-table bar program at Berkeley’s Revival Bar & Kitchen, and they have received accolades including the East Bay Express award for Best Bartender in the East Bay. They have served as a judge for the San Francisco World Spirits Competition since 2020. Nat’s debut book, Spirits Distilled: A Guide to the Ingredients Behind a Better Bottle, explores the world of spirits from the ground up, focusing on the raw ingredients that make up our favorite drinks.
Jon Hickey
Jon Hickey earned his MFA at Cornell University and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. His short stories have appeared widely, and his novel, Big Chief, published last April, was named a Most Anticipated Book of 2025 by the Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, and LitHub. He has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and he is an enrolled member of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians.
Carolina Ixta
An Oakland-based daughter of Mexican immigrants, Carolina Ixta received her B.A. in creative writing and Spanish language and literature at UC Santa Cruz and earned her master’s degree in education at UC Berkeley. Her debut novel, Shut Up, This Is Serious, was a Morris Award finalist, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, and the winner of the Pura Belpré Award, presented by divisions and affiliates of the American Library Association to a writer and illustrator whose work best portrays, affirms, and celebrates the Latino/Latina cultural experience in a work of literature for children and youth. Few Blue Skies, her sophomore novel, will be published in February 2026.
Dion Lim
Dion Lim is an Emmy Award–winning journalist and author of the forthcoming book Amplify! My Fight for Asian America. For nearly two decades, she was a TV news anchor, making history as the first Asian American woman anchor at stations in Kansas City, Charlotte, Tampa Bay, and San Francisco. Her reporting on racism and violence against Asian Americans during the COVID pandemic was featured on Good Morning America, 20/20, Nightline, ABC News Live, and elsewhere. It earned her an invitation to the White House in 2022 for the first AAPI Heritage Month Celebration. She was commended by the California legislature and city of San Francisco and was named one of Gold House’s 100 most impactful Asian Pacific leaders.
Kathryn Ma
Kathryn Ma is the author of the novel The Chinese Groove, winner of the California Book Award Silver Medal for Fiction and the 2024 selection for One City One Book by the San Francisco Public Library. It was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a People Magazine Best Book, and a Washington Post Best Audiobook. Her work includes the novel The Year She Left Us and the short story collection All That Work and Still No Boys, winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award. She earned her B.A. and M.A. in history from Stanford, and a J.D. from UC Berkeley; she practiced law before becoming a writer. She has taught creative writing at several universities.
Leila Mottley
Leila Mottley is the award-winning author of the novels The Girls Who Grew Big, spotlighting the cultural scrutiny of teen mothers, and Nightcrawling, an Oprah’s Book Club pick and New York Times bestseller, and of the poetry collection woke up no light. Born and raised in Oakland, where she continues to live, she was the 2018 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate. Her writing has been published in Oprah Daily, Condé Nast Traveler, and the New York Times, and she has been featured on NPR, CBS Mornings, Late Night with Seth Meyers, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, and more.
Héctor Muñoz-Guzmán
A first-generation Chicano painter and illustrator, Héctor Muñoz-Guzmán is the author of Brown Eyes from Russell Street, tracing his artistic practice during a transformative period in his life. His art is rooted in the stories of working-class Mexican American communities, particularly in the Bay Area. Beginning with intimate collages of family photographs, Mesoamerican imagery, and found materials, he builds complex compositions that layer memory, heritage, and place. After completing his foundation year at Parsons School of Design and studying painting at Rhode Island School of Design, he paused his formal education due to a bipolar diagnosis and financial hardship, but he continued to develop his craft. In 2024, he entered the MFA program at UC Berkeley.
Tu David Phu
Chef Tu David Phu, chef-partner at GiGi’s and a San Francisco Chronicle Rising Star Chef, works at the nexus of heritage, equity, and enterprise. Raised in Oakland by refugee parents from Phú Quốc, Vietnam, where fish sauce is identity, he trained in Michelin-starred kitchens before finding his voice cooking from memory. His Emmy-nominated PBS documentary Bloodline and cookbook The Memory of Taste explore food as lineage and identity. His work spans seafood sustainability, Japanese knife-making with Seisuke Knife, nutrition reform with Eat Real (which offers a certification program and advocacy for healthy food for children), and food equity at San Quentin Rehabilitation Center.
Nigel Poor
Nigel Poor is an artist and podcast host whose work explores how people leave behind evidence of their existence. In 2011 she became a volunteer teacher for Mount Tamalpais College (formerly the Prison University Project) at San Quentin Rehabilitation Center. In 2017 she co-founded the prison-based podcast Ear Hustle, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and two-time Peabody Award nominee. She is the author of The San Quentin Project and co-author of This Is Ear Hustle: Unflinching Stories of Everyday Prison Life, which was the San Francisco Public Library’s One City One Book selection in 2022. Her work as a visual artist has been exhibited internationally and is in museum collections across the country. Nigel is a professor of photography at California State University, Sacramento.
john a. powell
john a. powell is director of the Othering and Belonging Institute and professor of law, African American studies, and ethnic studies at UC Berkeley. He previously directed institutes on race, ethnicity, and poverty at the Ohio State University and the University of Minnesota, and he is the former National Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union. He led the development of an “opportunity-based” model that connects affordable housing to education, health, health care, and employment, and he is well-known for his work developing the frameworks of “targeted universalism” and “othering and belonging” to effect equity-based interventions. His latest books are Belonging Without Othering: How We Save Ourselves and the World and The Power of Bridging: How to Build a World Where We All Belong.
Rachel Richardson
Rachel Richardson is the author of Smother and two earlier poetry collections, Copperhead and Hundred-Year Wave. She is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow and National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, and she serves on the board of The Frost Place, a center for poetry and the arts based at Robert Frost’s former farmhouse in Franconia, New Hampshire. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, the New York Times, The Yale Review, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. In 2024 she was named an inaugural Artists-in-Fire Fellow through the Confluence Lab — which fosters interdisciplinary research projects on environmental issues — and she is now trained as an FFT2 wildland firefighter. She is co-founder of the community writing center Left Margin LIT in Berkeley, where she teaches.
Samantha Schoech
Samantha Schoech’s debut collection of stories, My Mother’s Boyfriends, came out in January 2025. Her writing has appeared in The Sun, Seventeen, The Gettysburg Review, the New York Times, and many other publications. She earned her M.A. in English from UC Davis and has been awarded many residencies, a Sustainable Arts Foundation grant, and the Erma Bombeck Humorist-in-Residence Award. She is also a member of The Writers Grotto. She is the founding director of Independent Bookstore Day, co-founder of The Rowland Writers Retreat, a former book section editor for the San Francisco Chronicle, a current staff writer for the New York Times Wirecutter, and the Bay Area producer of the live storytelling event, Generation Women.
Steve Wasserman
Steve Wasserman is the publisher of Heyday and the author of Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It’s a Lie: A Memoir in Essays. A graduate of UC Berkeley, he has a degree in criminology. He is a former deputy editor of the Los Angeles Times op-ed page and opinion section; editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review; editorial director of New Republic Books; publisher and editorial director of Hill & Wang and the Noonday Press at Farrar, Straus & Giroux; editorial director of Times Books at Random House; and editor at large for Yale University Press. A former partner of Kneerim & Williams Literary Agency, he has represented many authors, including Christopher Hitchens, Linda Ronstadt, Robert Scheer, and David Thomson.
Earlonne Woods
Earlonne Woods was born and raised in South Central Los Angeles. In 1997, he was sentenced to 31 years to life in prison. While incarcerated, he received his GED, attended community college, and completed many vocational programs. He also founded CHOOSE1, which aims to repeal California’s Three Strikes Law, the statute under which he was sentenced. In 2017 he co-founded the prison-based podcast Ear Hustle, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and two-time Peabody Award nominee. In November 2018, California Governor Jerry Brown commuted Earlonne’s sentence. Upon his release, he was hired by PRX as a full-time producer and co-host for Ear Hustle. He is co-author of This Is Ear Hustle: Unflinching Stories of Everyday Prison Life, which was the San Francisco Public Library’s One City One Book selection in 2022.
Author Presenters
Vanessa Hua
As a child, Vanessa Hua felt like she’d “won the jackpot” when she came home from the library with a stack of books. She is the author of the national bestseller A River of Stars and of Deceit and Other Possibilities, a New York Times “Editors’ Choice” selection and winner of the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. Her book, Forbidden City, was on the Washington Post list of best books of 2022 and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. A National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, her work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. Previously, she was an award-winning columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Her new novel, Coyoteland, and a memoir, Uprooted, are 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.
2026 Sponsors
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