Authors Dinner 2027
2027 Honorees
Bestselling novelists, two Pulitzer Prize winners, a popular science guru, an acclaimed Afro-Latin chef, a scholar of the science of happiness, and a gem of Bay Area public radio — these are among the honored authors at the Foundation’s 24th Annual Authors Dinner, set for Sunday, February 7, 2027. The list also includes storytellers, environmentalists, activists, technology watchers, a playwright-turned-novelist, and two authors who are former public librarians. Scroll down to read about this fascinating group and the Foundation’s sponsors for the dinner honoring their work.
Meet Our Emcee
Anna Sale
Anna Sale is a journalist, a National Geographic Explorer, and the author of Let’s Talk About Hard Things. She created and hosts Death, Sex & Money, the award-winning interview podcast from Slate, and People Trying, a YouTube series about people working close to water, land, and nature as we all adapt to change. Before launching her podcast, she covered politics through two presidential campaigns and in three statehouses. She grew up in West Virginia and is now raising two daughters in Berkeley with her husband, Arthur, a professor of wildlife ecology at UC Berkeley.
Meet Our Emcee
Anna Sale
Anna Sale is a journalist, a National Geographic Explorer, and the author of Let’s Talk About Hard Things. She created and hosts Death, Sex & Money, the award-winning interview podcast from Slate, and People Trying, a YouTube series about people working close to water, land, and nature as we all adapt to change. Before launching her podcast, she covered politics through two presidential campaigns and in three statehouses. She grew up in West Virginia and is now raising two daughters in Berkeley with her husband, Arthur, a professor of wildlife ecology at UC Berkeley.
Honored Authors
Chloe Benjamin
Originally from San Francisco, Chloe Benjamin is the author of three novels that have been translated into more than 30 languages. Her latest book, Under Story, was a Good Morning America Book Club pick, as well as an Indie Next selection, a Barnes & Noble Book Club pick, and an Amazon Editors’ selection. Her previous books were also award-winners: The Immortalists, a New York Times bestseller, was named a best book of 2018 by NPR, the Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, and others; The Anatomy of Dreams received the Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award and was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.
André Carothers
An activist, writer, and organizer, André Carothers has engaged in campaigns and protests on issues of climate, human rights, environmental protection, and nuclear disarmament for more than four decades. He worked for Greenpeace USA for 13 years and was part of the team that opened the first Greenpeace office in Russia. With Annie Leonard, he is the author of Protest: Respect it, Defend it, Use it, a tribute to and defense of peaceful protest. He co-founded the Rockwood Leadership Institute, a training organization for activists; coaches leaders in the social change sector; and has been an advisor and board member for many environmental and other organizations.
Caleb Dardick
Caleb Dardick is the author of The Adventures of Superfreak: My Childhood on the Hippie Trail, a memoir of his family’s 1970 journey from Europe to India in search of a different way of life. That search brought them to Northern California’s back-to-the-land movement, where Caleb grew up in a politically active community. Growing up with disabled parents grounded his commitment to disability rights and access. His experiences shaped a career in community engagement, including at the Berkeley Mayor’s Office, UC Berkeley, and the Ed Roberts Campus (the noted hub for independent living and disability organizations), followed by public service and environmental leadership in Nevada County.
Gil Durán
Journalist Gil Durán began his career at the San Jose Mercury News before pivoting to politics and a decade as an advisor to politicians including Jerry Brown, Dianne Feinstein, and Kamala Harris. In 2018, he returned to journalism as California opinion editor of the Sacramento Bee and later editorial page editor of the San Francisco Examiner. Now an independent journalist, he publishes The Nerd Reich newsletter, focused on extremist tech politics. His first book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, debuted at #3 on the New York Times best-seller list. His writing has appeared in The New Republic, the Guardian, and the New York Times.
Portia Elan
Homebound is Portia Elan’s first novel, what her publisher calls a “genre-bending debut” that spans 1983 to 2586, exploring grief, loss and love. Her lyrical writing is often inspired by poetry, she says. She studied history at Stanford University and earned an MFA from the University of Victoria, British Columbia. Returning to California, she has worked as a teacher and public librarian. A former Lambda Literary Fellow, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her wife and an abundance of cats.
Nelson German
Nelson German is a leading voice in Afro-Latin cuisine and the author of Caribbean Cocktails: Drinks and Bites from the Afro-Latino Diaspora, his first book. He is Executive Chef and owner of Oakland’s Sobre Mesa and alaMar Dominican Kitchen & Bar, and he is Executive Chef and partner at Meski, San Francisco’s Afro-Ethiopian-Latin restaurant co-founded by Draymond Green and Guma Fassil. A proud Dominican-American, he was one of Time magazine’s 2026 Latino Leaders in the U.S. He competed on Top Chef season 18 and is a James Beard Foundation-recognized chef. At the heart of his work is a belief that food and drink are about connecting people through culture, storytelling, hospitality, and the experience of gathering around the table.
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. Her debut narrative nonfiction, Uprooted, is forthcoming. 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.
Shuka Kalantari
Bay Area journalist Shuka Kalantari is the executive producer of the award-winning podcast The Science of Happiness at UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center. She is also a co-author of The Science of Happiness Workbook: 10 Practices for a Meaningful Life, a practical, research-based guide to building a more meaningful life and stronger relationships. Her work has appeared on NPR, The World from PRX, WNYC’s The Takeaway, WHYY’s The Pulse, KQED, HuffPost, VICE, and other outlets.
Susanna Kwan
Susanna Kwan is an artist and writer from San Francisco. Her first novel, Awake in the Floating City, won the California Book Award for First Fiction and an Asian Pacific American Award for Literature. The book was also a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Climate Fiction Prize. Her work has been supported by fellowships from Kundiman, Storyknife, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, and Vanderbilt University. She has taught at Vanderbilt and the Tennessee Department of Correction, and she currently teaches writing with the writers’ group The Dream Side. As a teacher she strives to help writing students “cultivate their attention to [an] unstable world, explore interconnectedness, and move toward mystery.”
Dorothy Lazard
Dorothy Lazard is a writer, public historian, and retired librarian. As head librarian of the Oakland Public Library’s Oakland History Center, she encouraged people of all ages and backgrounds to explore local history. For her work with the public, Dorothy received the 2023 Oscar Lewis Award in Western History from the Book Club of California. Her latest book is Behind the Desk at the Main: A Librarian’s Memoir. Her first book, What You Don’t Know Will Make a Whole New World: A Memoir, published in 2023, was shortlisted for a Northern California Book Award.
Annie Leonard
A lifelong activist, Annie Leonard spent 17 years with Greenpeace USA, including as its executive director from 2014-23. She co-launched the Jane Fonda Climate PAC and the Committee for the First Amendment, and she speaks and writes widely on issues of pollution, waste, consumerism, climate, democracy, and activism. She is the creator of The Story of Stuff, an animated film, book, and organization about the lifecycle of material goods. She was named a Time magazine “Hero of the Environment” in 2008. Her most recent book, written with André Carothers, is Protest: Respect it, Defend it, Use it, a tribute to and defense of peaceful protest.
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.
Mary Roach
The author of the New York Times bestsellers Stiff, Spook, Bonk, Gulp, Grunt, Fuzz, and Packing for Mars, Mary Roach’s new book is Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy. She has written for National Geographic, Wired, and the New York Times Magazine, among others, and her TED talk made the TED 20 Most Watched list. She has been a guest editor for Best American Science and Nature Writing, a finalist for the Royal Society’s Winton Prize, and a winner of the American Engineering Societies’ journalism award, in a category for which, to be honest, she was the sole entrant.
Jason Roberts
Jason Roberts’ most recent book, Every Living Thing, is the story of two men’s 18th-century quest to identify and describe all life on Earth. It was awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for biography, as well as the PEN America/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing award. He describes himself as a “child of the counterculture,” who was a day-laborer, dishwasher, and disk jockey before teaching himself to program, starting a tech company, and eventually coming back to writing. His previous book, A Sense of the World, was a national bestseller, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and long-listed for the international Guardian First Book Award.
Kate Schatz
Kate Schatz is a feminist author, writing teacher, and public speaker. She’s the New York Times bestselling author of the “Rad Women” book series; the novel Where the Girls Were; the 33⅓ book Rid of Me: A Story; and Do the Work: An Anti-Racist Activity Book, co-written with W. Kamau Bell. She has been published widely and has appeared on MSNBC, NPR, and Conan O’Brien’s show, among other outlets. In all she does, she is committed to sharing radical histories that shine light on marginalized people, including “the people of color, the immigrants, the queers, the punks, the weirdos, the artists, the workers, and the women.”
Betty Shamieh
Betty Shamieh is a Palestinian American writer. Her debut novel, Too Soon, was named one of the Best Books of 2025 by The New Yorker and Oprah Daily. It was selected as a People magazine Book of the Month and an NPR Book of the Day. The book is the winner of a Golden Poppy Award, a finalist for a California Book Award, an Indie Next Pick, and a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. She is the author of 16 plays; her six New York play productions include the off-Broadway premieres of Roar and Malvolio, a sequel to Twelfth Night, which were both New York Times Critics Picks.
Juliana Spahr
A poet and scholar, Juliana Spahr’s most recent book of poetry, Arts Poeticas, was awarded a 2026 Pulitzer Prize. She is professor of English at Mills College/Northeastern University, where her work focuses on 20th-century and contemporary American literature and its relation to the state and social movements. She studies how institutional forces like the FBI, CIA, State Department, and private philanthropy shape U.S. literary production. Her most recent book, Crowd Control, co-written with Claire Grossman and Stephanie Young, investigates how American literary funding and recognition have historically responded to Black social resistance and mass protest.
Jill Suttie
Jill Suttie is a freelance journalist and a staff writer and contributing editor for Greater Good, an award-winning online magazine published by UC Berkeley. She is also a co-author of The Science of Happiness Workbook: 10 Practices for a Meaningful Life, a practical, research-based guide to cultivating greater well-being and stronger relationships for everyone. Her writing has appeared in several publications, including the Washington Post, Yes! magazine, Mindful, and more. Suttle is also a musician with two albums of original songs.
Ayelet Waldman
Ayelet Waldman’s most recent novel is A Perfect Hand, Love and Treasure. She is also the New York Times best-selling author of the novels Red Hook Road, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, and Daughter’s Keeper, as well as of the nonfiction books A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life and Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace. She is the editor of Fight of the Century: Writers Reflect on 100 Years of Landmark ACLU Cases, as well as other collections focused on social issues and social justice. She co-created Netflix’s Unbelievable, for which she won a Peabody Award, PEN award, and was nominated for an Emmy.
Gary Wolf
A former contributing editor at Wired and executive editor of Wired Digital, Gary Wolf is the co-founder of the Quantified Self movement. His latest book, The Quantified Self: Learning to Observe, helps us understand how to use personal data and numbers to expand our self-awareness. His previous books include Wired — A Romance and Dumb Money. He is a Kavli Science Journalism Award winner and former Knight Fellow at Stanford University. His work has appeared in The Best American Science Writing and The Best American Science and Nature Writing. He is currently the director of the Article 27 Foundation, a nonprofit whose mission is to support participation in science.
Nicole Wong
Nicole Wong became immersed in mahjong as a way of preserving her Chinese-New Zealand family history. She is the author of Mahjong: House Rules from Across the Asian Diaspora and the upcoming Mahjong: A Player’s Guide and children’s board book Mahjong Night! She is the founder of The Mahjong Project, a storytelling initiative to document traditions, house rules, and stories about mahjong from across the Asian diaspora, while spreading the joy of playing through events and community partnerships. Her work has been featured in outlets such as Vogue, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, PBS New Hour, and NPR’s All Things Considered, Here and Now, and Code Switch.
Thank You! 2026 Sponsors
Luminary
Literary Lions
Laureates
Belletrists
Bibliophiles
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