#grant-faulkner

#grant-faulkner

I didn't know who I was as a writer. I didn't know my voice or style. I was trying to be whatever writer I loved at the moment. You have to find authenticity, find your own voice. Marie's class gave me the ability to be a storyteller.

Karen Russell has built her literary reputation on stories that bend reality without losing emotional grounding. A Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Swamplandia!, Russell often blends the strange and the intimate, pairing mythic elements with sharp psychological detail.

The book's array of perspectives includes imaginative explorations of ancestry and belonging from Mei Chung and Katelyn Wong. Gupta and Paloma Francesca Carrubba explore the impacts of a racist and misogynistic external world on individual internal lives. McCulloch and Zofia Mosur do battle with existential dread using their own words. Ava Perez and Claribel Caamal Amodei write of the terror and trepidation of living under the threat of ICE.

It was the first Wednesday of December and the last One-Page Wednesday of 2025. Hosted by Portland novelist Emme Lund (The Boy with a Bird in His Chest) at the Literary Arts bookstore, the free monthly event is an open mic that functions more like a public writers' group. Students, aspiring writers, and National Book Award-winning authors hang out and read aloud one page from a work in progress.

Join us outside on YBCA's Third Street Courtyard for a poetry and spoken word reading by Kevin Dublin, Magick Altman and Tongo Eisen-Martin. Enjoy the performances designed to bring together intergenerational and diverse voices from the Bay. Included with gallery admission. Disclaimer: Please double check event information with the event organizer as events can be canceled, details can change after they are added to our calendar, and errors do occur. Address: 701 Mission St, San Francisco, CA

In these turbulent years, democracy was tested by war, pandemic, and violence driven by conflicts over race, immigration, and labor rights. In American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis, legendary historian Adam Hochschild brings this moment vividly to life, revealing both the repression that darkened the era and the Americans who struggled to repair a fractured nation.

The summer 2024 podcast series, Master: The Allegations Against Neil Gaiman, centered on the sexual assault and abuse allegedly committed by the Good Omens and Coraline author, 65, against multiple women. Other alleged victims leveled their own accusations in the wake of the early episodes, with eight women's claims published by Vulture in early 2025, at which point, Gaiman was dropped by his publisher, Dark Horse Comics.

A writer is a kind of magician. Their job is to create living, three-dimensional people out of the ordinary stuff of ink and paper. This is no easy task, because readers can't literally hear, touch, or observe a character. Everything that defines a human being in real life-the physical space they occupy, or how they smell, feel, and sound-is stripped away, replaced by description. But authors have one major, mystical advantage: They can show you what's happening inside of someone's brain.