Litquake, San Francisco’s literary festival, returns this year with two weeks of events across the city.
The festival will begin with an opening party at The Dairy, a large events space in the Sports Basement Store in the Presidio, on Oct. 6 and conclude on Oct. 22 with the highly anticipated annual Lit Crawl, where authors and fans gather at bars, bookstores, barbershops and laundromats in the Mission District.
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“Litquake’s audience is eager to get back to live events!”, said festival cofounders Jack Boulware and Jane Ganahl. Litquake went completely virtual in 2020 and included partial virtual programming in 2021.
“We’re counting on the great October weather and continuing pandemic abatement to give them what they want: close to 100 events in two-plus weeks of programming, from genre to poetry to nonfiction to storytelling,” said the cofounders, who established the festival in 1999 to encourage a sense of literary community and create a forum for writing in the Bay Area.
Highlights of this year’s festival include “Kidquake” on Oct. 7 with presentations by children’s authors, meet-and-greets with writers and workshops for K-5 students and teachers. Over the years, the festival has distributed 12,000 free books to San Francisco schoolchildren and plans to continue the practice this year.
On the same day, Peruvian American author Silvia Vasquez-Lavado, the first openly gay woman to complete the Seven Summits mountaineering challenge, will talk about her new book ,“In the Shadow of the Mountain,” at the Verdi Club in San Francisco.
The festival will also host “Craft and the Creative Life,” on Oct. 8 and 9, a series of panels, talks and conversations with advice on how to build your own small press, find a literary community and write a novel with authors Elaine Castillo, Daniel Handler and Andrew Sean Greer.
Other events will be held venues such as the Museum of the African Diaspora, Grace Cathedral and the Italian Cultural Institute in San Francisco and Throckmorton Theatre in Mill Valley. The book launch of San Francisco-based author K. M. Soehnlein’s new novel, “Army of Lovers,” takes place at Strut, a health, wellness and community center in the Castro District run by the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. The book is a fictional account of Soehnlein’s years as a member of the AIDS activist group ACT UP in New York.
Most events at Litquake are free. Tickets for paid events can be purchased at https://www.litquake.org/. The full schedule of the festival will be published on the festival website Sept. 6.