Celebration of writers turns page to YouTube
The names, pages and presentations may have changed, but the Bay Area Book Festival is carrying on through a robust YouTube series after its annual symposium was upended by the coronavirus.
The mostly outdoor Berkeley celebration of the written word, sponsored by The Chronicle, draws around 25,000 attendees each year but was nixed in March over fears of spreading the coronavirus. That same week, Alameda County officials joined five other Bay Area municipalities in issuing a shelterin place order, followed by statewide restrictions.
“We had a choice: We could just walk away from it with what money we had left in the bank, or we could try to continue on with what the festival is about,” said Cherilyn Parsons, festival director. “It’s really known across the country and across the world as a book festival with a focus on social justice issues, and we wanted to keep that going.”
The new #Unbound version is a series of live and prerecorded panel discussions on the festival’s YouTube channel, launching the weekend of FridaySunday, May 13. All are free to watch, with the exception of a Saturday night fundraiser, intended to offset this year’s $300,000 in losses so that a future festival can be staged.
The event’s previous incarnation was slated to feature luminaries such as cultural historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., known for writing and producing PBS documentaries, as well as popular Bay Area author Rebecca Solnit and humorist Adam Mansbach.
Parsons’ team spent the past week amping up the bookshelf star power into their reboot. The Saturday night fundraiser spotlights an exchange among Pulitzer Prizewinning writers Anthony
Doerr and Viet Thanh Nguyen and R.O. Kwon, author of the bestselling novel “The Incendiaries.” The three will explore stepping around the emotional land mines of life during the pandemic.
Other virtual events have their own draws, most notably Carol Anderson, author of “White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide.” On Netflix documentaries and “The Daily Show With Trevor Noah,” Anderson’s probing words on inequity and injustice have garnered a national following. She is scheduled to be interviewed by Rep. Barbara Lee, DOakland, about the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling to gut the Voting Rights Act.
“That decision let the dogs out, because within hours, Texas was enacting a racist voter ID law, a term I don’t use lightly,” Anderson told The Chronicle. “My talk will really focus on the various methods of voter suppression, and the fog and the lies around claiming those methods protect democracy. In truth, they’re undermining democracy because they block American citizens from the ballot box.”
For Anderson, the festival’s timing offers a disturbing window into stakes around free and fair elections. She lives in Georgia, where Republican Gov. Brian Kemp has ended the statewide shutdown that slowed the spread of the coronavirus. Alluding to claims that purging voter rolls handed Kemp the governorship over former Georgia Democratic state Rep. Stacey Abrams, Anderson added, “This isn’t some esoteric thing: This is about how we live — and how we die.”
Protecting voter rights was a major theme of the original festival and has carried on into #Unbound’s program. Anderson’s scheduled appearance is
one of six discussions on keeping democracy functioning. Another features Amber McReynolds, a former Colorado elections official and coauthor of “When Women Vote,” and New York Times editorial board member Jesse Wegman, author of “Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College.” McReynolds and Wegman plan to examine how to improve voting access through the prism of the women’s suffrage movement.
“We’ll be talking about how to address the barriers that voters are facing in 2020, but also how to make a more resilient system overall, because this pandemic has really exposed some vulnerabilities,” McReynolds said in a phone call.
Other virtual events will cover health topics such as endoflife planning and wider literary questions around sex, art and power.
The festival isn’t the only parcel of California’s literary landscape cracked by COVID-19. The Los Angeles Times’ Festival of Books, among the largest author events on the West Coast, was pushed from spring to early October, in hopes it can move forward. San Francisco’s annual LitQuake, a book lover’s festival that includes a pub crawl, is still tentatively planned for the same month.