Lit Crawl Sebastopol: Migration, Persistence, and History

Migration, Persistence, and History: Writing into the Known and Unknown

We are a mixture of fiction and non-fiction. We are all authors who are above 50 years old with enormous decades-long commitment to writing practice and craft. We have all met through a long, dedicated writing practice in a weekly disciplined community in a Book Writing World Craft Class led by the brilliant teacher, Elizabeth Stark Powers (who lives in Sebastopol), for over ten years. As authors above a certain age and being mostly women, this panel represents a unique community of writers, who are eager to share their most current writing work-in-progress. We are ready to come to Sebastopol!

Speakers

Devi S. Laskar
Devi S. Laskar is a poet, novelist, photographer, former newspaper reporter and lifelong TarHeel. She is the author of the award-winning The Atlas of Reds and Blues, which was named by The Washington Post as one of the 50 best books of 2019. Her second novel, Circa, was published in 2022 by Mariner Books and selected as a Goop Book Club pick. Her third novel, Midnight, At The War will be published by Mariner Books next year. She holds degrees from UNC - Chapel Hill, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Columbia University. She now lives in Northern California with her family.

Vijaya Nagarajan
Vijaya Nagarajan, a Professor of Theology/Religious Studies and Environmental Studies at the University of San Francisco, is the author of the ground-breaking book: Feeding A Thousand Souls: Women, Ritual, and Ecology in India (Oxford University Press, 2019), a criss-crossing of art history, anthropology, ecology, poetry, mathematics, and design in India. She holds several degrees from UC Berkeley. Mentioned and quoted in the NYT, she has won numerous national fellowships including the Fulbright Fellowship, the Harvard University’s Women in Religion Fellowship, as well as the Mesa Refuge Environmental Writing Fellowship (1998, 2023) and the Djerrassi Writing Fellowship. She is currently working on a braided double mother-daughter memoir, Amma and I, tying closely themes of migration, faith, and climate. We are all a part of the Book Writing World Tuesday Craft Writing Class in Berkeley.

Christine O'Brien
Christine O’Brien, daughter of Academy, Emmy, and Golden Globe-winning movie and television producer, Edgar Jay Scherick, earned a BA in English at UC Berkeley and holds a Double MFA from Saint Mary’s College of California in Nonfiction and Fiction, where she was awarded the Saint Mary’s Agnes Butler Scholarship for Literary Excellence. Her first book, Crave: A Memoir of Food and Longing, was selected for Lit Hub’s 2018 “Ten Memoirs to Look Forward to This Season” and featured on The Dr. Oz Show. Booklistdescribed Crave as “a page-turner” and “compelling,” while Publishers Weekly characterized it as “emotionally fraught.” The New York Times hailed it as “a 20th Century fairy tale.” She is currently a part-time lecturer in the English Composition Department at Saint Mary’s College and lives in Walnut Creek, California, with her husband, two children, and various beloved pets.

Susan Sasson
Susan Sasson’s novel, The Mountains at their Back, builds upon the stories told by her Jewish-Kurdish family who fled Iran at the onset of the Islamic Revolution. A long-time member of the Book Writing World, she holds an MFA from St Mary’s College of California. Robert Ward, hornist, has been a part of the Bay Area classical music scene since he joined the San Francisco Symphony in 1980 and he played in the inaugural concert for the opening of Davies Symphony Hall. He has written four novels: “The Halflife of Memory”, about an ancient cure for Alzheimer’s and its terrible cost; “Pages from the Center”, a modern-day murder mystery with its roots in the California Gold Rush; “Cornucopia”, about a musician who buys a magical horn and through its powers experiences the lives of its previous owners; and “Moving Day”, in which a young musician flees to New York in 1913 to escape his guilty past and in the process must discover whether past sins are irredeemable, what it means to be a man, and whether forgiveness is a prerequisite to love.

Robert Ward

(more info to come)

Lit Crawl Sebastopol features over 119 authors from around the Bay Area during its four hours of literary mayhem and will draw hundreds of readers, writers, and revelers to crawl through downtown Sebastopol, listening to readings and celebrating Sonoma County’s spirited and diverse literary community.

LitCrawl is FREE to all.