Date and Time
- Sunday, Oct 4, 2026 11am - 4pm
Location
Yerba Buena Gardens
750 Howard St
Details
In a city built on tall tales, hard-boiled prose, revelatory memoirs, and penetrating reportage, Litquake is the soul of San Francisco’s cultural life. The region’s largest literary festival returns in 2025, celebrating the exuberantly creative literary community from throughout the Bay Area and beyond. Come explore a curated spread of small presses and literary magazines at the Litquake Book Fair in Yerba Buena Gardens. Browse the best in local literature set to a day of poetry readings from Litquake Out Loud. Highlighting the Bay Area’s BIPOC & LGBTQ+ writers and thought leaders, Litquake continues to elevate underrepresented voices so that all people are included in creating and imbuing the Bay Area’s historic, thriving arts scene.
Schedule:
#1- Hands in the Soil, Legs on the Pole: Queerness in the Material Realm
Sunday October 4, 2026 11:00am - 12:00pm
How is a tree like a stripper pole? Where do the poetics of physicality and ecology overlap? As digital spaces collapse into slop and surveillance, how can queer communities in the material world dig and twerk toward pleasure and liberation? Here, QTBIPOC writers Brandon Logans, Kevin Madrigal Galindo, May-Li Khoe, and Nnenna Loveth explore the sensuality, tenderness, and resilience of both body and earth. These landworkers, dancers, and poets discuss how queerness informs and supports their relationship to tangible space, natural environs, and embodied movement. Curated by Mukethe Kawinzi.
#2-Small Press Book Fair
Sunday October 4, 2026 11:00am - 4:00pm
Join a curated spread of our favorite small presses and literary magazines for Litquake’s Small Press Book Fair in Yerba Buena Gardens! Browse the best in local literature set to a day of poetry readings from Litquake Out Loud.
#3- Fluent in Rebirth: Trans and Non-Binary Incantations
Sunday October 4, 2026 12:30pm - 1:30pm
If you’re looking for architects to dream up a new world, why not start with the folks who have already built one? As trans and gender non-confirming people, we are skilled at identifying what is meant to stifle and cage us, as well as envisioning what else is possible when we rage towards liberation. Trans people teach us what it means to transform the physical conditions of our world and show us what’s possible when our imaginations are freest and at their most feral. These Bay Area trans and non-binary artists will share work resisting erasure and conjuring prayers for the world we’re collectively building. Featuring Isa Borgeson, Mason J, Trinh Lê, and Reggie Edmonds-Vazquez. Curated by Zara Jamshed.
#4-Queer Trans Black & Indigenous Poetics: We Have Always Paved Our Own Ways
Sunday October 4, 2026 2:00pm - 3:00pm
Queer trans Black and Indigenous people have always paved our own ways of existing in the world, formed our own networks of care, and resisted dominant systems of power to preserve culture, traditions, and our ways of life. This reading will gather queer and trans Black and Indigenous poets Aleah Bradshaw, Ju(mia), and Zander Moreno Lozano to explore relation to the body, land, lineage, resistance, and the alternative futures we are actively building. Please join us for an afternoon of shared joy, righteous wordsmithing, and compelling truth. Curated by Vania Luna Gutierrez.
