Lit Crawl San Francisco 2026: Full Schedule

One of the most anticipated literary nights of the year, Lit Crawl San Francisco is a massive, one-night literary pub crawl through San Francisco’s Mission District on Saturday, October 25th from 5:00-9:00pm. Join us to cap off another great festival, and don’t miss out on the afterparty at Drawing Room Annex!

ATTENTION: We’ve turned off the My Schedule tool as Sched has changed its pay structure recently and it’s no longer feasible for us to use. No RSVPs are necessary, just show up! Seating + space are first come, first serve. Sorry for the confusion!

3:00pm PDT

Want to Read at Lit Crawl? A Pre-Crawl Tailgate

Saturday October 24, 2026 3:00pm - 4:00pm PDT

Page Street (297 Page St, San Francisco, CA 94102)

We'll open the doors at 2:45 pm to give you time to get a drink (wine, Prosecco, energy drinks) and get settled at a writing space.

At 3 pm, Page Street founder, Janis Cooke Newman, will announce the theme for our Phase One Lit Crawl event, Without a Net. (We're keeping the theme under wraps until then.)

Everyone will have 40 minutes to write 250 words (no more!) on our theme.

If you like what you've written, and want to read it at the Crawl, just drop your name into our sorting hat (bookish Happy Potter reference).

When the 40 minutes are up, we will randomly draw up to 20 names out of the hat to be our readers!

The event is free, but space is limited to 40 writers, so you do need to pre-register.

Please note, if you are chosen, you'll have to go directly from our location to the Drawing Room on Valencia Street so you'll be ready to read in Phase One of the Crawl at 5 pm.

Saturday October 24, 2026 3:00pm - 4:00pm PDT
Page Street (297 Page St, San Francisco, CA 94102)

TAILGATE

Genre erotica, fiction, memoir, poetry, women of a certain age, workshop, tailgate sponsor, open mic opportunity

5:00pm PDT

¡ChALE con eso!: Mujeres en Rebeldía (Women in Rebellion)

Saturday October 24, 2026 5:00pm - 6:00pm PDT

Adobe Books & Arts Cooperative, (3130 24th St, San Francisco, CA 94110)

What happens when women stop swallowing their words, their anger, their stories, their poems, and their truths? ¡ChALE con eso!: Mujeres en Rebeldía brings Bay Area writers to the mic for poetry, personal narrative, humor, memory, and a little literary desmadre. Come for community, let it out through call-and-response, and leave with a pocket-sized poem of rebellious inspiration.

Saturday October 24, 2026 5:00pm - 6:00pm PDT
Adobe Books & Arts Cooperative, (3130 24th St, San Francisco, CA 94110) 3130 24th St, San Francisco, CA 94110, USA

PHASE 1

Audience 18+
Genre poetry, latine readings, audience participation, memoir, humor, BIPOC

5:00pm PDT

Body Language

Saturday October 24, 2026 5:00pm - 6:00pm PDT

Teeth Bar SF (2323 Mission St, San Francisco, CA 94110)

Every body has a story to tell. Physically and figuratively, it holds our emotional truths, identity, fears, triumphs and losses. Through spoken word, poetry, fiction and essay, five writers show how a body can change to please others, how it feels to be severed by ancestral trauma, what it means to be lucky after an amputation, and how the body is a site of memory and inheritance. In holding it all together, the body becomes stronger, more resilient and a champion of change.

Saturday October 24, 2026 5:00pm - 6:00pm PDT
Teeth Bar SF (2323 Mission St, San Francisco, CA 94110) 2323 Mission St, San Francisco, CA 94110, USA

PHASE 1

Genre poetry, fiction, memoir

5:00pm PDT

Mommy Issues

Saturday October 24, 2026 5:00pm - 6:00pm PDT

Blondie's Bar (540 Valencia St, San Francisco, CA 94110)

Five past and future writers from the BAIT Reading Series tackle the personal haunting of motherhood: bad moms, sad moms, no moms, being a mom, overachieving moms, New Age moms, and other matriarchal specters. Let's collectively exorcise our mommy issues, with rounds of mother-related trivia and prizes between readings.

Authors & Performers

Lexi Pandell

Writer, Freelance

Lexi Pandell is the author of the forthcoming hybrid memoir HOLY MOTHER! (fall 2027, Chelsea Green Publishing). Her journalism has been published by Wired, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and many others. Her short fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the... Read More →

Tanya Žilinskas

Tanya Žilinskas is the host of the BAIT reading series at the Sausalito Public Library. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Sun, EPOCH, Chicago Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, Puerto del Sol, The Florida Review, and elsewhere. More at tanyazilinsk... Read More →

Lisa Teasley

Lisa Teasley is the author of acclaimed novels Dive and Heat Signature, the award-winning story collection, Glow in the Dark, (Bloomsbury) and the story collection Fluid (Cune Press). She is the librettist for the coming 2028 opera, The Passion of Nell, which won the 2026 Davise Fund... Read More →

Eirinie Carson

Eirinie Carson is an award-winning Black British writer and college dropout living in California. She writes about sexual taboos, death and dying, illegal substances, hauntings both real and imagined, and ancestral inheritance in a world desperate to sever the connections between... Read More →

Saturday October 24, 2026 5:00pm - 6:00pm PDT
Blondie's Bar (540 Valencia St, San Francisco, CA 94110) 540 Valencia St, San Francisco, CA 94110, USA

PHASE 1

Audience 21+
Genre intergenerational, memoir, family drama, audience participation

5:00pm PDT

Shame Chronicles

Saturday October 24, 2026 5:00pm - 6:00pm PDT

Latin American Club (3286 22nd St, San Francisco, CA 94110)

Shame is a powerful emotion. As writers, we can unpack that raw energy on the page. During this event, we’ll intersperse readings with prompted free-writes anchored in this complex emotion. Bring something to write with, and leave with multiple starts for stories, poems, or essays in your pocket.

Saturday October 24, 2026 5:00pm - 6:00pm PDT
Latin American Club (3286 22nd St, San Francisco, CA 94110) 3286 22nd St, San Francisco, CA 94110, USA

PHASE 1

Genre audience participation, healing, memoir

5:00pm PDT

Spill the TEA: A Tasting Menu of the Untranslatable and Unsayable

Saturday October 24, 2026 5:00pm - 6:00pm PDT

Red Poppy Art House (2698 Folsom St, San Francisco, CA 94110)

English is great at absorbing words from other languages, like ‘shadenfreude’ or ‘chutzpah’. But the words you probably know from Transeurasian languages, from Turkic to Slavic, are more ominous: kompromat, horde, vampire.

True, wars, including Russia’s ongoing assault of Ukraine, have dominated our newsfeeds. Luckily, the TEA Collective of Transeurasian Writers & Translators can help us move past the headlines and enrich our vocabulary and understanding of life elsewhere to include joy, camaraderie, and resilience in the face of fear and loss.

The TEA Collective invites you to a literary tea party with stories by mixed-genre writers with roots from Serbia, Ukraine, Russia, and the Armenian Diaspora that put into words what is difficult to say and nearly impossible to translate. We’ll integrate music and "tasting notes," words in other languages hidden under your seats that will help us give voice to experiences and feelings that we didn’t know we had.

Saturday October 24, 2026 5:00pm - 6:00pm PDT
Red Poppy Art House (2698 Folsom St, San Francisco, CA 94110) 2698 Folsom St, San Francisco, CA 94110, USA

PHASE 1

Genre diasporic stories, healing, immigration, memoir, mixed genre, playwriting, translation, poetry, radical joy

5:00pm PDT

Without a Net: 20 Super-short, Uncurated, Uncensored, Unrehearsed Pieces, Freshly Written in the Last Hour

Saturday October 24, 2026 5:00pm - 6:00pm PDT

The Drawing Room: ANNEX (599 Valencia St, San Francisco, CA 94110)

Always wanted to read at Lit Crawl? Here's your chance. Step one...attend the pre-Crawl Tailgate at Page Street SF where you will be given a prompt and 30 minutes to write a no-more-than-2-minute piece on that prompt. (We might also give you a glass of wine if you like.) If you like what you wrote, drop your name into our sorting hat (literary reference there). If you're chosen to be one of our readers (and there will be 20 of you), you'll need to head to the Phase One venue for our Lit Crawl event, Without a Net: 20 Supershort, Uncurated, Uncensored, Unrehearsed Pieces Written in the Last Hour. Don't forget to text your family and friends to let them know you're reading at Lit Crawl!

Saturday October 24, 2026 5:00pm - 6:00pm PDT
The Drawing Room: ANNEX (599 Valencia St, San Francisco, CA 94110)

PHASE 1

Audience 18+
Genre tailgate sponsor, mixed genre, memoir, fiction, nonfiction

6:30pm PDT

Chopped Liver: Stories from Secular Jewish Life

Saturday October 24, 2026 6:30pm - 7:30pm PDT

Latin American Club (3286 22nd St, San Francisco, CA 94110)

Chopped Liver is a new storytelling series about the rest of American Jewish culture. We are a people with rich traditions and histories. At this LitCrawl event, you will hear Jewish stories about music, immigration, humor in grief, mythology. and the quest for connection and belonging.

We are not the diaspora - we create the world in this place we belong.

Authors & Performers

Леонид

Born in Leningrad in 1950, I have been living in San Francisco since 2022. I am the author of a numerous short stories and the novel based on the true story of a student rock band "The Green Ants"—one of the first in the Soviet Union (1967 – 1975).

Becka Robbins

Becka is a former literacy specialist, a former bookseller, and a lifelong compulsive reader. She runs the nonprofit Books Not Bans, which was featured in the LA Times, CBS National and in the Guardian UK. She's long been obsessed with Jewish American literature. This is her first... Read More →

Saturday October 24, 2026 6:30pm - 7:30pm PDT
Latin American Club (3286 22nd St, San Francisco, CA 94110) 3286 22nd St, San Francisco, CA 94110, USA

PHASE 2

Audience 21+
Genre cultural commentary, healing, humor, memoir, secular Jewish, immigration

6:30pm PDT

Circle and Fist: Holding Tenderness while Fighting for the World We Need and Deserve

Saturday October 24, 2026 6:30pm - 7:30pm PDT

Red Poppy Art House (2698 Folsom St, San Francisco, CA 94110)

In restorative justice, our hearts expand to hold grief and rage. As artists we also feed fires of hope. This event is a window and the wind through that window, fresh air, breathing together toward freedom for us all, pulling from Afro-Caribbean, South Asian, and Indigenous American cultural traditions.

Saturday October 24, 2026 6:30pm - 7:30pm PDT
Red Poppy Art House (2698 Folsom St, San Francisco, CA 94110) 2698 Folsom St, San Francisco, CA 94110, USA

PHASE 2

Audience 18+
Genre erotica, fiction, memoir, poetry, women of a certain age, BIPOC, Black culture, diasporic stories, elder wisdom, south asian, indigenous american, healing

6:30pm PDT

Dirty Old Women

Saturday October 24, 2026 6:30pm - 7:30pm PDT

Monkeybrains

Older women: Wise enough to tell the truth about sex--what they want, what they've done, what makes them hot. Tonight, we tell you. Our erotica takes many forms--fiction, poetry, memoir--from sweet to kinky to weird. If you missed the legendary series at the Octopus Literary Salon, this is your chance!

Saturday October 24, 2026 6:30pm - 7:30pm PDT
Monkeybrains 933 Treat Ave, San Francisco, CA 94110, USA

PHASE 2

Audience 18+
Genre erotica, women of a certain age, fiction, memoir, poetry

6:30pm PDT

It's Never Too Late: Howls from Owls

Saturday October 24, 2026 6:30pm - 7:30pm PDT

Muddy Waters Café & Lounge

Join the parliament of OWLS (Older Writers' Laboratory) as we celebrate, investigate and illuminate our lives and perspectives as older poets. Be prepared for unexpected revelations, extraordinary histories and audience
participation as we follow in the great San Francisco tradition of murmuring, whispering, enunciating and howling our words out to you in the foggy urban night.

Saturday October 24, 2026 6:30pm - 7:30pm PDT
Muddy Waters Café & Lounge 521 Valencia St, San Francisco, CA 94110, USA

PHASE 2

Genre elder wisdom, memoir, mixed genre, poetry

6:30pm PDT

Poly AF

Saturday October 24, 2026 6:30pm - 7:30pm PDT

Teeth Bar SF (2323 Mission St, San Francisco, CA 94110)

Open marriages, polycules, orgies, reconceiving the shape of family, falling in love with two people at the same time, a Google Calendar so crammed it brings the main character to her knees. Come hear the newest polyamory stories from the beating heart of America’s homeland for relationship rebels, misfits, and pioneers.

Saturday October 24, 2026 6:30pm - 7:30pm PDT
Teeth Bar SF (2323 Mission St, San Francisco, CA 94110) 2323 Mission St, San Francisco, CA 94110, USA

PHASE 2

Genre erotica, family drama, fiction, humor, memoir

6:30pm PDT

USF Presents: Emerging Writers Take the Stage

Saturday October 24, 2026 6:30pm - 7:30pm PDT

The Sycamore (2140 Mission St, San Francisco, CA 94110)

We're an all-ages group of grad student writers at the University of San Francisco. We’re putting our non-writing lives on hold for two years while we dig deep into the art world and see what could happen. We experiment and write normal stuff and weird stuff. We have incredible dogs and cats that inspire and terrorize us.

Saturday October 24, 2026 6:30pm - 7:30pm PDT
The Sycamore (2140 Mission St, San Francisco, CA 94110) 2140 Mission St, San Francisco, CA 94110, USA

PHASE 2

Audience 18+
Genre erotica, fiction, memoir, poetry, women of a certain age, emerging voices, mixed genre, sponsor

6:30pm PDT

We Out Here: Black Women Travelers

Saturday October 24, 2026 6:30pm - 7:30pm PDT

The Drawing Room: ANNEX (599 Valencia St, San Francisco, CA 94110)

What happens when Black female/NB bodies venture into spaces that don't expect us—and write about it anyway? Decolonial travel writing pioneer Faith Adiele hosts five storytellers who turn travel inside out: a globetrotter to 70 countries, a comics artist documenting Black life, a novelist searching for home, a spoken word artist claiming space. Whose world is this, anyway?

Authors & Performers

elaine lee

Elaine Lee is an attorney, globetrotter and an award-winning travel journalist. She is the editor of the first black travel book of the modern era “Go Girl” The Black Woman's Book of Travel and Adventure” (1997) and its sequel, “Go Girl 2” (2024). She has visited seventy... Read More →

CieraJevae Gordon

Ciera Jevae is a Pushcart Prize–nominated poet and Richmond’s first Black woman Poet Laureate. Author of Unto Ivy’s Rib and forthcoming And All My Flowers, she holds an MFA from California College of the Arts. Her work is informed by travels throughout Costa Rica, Ghana, Ken... Read More →

Ajuan Mance

Ajuan Mance is an Oakland-based writer and illustrator. Her comics and illustrations have appeared in several periodicals and anthologies including, most recently, Come Out and Play: The Queer Sports Project. Gender Studies, Ajuan’s first solo compilation was nominated for the 2024... Read More →

Kai Harris

Kai Harris is a writer and educator from Detroit, Michigan, who uses her voice to uplift the Black community through realistic fiction centered on the experiences of Black girls and Black women. Her debut novel, What the Fireflies Knew, won the 2023 Phillis Wheatley Book Award in... Read More →

Saturday October 24, 2026 6:30pm - 7:30pm PDT
The Drawing Room: ANNEX (599 Valencia St, San Francisco, CA 94110)

PHASE 2

Genre BIPOC, travel writing, memoir, Black culture

8:00pm PDT

CCA Presents: The Last Word is Never the Last

Saturday October 24, 2026 8:00pm - 9:00pm PDT

Et al. etc. (2831a Mission St, San Francisco, CA 94110)

The final graduating class of California College of the Arts' MFA in Writing takes the Litquake stage for the program's last appearance after decades of nurturing distinctive literary voices. Every generation of writers inherits the world as it is and imagines the world as it might become. In a cultural moment that often rewards speed over reflection and certainty over complexity, these emerging writers remind us that literature remains one of our most powerful ways of paying attention to one another, to history, and to ourselves. Through fiction, memoir, poetry, and hybrid forms, these writers move across borders, histories, families, and imagined futures with wit, ambition, and emotional precision. This is more than a farewell to a beloved program. It is an introduction to the writers who will carry its legacy forward and a reminder literature is always unfinished and always becoming. The last word is never the last.

Authors & Performers

Leela Smelser

Leela Smelser’s truest devotion is Sci-Fi/Fantasy, but he dabbles in poetry and has been known to microdose screenwriting on the side. With a BA in Creative Writing and Classics from Bryn Mawr College, he is now in his second and final year in the CCA MFA Writing program.

Saturday October 24, 2026 8:00pm - 9:00pm PDT
Et al. etc. (2831a Mission St, San Francisco, CA 94110) 2831a Mission St, San Francisco, CA 94110, USA

PHASE 3

Genre memoir, mixed genre, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, sponsor

8:00pm PDT

Pochex Deluxe: An Ode to the Californiana Lengua

Saturday October 24, 2026 8:00pm - 9:00pm PDT

Medicine for Nightmares (3036 24th St, San Francisco, CA 94110)

Pochex Deluxe is a celebration of Pochos continuing to shape the California tongue within our collective BIPOC communities. It collapses the refrain that we are neither from here nor from there into a declaration: we are the makers of larynx, the makers of now and tomorrow’s literary landscape.

This reading honors the intersection of our tongues—a language that undoes, restores, revolts, and transmutes, continuously rehumanizing our gaze. It celebrates the present Californiana poem a that mimics and becomes cosmos, a poem that can only have the limbs of California.

Pochex, Pocha, Pocho, Poches is further defined here as a descendent body of migrating bodies that insists on being not only the ear, but the mouth of tomorrow’s poem.

Pochex Deluxe because it tears at the seams of tongues.

Authors & Performers

Josiah Luis Alderete

Josiah Luis Alderete is a ful blooded spanglish speaking Pocho left handed callejero de Aztlan. He is the curator and host of the long running Bay Area Latine reading series Speaking Axolotl and currently tends the Portal on Calle Veint Cuatro known as Medicina Para Pesadillas. His... Read More →

hector son of hector

hector son of hector is from Long Beach, CA and currently lives in Oakland. He is the child of Mexican immigrants, works in a hospital, dreams of short stories and writes poetry in secret.

María Guerrero

María Guerrero is a proud queer Chicanx, born in San Francisco, raised in Bayview–Hunters Point. Es maestra por el día y poeta a las 3 de la mañana. María writes about her experience living in her childhood home, her ancestors, her communities, y medicina

Mimi Tempestt

Mimi Tempestt (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and daughter of California. She has a M.A. in Literature from Mills College, and a Ph.D in Literature & Creative/Critical Writing from UC Santa Cruz. Her first book, the monumental misrememberings, is published with Co-Conspirator... Read More →

Saturday October 24, 2026 8:00pm - 9:00pm PDT
Medicine for Nightmares (3036 24th St, San Francisco, CA 94110) 3036 24th St, San Francisco, CA 94110, USA

PHASE 3

Genre BIPOC, latine readings, memoir, poetry

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