Lit Crawl San Francisco 2026

Lit Crawl San Francisco 2026

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!

6:30pm PDT

API Transmasculine Stories Take the Stage

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

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

Asian and Pacific Islander transmasculine artists take the stage with original work spanning poetry, memoir, storytelling, and embodied performance. Lambda Literary Award–winning author Willy Wilkinson performs “The Poetry of Scars” through Body as Truth, an emerging art form in which the body presents truth as evidence. Voices from the API diaspora explore alignment, inheritance, and connection across cultures and generations.

Authors & Performers

Bobby C.

Bobby C. is an immigrant who grew up in Hong Kong and San Francisco. He is a titleholder, Mr. Transgender San Francisco 2004. He has been a longtime organizer/volunteer for the LGBTQ+ community. Bobby enjoys shooting photos at community events, creating visual art, writing poetry... Read More →

Willy Wilkinson

Willy Wilkinson is the Lambda Literary Award-winning author of Born on the Edge of Race and Gender, illuminating trans experience from a Chinese American and mixed-heritage perspective. Its second edition arrives this fall. He received an Association of LGBTQ Journalists Award for... Read More →

Prince Canada

Prince (they/he) is a truth-teller, visual artist, and social entrepreneur. Drawing upon their ugly lived experiences, they create prose, poetry, zines, and paintings. He fought personal legal battles in immigration and transgender housing discrimination. They recently opened their... Read More →

Gino Visinia

G7NO is an artist born into music, carrying a natural connection to rhythm, storytelling, and performance from an early age. With more than 10 years as an official recording artist, his journey has evolved from simply creating music to intentionally using his voice as a tool for impact... Read More →

Saturday October 24, 2026 6:30pm - 7:30pm PDT
Et al. etc. (2831a Mission St, San Francisco, CA 94110) 2831a Mission St, San Francisco, CA 94110, USA

Genre AAPI, mixed genre, LGBTQIA+, diasporic stories

6:30pm PDT

Borrowed Time—with the Lisa Brown & Daniel Handler Residents

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

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

An evening of original work from the Lisa Brown & Daniel Handler Residents at the San Francisco Public Library, exploring what is borrowed, what is returned, and what is transformed.

Across fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and hybrid forms, these writers engage with memory, archives, identity, and the fragile timelines that shape our lives. Rooted in a yearlong residency in support of the public library, this work reflects both personal histories and the collective record.

Saturday October 24, 2026 6:30pm - 7:30pm PDT
Blondie's Bar (540 Valencia St, San Francisco, CA 94110) 540 Valencia St, San Francisco, CA 94110, USA

Audience 21+
Genre fiction, nonfiction, poetry, hybrid, mixed genre

6:30pm PDT

Celebrating the World in Translation

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

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

Celebrate the third year of the BEST LITERARY TRANSLATIONS, bringing you the literatures of the world for our delight! Featuring an editor and contributors to the 2026 edition of this annual anthology, the session will feature poetry and prose from four continents, including work from Brazil, Mexico, Korea, and Palestine.

Saturday October 24, 2026 6:30pm - 7:30pm PDT
Adobe Books & Arts Cooperative, (3130 24th St, San Francisco, CA 94110) 3130 24th St, San Francisco, CA 94110, USA

Genre poetry, mixed genre, translation

6:30pm PDT

Center for the Art of Translation Presents: So You Think You Can('t) Translate—Youth Edition!

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

826 Valencia (826 Valencia St, San Francisco, CA 94110)

Budding Bards! Fledgling Wordsmiths! Rising Scribes! Unlock your creativity and share your skills while translating poems from all over the world. No need to be a poet. No second language required. Equipped with a glossary, guided by local translators, and with the encouragement of friends (bring your own!), you’ll dismantle and reassemble a poem in a new language. Translation of poetry by its nature offers multiple possibilities: since there is no single “correct” rendering of a poem, be prepared to share and defend your language choices. Who knows? Maybe it will change your entire relationship with language? With collaboration? With creation? 2025-2027 Poetry Inside Out Teaching Fellows (https://www.catranslation.org/education/teaching-fellowship/) will host this fun workshop and spontaneous performance for youth writers.

Saturday October 24, 2026 6:30pm - 7:30pm PDT
826 Valencia (826 Valencia St, San Francisco, CA 94110) 826 Valencia St, San Francisco, CA 94110, USA

Audience All Ages
Genre Youth Voices, translation, mixed genre

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

L

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

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

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

CôEm Collective Presents: Monsters, Myths, and Me

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

Fingersnaps Media Arts

Through themes of creation, ritual, and tradition, these writers trace patterns carried across generations—from our mythical origin, to a lost motherland, to the present day and beyond. This reading invites us to witness how inherited stories—both told and untold—bind us, fracture us, and offer the possibility of new life. It asks: What do we inherit? What do we choose to carry forward? And what do we lay to rest?

Authors & Performers

Vina Vo

Vina Vo is a storyteller, facilitator, and organizer who bridges the cultural and geographic divide caused by displacement and diaspora. She is originally from Little Saigon in Southern California and now calls Hayward home. She is currently working on a collection of essays.

Saturday October 24, 2026 6:30pm - 7:30pm PDT
Fingersnaps Media Arts 3527 20th St, San Francisco, CA 94110, USA

Genre southeast asian, intergenerational, diasporic stories

6:30pm PDT

Dirty Old Women

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

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

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

6:30pm PDT

Divination Poetics: Spells & the Tarot

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

Curio Bar SF @ The Chapel (775 Valencia St, San Francisco 94110)

From T.S. Eliot to Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe, poets have long experimented with the tarot as a generative praxis. How can we, amidst current & ongoing crises, incorporate the tarot or spellwork in our writing practices, as a means of healing interspecies relationships, cultural lineages, or even ourselves? Explore ways poets from various backgrounds use divination as a practice to collaborate with issues of apocalypse, gender, the biodiverse, and the lyric as they intersect to construct a poetics.

Authors & Performers

Sezin Devi (Koehler)

Sezin Devi Koehler is the multiracial Sri Lankan/Lithuanian author of Much Ado About Keanu: A Critical Reeves Theory, a sociocultural deep-dive into Keanu Reeves’ work. Sezin writes from an Oakland historic landmark that looks like the house from Practical Magic, where she can see... Read More →

Melissa Eleftherion

Melissa Eleftherion (she/they) is a writer, a librarian, and a visual artist. Born & raised in Brooklyn, she is the author of four poetry collections including Suture (Cooper Dillon, 2026) & Malocchia (White Stag, 2026) as well as 12 chapbooks from various presses. Melissa served... Read More →

Georgina Marie Guardado

Georgina Marie Guardado, MFA (Latinx, Indigenous, she/her), is Poet Laureate Emerita of Lake County, CA for 2020-2024 and a Poets Laureate Fellow with The Academy of American Poets. She serves as the Literacy Program Coordinator for the Lake County Library and Marketing Director for... Read More →

Saturday October 24, 2026 6:30pm - 7:30pm PDT
Curio Bar SF @ The Chapel (775 Valencia St, San Francisco 94110) 775 Valencia St, San Francisco, CA 94110, USA

Audience 21+
Genre poetry, healing

6:30pm PDT

Dramatic Readings of Not-So-Dramatic Local Stories with the Editors of 7x7

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

Ritual Coffee Roasters (1026 Valencia St, San Francisco, CA 94110)

Since 2001, 7x7 has been covering the food, culture, and style trends poised to take over the city. Try not to laugh as we bring you 25 years of poor predictions, ridiculous recommendations, and fizzled sensations from the archives.

Saturday October 24, 2026 6:30pm - 7:30pm PDT
Ritual Coffee Roasters (1026 Valencia St, San Francisco, CA 94110) 1026 Valencia St, San Francisco, CA 94110, USA

Genre san francisco stories, journalism, cultural commentary, sponsor

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

Genre elder wisdom, memoir, mixed genre, poetry

6:30pm PDT

Mesa Refuge Presents: In the Spirit of Kapwa

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

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

This reading includes seven Filipino-American writers, who were brought together through the Helen Toribio Kapwa Fellowship at Point Reyes writing retreat, Mesa Refuge. Kapwa is a Tagalog word that does not have an exact English translation, but describes "the universal truth of interconnectedness and solidarity with all living beings." In the spirit of kapwa, these writers bring into conversation distinct explorations of intergenerational relationships and trauma, mothering, queerness, climate change and the role of colonialism, and mythology.

Saturday October 24, 2026 6:30pm - 7:30pm PDT
Medicine for Nightmares (3036 24th St, San Francisco, CA 94110) 3036 24th St, San Francisco, CA 94110, USA

Audience All Ages
Genre AAPI, filipinx, environmental, colonialism, BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, mixed genre, intergenerational

6:30pm PDT

Museum of Forgotten Fun: Immersive Storytelling from the San Francisco Underground

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

Immersive storytelling—where a performer embodies a character, crafts a backstory, and speaks from a script as well as improvising in dialogue with audience members who are also roleplaying—is an ascendant form of literature in San Francisco's underground art scene. The Museum of Forgotten Fun—a museum located 1,000 years in the future, and featuring re-enactments of ritual fun of the 2020s—explores this medium with a group of five writers.

Saturday October 24, 2026 6:30pm - 7:30pm PDT
Martuni's 4 Valencia St, San Francisco, CA 94103, USA

Audience 21+
Genre audience participation, speculative fiction, san francisco stories, immersive storytelling

6:30pm PDT

Palabras del Pueblo: Cultura pa' la Raza

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

Grand Coffee Too (2544 Mission St, San Francisco, CA 94110)

Palabras del Pueblo brings its Raza-centered writing workshop to the Mission for a reading by instructors and participants working in fiction, poetry, comics, and radical writing. Palabras is about the community speaking to itself, arming creators with knowledge and cultura, and encouraging writers. The work reflects memory, struggle, and imagination shaped in community.

Authors & Performers

Ronnie Dukes

Ronnie Dukes is an international award-winning illustrator and CCO of DUKEScomics, an independent publisher and IBPA Innovative Voices fellow. Dukes has exhibited at international comic conventions, including Tokyo Comic Con, Leipzig Book Fair and Guadalajara FIL. He’s a featured... Read More →

Dr. Elvira Carrizal-Dukes

Dr. Elvira Carrizal-Dukes is a Xicana narrative designer from the U.S.–Mexico borderlands and C.E.O. of DUKEScomics, an IBPA Innovative Voices publisher. She’s an International Latino Book Awards author of graphic novel Daizee & the Dukes of Chuco: Chuco–Juárez World Rally... Read More →

Juan G. Berumen

Juan G. Berumen is an East Oakland-based writer, director, educator, and actor who sees storytelling as a vehicle for self-expression, community empowerment, and social transformation. Shaped by his experience growing up undocumented in the Bay Area, Juan is committed to telling stories... Read More →

Blanca Torres

Blanca Torres grew up on the dry, eastern side of Washington state. She is a graduate of Vanderbilt University and earned a Masters of Fine Arts in fiction from Mills College. She has worked as a reporter for several major newspapers and is now an award-winning producer and reporter... Read More →

Osmani R. Ochoa

Casa Colibri

Osmani R. Ochoa is a queer Mexican-Xicano poet and longtime local and national organizer for immigrant and worker rights. They've recently released their debut chapbook ‘How to Survive an Asthma Attack in a Climate Apocalypse’ with Abode Press.

Saturday October 24, 2026 6:30pm - 7:30pm PDT
Grand Coffee Too (2544 Mission St, San Francisco, CA 94110) 2544 Mission St, San Francisco, CA 94110, USA

Genre latine readings, fiction, poetry, illustrated storytelling

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

Genre erotica, family drama, fiction, humor, memoir

6:30pm PDT

The Creative Youth Collective Presents: Building Worlds and Shaping Futures

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

Dog Eared Books (900 Valencia St, San Francisco, CA 94110)

The Creative Youth Collective is a mentorship program that guides young writers in developing their authorial voice. CYC authors (ages 12–16) will share excerpts from original fiction and poetry, alongside reflections on authorship as a practice of authority—one that authorizes them to participate in shaping their world. Through readings and an interactive discussion, they explore writing as a practice that engages questions of meaning, identity, ecology, and culture.

Saturday October 24, 2026 6:30pm - 7:30pm PDT
Dog Eared Books (900 Valencia St, San Francisco, CA 94110)

Audience All Ages
Genre Youth Readings, Youth Voices, fiction

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

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)

Genre BIPOC, travel writing, memoir, Black culture