Litquake holds its 2026 festival from Thursday, October 8 through Saturday, October 24, with dozens of readings, panels and parties at venues across San Francisco plus a handful in Berkeley, Oakland, Marin and Sausalito.
What to Expect
Opening night is the Booksellers Ball on Thursday, October 8 at 524 Union. Kidquake runs morning sessions for elementary school audiences at the San Francisco Public Library Main Branch on October 8 and 9, with Dan Santat, Elisa Kleven, Lisa Moore Ramee, Maggie Tokuda-Hall, Monisha Bajaj and Mahogany L. Browne.
Authors on the schedule include Min Jin Lee at Calvary Presbyterian on October 10, Claudia Rankine in Oakland the same night, David Treuer at Grace Cathedral on October 11, Jon Ronson at the JCCSF on October 14, Sherry Turkle at the YBCA Screening Room on October 21, and Walter Mosley at the Main Library on October 23. Smaller readings run at City Lights, Green Apple Books on the Park, Omnivore Books, Medicine for Nightmares, Telegraph Hill Books, the Make-Out Room, the Stud and the Roxie.
The festival closes with Lit Crawl SF on Saturday, October 24, starting at 5pm across multiple venues, followed by an afterparty at The Drawing Room: Annex. Litquake marks a large share of the schedule free or pay what you can.
Two festival events land before opening night. An Evening with Ayad Akhtar, in conversation with Karen Russell, is at the Sydney Goldstein Theater on Tuesday, October 6. Litquake Out Loud and the Small Press Book Fair take the Great Lawn at Yerba Buena Gardens on Sunday, October 4, with readings at 11am, 12:30pm and 2pm.
Details
When: October 8 to 24, 2026, with Litquake Out Loud on October 4 Where: Venues across San Francisco, plus Berkeley, Oakland, Marin and Sausalito
Cost: Varies by event, and many are free or pay what you can Tickets: litquake.org
Source: the Litquake 2026 festival schedule.
Photo: ECTran71, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
