City Arts & Lectures

Our guest today is Anna Malaika Tubbs, a multidisciplinary expert on current and historical understandings of race, gender, and equity.  She is the author of “The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation” and the just-published “Erased: What American Patriarchy Has Hidden From Us”.  In both books, Tubbs examines society’s limitations on women and the consequences of those systems of oppression.  Tubbs argues that this is no coincidence – it’s as essential to maintaining power structures today as it was when the United States was founded.  But what can seem intractable doesn’t need to be – Tubbs says “it’s all made up, so let’s make up something different”. On May 13, 2025, Anna Malaika Tubbs came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco for an onstage conversation with podcaster, human rights activist and social impact strategist Jamira Burley. 

Ross Gay is a writer with a mission: to help readers explore the beautiful complexities of joy, gratitude, and delight.  In his essays and poetry, Gay brings his overflowing kindness and relentless eye for details to community gardens, the lives of Black people, the artistry of basketball, and much more. He is the author of the poetry collections Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude and Be Holding, and the essay collections The Book of Delights, Inciting Joy and The Book of (More) Delights.

On May 2, 2025, Ross Gay came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to read from his work and talk with poet and editor Aracelis Girmay.  

Alec Karakatsanis is a lawyer, writer, and the founder and executive director of the nonprofit Civil Rights Corps.  He graduated from Yale College and Harvard Law School, and served as a deputy public defender in the District of Columbia.  His books are "Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System" and the newly published "Copaganda", discussing how the news media's portrayal of crime narrows our perception of justice.  On April 28, 2025, Alec Karakatsanis came to the studios of KQED to talk to Lara Bazelon, a journalist and professor of law at the University of San Francisco. 

Vauhini Vara is a journalist, novelist, short story writer, and playwright. She began her journalism career as a technology reporter at the Wall Street Journal and later launched, edited and wrote for the business section of the New Yorker’s website. 

Her latest book, Searches, is a work of journalism and memoir about how big technology companies are changing our understanding of our selves and our communities. Her debut novel, The Immortal King Rao, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, and the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. 

On April 15, 2025, Vauhini Vara came to the studios of KQED in San Francisco to talk about "Searches" and her writing journey with New York Times deputy business editor Pui-Wing Tam. 

This is a rebroadcast of a program that originally aired in August of 2023.  We've selected the encore to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, the turning point in the Vietnamese diaspora of which Ocean Vuong is a part.   

Ocean Vuong‘s exquisitely crafted poetry and prose ask perennial and pressing questions about race, masculinity, addiction, trauma, and courage. His beloved novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, for which he recently finished writing the screenplay, tells the story of a queer Vietnamese refugee coming of age against the backdrop of violence, poverty, and addiction. Vuong is the author of the poetry collections Night Sky with Exit Wounds and his newest, Time is a Mother, “full of concentrated, kaleidoscopic riffs on the feelings and sounds, the delirious highs and darkest lows, that make up contemporary life” (The New Yorker).

On June 9, 2023, Ocean Vuong came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco for an onstage conversation with Mike Mills, a filmmaker, graphic designer, and artist best known for the films Beginners, 20th Century Women, and most recently C’mon C’mon.