Debuts May 2026 — Compassion in Crisis
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Co-editors of Loam Center Carework and Mutual Aid in this Practical Guide to Navigating Our Changing Climate
In Compassion in Crisis, Kate Rose Weiner and Kailea Rose Loften draw on the experiences of organizers and first responders to offer a one-of-a-kind resource for tending to our communities, bodies, and spirits when disaster strikes.
BERKELEY, CALIF. — Crisis looms large in daily life. From failing public health infrastructure to resource shortages, endless wars, and melting ice caps the crisis in education is inseparable from the crisis in loneliness, spurred on by the interests and fantasies of a small group of wealthy individuals, for whose sake whole swaths of our planet burn. The name for this compounding disaster is polycrisis.
Confronted with this situation, Kate Rose Weiner and Kailea Rose Loften began collaborating on what would become Compassion in Crisis: Building Disaster-Resilient Communities, a book that presents a strategy for catastrophe guided by values of curiosity and communal care. Knowing this is work with long-growing roots, Weiner and Loften gather a choir of organizers, educators, and healers from across North America to speak to their experiences responding to disaster. Compassion in Crisis is a book of energizing dialogues and clear-eyed checklists for everything from water purification to somatic practices. Readers will learn how to prepare baby formula in an emergency, how to best use stinging nettle or chamomile flowers for first-aid, alongside tips for paying attention to the different responses of our nervous systems to stress.
For many, the word “prepper” conjures images of underground bunkers and rural compounds; it’s an endeavor of individuals. The kind of preparedness such ideologies offer focuses on the survival of one, cut off from (or outright against) their neighbors. Compassion in Crisis affirms that true preparedness is the practice of honoring change, learning to steady ourselves and what we love in the face of it, and remembering that the world we want only follows from acting as if we live there already.
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Kalie Caetano
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Advance Praise for Compassion in Crisis
“As we enter an era of climate shifts and more frequent, layered catastrophes, this is the book you want beside you to navigate the realities of disaster and recovery. Drawing from survivors, practitioners, and thinkers, this book offers a guide to cultivating the kind of attentiveness and care that might help us think about preparedness wholistically, from philosophical ideas about how our experiences of time shift to practical and profound advice that can move the needle towards justice in the aftermath of grief and loss. Weiner, Loften, and their contributors help us consider what it takes to move through change and the kinds of transformation that are inevitable in the wake and shadows of disasters, acknowledging that systems and institutions can and do fail us, and showing where and how communities can be created, revitalized, and mobilized to step in and step up for each other.”
—Candis Callison, Member, Tāłtān Nation, and author, How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts
Kate Rose Weiner is a writer, editor, and publisher working at the intersections of culture and climate justice. She is the coeditor of community publisher Loam and the director of Loam Library, a mobile library committed to bringing the power of print to the people. Kate’s work is shaped by her studies in environmental art, social practice, and community herbalism.
Kailea Rose Loften is a mother of Tahltan, Kaska, and Black American ancestry. She is the coeditor for the community publisher Loam and has guided climate change policy with an emphasis on Indigenous rights, previously serving as a Climate Commissioner for the City of Petaluma, California. You can contact her through kailealoften.com.
Debuts June 2026 — I Love You So Many
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Native Travel Memoir Lights the Way to Making Kin and Building Community Around the Globe
From celebrated California Indian journalist Terria Smith, a debut memoir that explores the personal intersections of travel and Indigeneity in Cuba, Guyana, and beyond.
BERKELEY, CALIF. — The genre of travel writing has, for too long, been the domain of settlers: so-called “explorers” whose journeys and way of being in the world have seeped into the foundation of everyday life on the move, from militarized borders to the names of mountains, rivers, and deserts. But travel is a lot older than settler colonialism. In many ways, the urge to travel—to meet new people, share stories and experiences, and be in relationship with parts of the world previously unknown to you—can be a lived and fully embodied practice of resistance.
In her debut memoir, I Love You So Many: A Native Memoir of Adventure, Culture, and Family, Terria Smith traces her journey from the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Reservation to journalism school, and her decision to travel the United States to tell about the lives of Native people from one coast to another. As her hunger for travel grew, so did her understanding of community, and what it means to be a world citizen. In warm and thrilling prose, Terria takes readers with her on trips across the Americas, spending time in Cuba, Iceland, and Guyana as she falls in and out of love and develops lifelong bonds with the people she meets.
The phrase “I Love You So Many” comes from a phrase used by Terria’s Spanish-speaking relatives: what would be considered by some to be an error of translation is refigured here as an opening to celebrate the many-ness of our loves, populated with people, animals, islands, and life. I Love You So Many is a book that challenges a certain way of thinking about travel, and invites readers into Terria’s infectious enthusiasm for stepping outside and seeing what you can give the world and the amazing experiences it can give back to you.
Media Contacts:
Bradley Trumpfheller
Marketing & Membership Associate, Heyday
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Praise for I Love You So Many
“I Love You So Many is an Indigenous memoir that chronicles Terria Smith’s journey of self-discovery and acceptance through global travel, relationality, and family history. Moving from Alaska to Cuba, Iceland, Guyana, and beyond, Smith explores themes of Indigenous identity, resilience, and love while navigating personal challenges like divorce, migration, and loss. Embedded in a beautifully chronicled travelogue of her unfolding life—her unflinching truths become touchstones, illuminated and validated with each stamp on her passport. Joining the ranks of Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians and Therese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries, this memoir celebrates healing, empowerment, and the enduring strength of Indigenous mobility in an accessible and interconnected world.”
—Theresa Gregor, Professor of American Indian Studies, California State University-Long Beach
“Terria Smith has gifted us something we don’t see so much of: a Native travel narrative that is more than just the fish-out-of-water, “Indian leaves the rez and is overwhelmed” trope. I can almost hear the gasps of readers marveling at the idea that Indians travel at all! Smith is a wonderful guide in showing that we absolutely do, and that our experiences at home provide us insights beyond what most American travelers may bring with them when they go abroad. At the core of this quarter-century unfolding is Smith’s personal origin story as a mighty, independent Indigenous woman with a deep love for her traditional land finding her power in a broader, borderless world; in worlds, really, both inner and outer varieties of them. Smith’s journey is full of heart and humor, and a different version of Native memoir from what we usually get and I am grateful for the opportunity to travel with her.”
— Chris La Tray, author of Becoming Little Shell
“This book is like a letter from your best friend telling you what really happened during her trip.”
— Ursula Pike, author of An Indian Among Los Indígenas
“Smith beautifully weaves together stories from her life as a Desert Cahuilla woman on the Torres-Martinez Indian Reservation in the Coachella Valley desert, with her travels as an engaged and intrepid traveler who represents her deep, desert-based indigenous roots while also seeking to engage and learn and connect with indigenous people and cultures everywhere she goes. Please read this book. It is a journey you need to travel along with, learn from, and celebrate with, and your life will be all the much richer for it.”
— Ruth Nolan, editor of No Place for a Puritan: The Literature of California’s Deserts
Terria Smith is a tribal member of the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians and a proud original Californian. She is the editor of News from Native California magazine and director of the Berkeley Roundhouse, Heyday’s California Indian publishing program. Smith is also the editor of the 2023 anthology Know We Are Here: Voices of Native California Resistance. She received her undergraduate degree at Cal Poly Humboldt (formerly Humboldt State University) and earned her master’s degree at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
Debuts May 2026 — Birds of Santa Cruz
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
A Painterly Guide to Santa Cruz’s Winged Neighbors
From Santa Cruz-born artist and activist Sophie Wood Brinker comes a gorgeously illustrated guide to the birds of Santa Cruz—and a testament to the power of attention.
BERKELEY, CALIF. — For those who know how to look, Santa Cruz is a birder’s paradise. From titanic redwood groves to the jeweled beaches of Monterey Bay, this swath of California’s Central coast is home to a vast array of avian life. Sophie Wood Brinker not only knows how to look, but she knows what that looking means. In Birds of Santa Cruz, out this summer, she takes us on a journey through the county’s feathered friends. Hand-illustrated by Sophie herself, readers will learn about the remarkable language of the Steller’s Jay and the skydances of Red-shouldered Hawks.
A short introduction grounds the book in the importance of noticing and knowing the creatures with whom we share the Earth, and offers up birding and nature journaling as collective practices of love, attention, and resistance. How can we live with birds better? What can we learn from their ways of being in the world? Quoting Dorothy Day, Sophie asks “how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?”
The answer might begin in the practice of learning the names and voices of our neighbor birds. It might begin with the knowledge that, after wildfire, the nests of Acorn Woodpeckers are used for safe shelter by displaced animals. Birds of Santa Cruz is for the experienced birder and the novice, the activist and the artist, the visitor and the longtime resident. With breathtaking, full-color paintings of the 25 species of birds she describes, Sophie Wood Brinker’s book is that rare guidebook that, like poetry, delights as much as it instructs.
Birds of Santa Cruz is the fifth volume in Heyday’s beloved bird series, which also includes Oliver James’s Birds of Berkeley, Alex Harris’s Birds of Lake Merritt, Keith Hansen’s Birds of Point Reyes and Aaron N.K. Haiman’s Birds of the California Delta. It debuts this May, in the heart of spring migration.
Media Contact:
Bradley Trumpfheller (they/them)
Marketing & Membership Associate
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Sophie Wood Brinker (she/her) is a science illustrator who works with paint and pencil to communicate the brilliance and intricacy of the ecosystems that surround us. Her art scales from drawing the texture of butterfly wings to painting fifteen-foot protest banners. Sophie also works in a small town library, helping spread library joy and community resources. As a Quaker, Sophie grew up sitting in intergenerational circles hearing messages spoken out of silence. She has a BA in peace and global studies from Earlham College and is a graduate of the Science Illustration Program at California State University, Monterey Bay. Sophie grew up in Santa Cruz, California, on unceded territory of the Awaswas-speaking Uypi Tribe, and lives in Bolinas, California, on unceded Coast Miwok territory.
In Memoriam, Heyday Remembers Malcolm Margolin
In Memoriam, Heyday Remembers Malcolm Margolin
BERKELEY, CALIF. — On August 20, 2025, our founder and dear friend Malcolm Margolin passed away surrounded by his family. He was eighty-four years old. His death leaves all of us at Heyday, the inheritors of his dream, saddened beyond measure and redoubled in our commitment to the work he began here more than fifty years ago.
Our independent nonprofit press began in 1974, a brainchild of Malcolm’s fertile imagination. It all started when he wrote, designed, and typeset his first book, The East Bay Out—an “unauthorized guide” to recreation in the East Bay Regional Parks, where he had found work after moving cross country from New York in a VW van with his wife Rina. Four years later he published The Ohlone Way, a standard-bearer text in Native California history, followed in 1981 by The Way We Lived, an anthology of stories, traditions, and songs of Indigenous Californians in their own voices.
“I never thought I’d be a publisher,” Malcolm confessed in his 2014 biography, The Heyday of Malcolm Margolin, “But then I published another book and another book. Before you know it, hundreds of books and forty years have passed.”
In the course of his unexpected career at the helm of a publishing house, Malcolm served as midwife to countless writers, dreamers, and activists. He typeset books for Alice Walker and Eldridge Cleaver. He co-founded two magazines, News from Native California in 1987 and Bay Nature in 2001. His passions as a publisher were capacious—Paul Yamazaki of City Lights Books described him as “one of the great polymaths.” Malcolm’s wide-ranging intellect, curiosities, and impish iconoclasm fueled his vision for a new kind of press, one that swam against the dominant culture, one that was rooted in place and cultivated by deep friendship, particularly among Indigenous communities across the state.
“What this place, what Heyday has allowed me to do is to create a real community, to be really useful, to create a home for certain people and certain ideas,” said Malcolm, “That’s the role of a publisher, furthering others.”
In recognition of his incalculable contributions to the cultural life of California, Malcolm was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from Heyday on the occasion of its 50th anniversary in 2024.
“It is with profound grief that we mark the end of this extraordinary man, but we are summoned to continue the legacy he has left us,” said Malcolm’s successor, Steve Wasserman, publisher of Heyday, “a profound commitment to celebrating the beauty and joy to be found in this broken world, a deep and abiding respect for California’s Indigenous traditions that he did so much to learn from and explore, a passionate engagement with the issues of social justice he sought to bring to light and, where possible, to heal and repair. Above all, we will miss his unrivaled talent as a storyteller and a dreamweaver.”
"I'm proud of how Heyday has grown since I founded it in 1974, proud of our work as publishers, as community builders, as conveyers of truth, advocates for justice, and creators of beauty. I'm proud of the walls we've torn down, the bridges we've built, the trails we've blazed. We have created a significant legacy."
—MALCOLM MARGOLIN, founder of Heyday
Remembrances of Malcolm
“It takes a Malcolm Margolin to hear and see and pursue the persons—writers, artists, eccentrics, rebels, and innovators—whose lives and stories will become the beginning tale of a place. Like a silvery ghost, Malcolm has smiled and chuckled his way through zone after zone and brought a kind of community to pass.” —GARY SNYDER
“Malcolm Margolin is the glue that holds the sweetest parts of California together.” —REBECCA SOLNIT
“The Heyday list as a whole helps us map an imaginative worldview of California. Malcolm has left a distinctive mark.” —KEVIN STARR
“Across the region now known as California, so many of our Tribal Peoples mourn the loss not only of a dear friend but a true advocate.” —TERRIA SMITH (Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla), editor of News from Native California and director of the Berkeley Roundhouse
“For every piece of insight or knowledge he has gleaned from our cultures, Malcolm gives back in savvy, tangible, imaginative support that empowers our cultures and our lives. It was a lucky day for us when this Boston Jew wandered into our homelands and hung out so deeply he’s never left.”—DEBORAH MIRANDA (Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation), author of Bad Indians
“People were drawn to his abundance mindset. For him, the books were never ends in themselves. They were platforms and occasions, a way to engage and understand the world. Even after he retired from Heyday, he saw potential books everywhere.” —GAYLE WATTAWA, general manager and editorial director of Heyday
“If he had twice this lifetime, I am sure his imagination would still have been too large for it.” —MARTHINE SATRIS, associate publisher of Heyday
Malcolm Margolin, eccentric publisher and founder of Heyday in Berkeley, dies at 84
by Sam Whiting, San Francisco Chronicle
"A mighty redwood of a man has fallen"; remembering Malcolm Margolin
by Joanne Furio, Berkeleyside
Malcolm Margolin, Founder and Publisher of Heyday, dies at 84
by Sam Spratford, Publishers Weekly
Debuts August 2025 — Ocean Beach
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Illustrated Guidebook to Ocean Beach Underscores Its Ecological Significance to the City of San Francisco
Scientist and surfer Eddy Rubin celebrates the inhabitants and phenomena that shape this dynamic coastal ecosystem perched at land’s end.
BERKELEY, CALIF. — The Pacific Ocean is the most significant geographical feature on the face of the earth, covering 30 percent of the planet’s surface—and it is at Ocean Beach that this colossus meets land in the city of San Francisco. Here at the western edge of the city, the confluence of waves, winds, and moon tides have given rise to a one-of-a-kind ecosystem beloved by surfers, locals, and tourists the world over. Ocean Beach: Fog, Fauna, and Flora, part love letter, part guidebook, is an illustrated primer on the atmospheric forces that shape this shoreline and the plant and animal life teeming in the sea, soaring overhead, and burgeoning forth from its sands.
Written by Eddy Rubin and illustrated by Greg Wright, Ocean Beach is divided into three sections that explore, in turn, the climatic conditions of the beach, the wildlife who populate it, and the plants that thrive in its coastal interface. Rubin reveals how the nutrient rich California Current combines with northwesterly winds to create the city’s world-famous gray mist—Karl the Fog—which pours through the Golden Gate and blankets the beach’s outlying neighborhoods, lending San Francisco it’s cool summer temperatures and how storm systems in the far North Pacific give rise to the swells that have made Ocean Beach a surfer’s destination since the 1940s. Profiles of the beach’s animalian denizens—from the iconic gulls and sea lions to the lesser seen sand crabs and moon jellyfish—delight in each species’ quirks. And spotlights of local plant life range from the seaswept bull kelp to the hardy ice plant dotting the dunes.
Threatened by rising sea levels and ocean acidification, this delicate ecosystem offers a valuable reprieve from the metropolis to its east. Separated from the city by the Great Highway, recently repurposed as a pedestrian pathway by popular vote, Ocean Beach is an extraordinary strip of coastline the future of which will be shaped by civic policy and management. “The Ocean Beach of the future may look different from the one we know today,” says Rubin, “but its essence—a place of natural wonder, a refuge from urban life, and a reminder of our place in the larger ecosystem—can endure.” This book invites the reader to witness with wonder this wild retreat at the city’s outer rim, with a call to protect and conserve it for generations to come.
Media Contact:
Kalie Caetano
Marketing and Publicity Director
For review copies, feature interest, and interview and image requests, get in touch: publicity@heydaybooks.com
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Eddy Rubin is a longtime Ocean Beach enthusiast who has been walking, surfing, and foraging along the beach for decades. When not spending time at Ocean Beach, he led the Human Genome Project at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. There, Eddy oversaw the mapping of genomes for humans, Neanderthals, and dozens of animals, plants, and microbes. His awards include an honorary doctoral degree, membership in a royal society, and—a matter of great personal pride—election into the Ocean Beach Double Overhead Surf Association.
Greg Wright has lived on the west side of San Francisco and surfed at Ocean Beach for more than a decade. While spending his days working in technology, he has cultivated a passion for art and the beach’s fall and winter swells.
Debuts November 2025 — The ABCs of California's Native Bees
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
National Geographic Explorer Profiles California’s Native Bees from A to Z in New Image-Rich Guidebook
Conservation photographer, community scientist, and bee expert Krystle Hickman offers a primer on a selection of 26 bee species native to the Golden State
BERKELEY, CALIF. — There are nearly 3,000 bee species native to western North America, and over 1,600 of them reside in California—one of the most biodiverse regions in the world. National Geographic Explorer and celebrated community scientist Krystle Hickman offers a guide to a selection of these remarkable species alongside her stunning nature photography in The ABCs of California’s Native Bees.
Featuring 26 species, from the Agile Longhorn Bee to the Zone-tailed Banded-Mining Bee, Hickman’s primer on the Earth’s premier pollinators is a love letter to these busy bodies and a clarion call for their conservation. Native bees—as distinct from honey bees—are at risk of extinction due to climate change and habitat loss. They may be native to an area as small as a zip code or as large as an entire nation, though wherever they reside, they are integral to their surrounding ecosystems. The number of species native to California dwarfs the variety to be found in whole countries, such as France or Argentina, and rivals the biodiversity of the entire continent of Australia. This natural abundance of bees makes the Golden State significant terrain for entomologists. And since bees are an indicator species—whose absence or decline in population are often a first signal of ecosystem collapse—the study of bees is significant terrain for environmentalists writ large.
In the The ABCs of California’s Native Bees, Hickman profiles a handful of the species that underpin the ecologies of the Golden State. Each chapter profiles a distinct species, from the rare desert-dwellers to the storied bumble bees, and includes intricate photography, tips on identification, and details about each bee’s biome, preferred plantlife, traits, and seasonality. Through her anecdotes and observations, Hickman’s passions alight the reader’s enthusiasm, enjoining them on her quest to spread awareness around these minute but mighty insects.
Media Contact:
Kalie Caetano
Marketing and Publicity Director
For review copies, feature interest, and interview and image requests, get in touch: publicity@heydaybooks.com
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Krystle Hickman is a National Geographic Explorer and community scientist based in Los Angeles. With a passion for nature and an eye for artful photography, Hickman strives to elevate awareness of the decline of native bee species and shed light on their intricate and biodiverse ecosystems. Hickman’s commitment to conservation takes her across the globe, documenting rare native bees without resorting to any form of lethal collecting. Hickman’s influence extends beyond the lens: She has graced multiple television and online broadcasts, been interviewed on podcasts such as Ologies, presented at the 2024 United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP16) in Colombia, and lectured at colleges such as Harvard, UC Irvine, UCLA, and more. Learn more about her work at beesip.com.
Debuts October 2025 — California Rewritten
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
New Book Charts California’s 21st-Century Literary Canon
Knopf Editor John Freeman proposes the contours of a contemporary California canon, encompassing 49 West Coast writers and an iconic 70-year-old literary institution.
BERKELEY, CALIF. — For a state that has projected its studio-lot image across the globe, California has remained largely undersung in the world of letters, too often left to languish in the shadow of the East Coast’s literary hegemony. To rectify this peculiar imbalance, Knopf Editor John Freeman offers a thoroughgoing survey of the major voices and modern-day classics burgeoning out of the West Coast in his latest collection California Rewritten: A Journey Through the Golden State’s New Literature.
“Literature of so many kinds and so many genres from so many different types of people—at the highest level—has been coming out of California and from Californians for decades now,” says Freeman. In the last ten years alone, Californians have won more Pulitzers in literature than writers from any other region of the United States, he points out. Moreover, readers have a real appetite for these perspectives: Freeman, in his role as host for Alta Journal’s California Book Club, commands an audience of 20,000 members and counting, and California authors like Amy Tan and Tommy Orange perch on the New York Times bestseller lists for weeks and sometimes months on end.
In California Rewritten Freeman offers probing critical engagement with the writers whose works are defining this new West Coast sensibility. Across 50 essays collected from his writings for Alta, he features 49 authors and one keystone literary powerhouse that together comprise a 21st-century California canon. He spotlights the poets—Ada Limón, Claudia Rankine, Gary Snyder—whose voices defy the boundaries of the genre. He delves into the watershed works of the novelists—Percival Everett, Rachel Khong, Viet Thanh Nguyen—at the vanguard of a new firmament of American classics. And he explores the memoirists—Deborah Miranda, Javier Zamora, Maxine Hong Kingston—whose worlds offer a gripping, if sobering mirror, for our society.
Collectively these works address pressing concerns for our era: What is the meaning of a place, and how do we belong to it? How does the past imprison our present? What fears hobble our imaginations, and what kind of tomorrow could we possibly build if we liberated them? In short, Freeman, in this savvy and perceptive volume, shows why Californians deserve to be read the world over.
Praise for California Rewritten
“In California Rewritten, Freeman writes with singular precision and intelligence about new California literature, animating that mysterious relationship that unfolds when a writer’s imagination engages with place. In Freeman’s hands, California is a literary mecca, and each essay a revelation.”
—INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS, author of The Man Who Could Move Clouds
“John Freeman’s crisp, incisive essays cast a wonderfully sensitive eye on a wide-ranging collection of people who’ve written about this state in novels, reportage, memoir, history, and more. Step aside, New York; the center of the American literary universe has moved here.”
—ADAM HOCHSCHILD, author of American Midnight
“Here is vindication of all that I have argued the last fifty years—that California has had and currently has the richest, the most literary tradition in the country, the most recent of which is so beautifully chronicled in this book. I know I’m not the only California writer to say, Thank you, John Freeman.”
—GREG SARRIS, author of The Forgetters and Grand Avenue
Media Contact:
Kalie Caetano
Marketing & Publicity Director, Heyday
For review copies, feature interest, and interview and image requests, get in touch: publicity@heydaybooks.com
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John Freeman has hosted Alta‘s California Book Club since its founding in 2020 and is the author, most recently, of California Rewritten: A Journey Through the Golden State’s New Literature. He is an executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf, and he edited Freeman’s (2015–2023), a literary annual of new writing. His books include How to Read a Novelist and Dictionary of the Undoing, as well as the anthologies Tales of Two Americas, Tales of Two Planets, The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story, and Sacramento Noir. He is also the author of three poetry collections, Maps, The Park, and Wind, Trees. His work is translated into more than twenty languages, and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The New York Times. The former editor of Granta, he lives in New York.
Debuts October 2025 — Butterflies of the Bay Area and (Slightly) Beyond
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
All-Encompassing Guide Featuring Enchanting Portraits Celebrates the Butterflies of the Bay Area and (Slightly) Beyond
Self-taught butterfly obsessive Liam O’Brien shares his passion for these beloved and storied insects in this informative and surprisingly personal guidebook.
BERKELEY, CALIF. — Following an HIV diagnosis in 2000, thespian-turned-lepidopterist Liam O’Brien leaned into his passion for butterflies as a source of wonder. After decades of observing, counting, and (responsibly) capturing these scaled winged beauties, he became an ambassador for the species. In his debut book Butterflies of the Bay Area (and Slightly Beyond): An Illustrated Guide, O’Brien chronicles 135 varieties of butterfly with vim and vivid hand-painted illustrations to introduce readers to the breadth and beauty of butterfly biodiversity of this region.
With over 700 hand-drawn illustrations depicting both adult and caterpillar forms of each species, this book offers a stunning and romantic catalog of the region’s lepidoptera. Entries include habitats, host plants, life phases, and tips on where to find each species of butterfly. O’Brien also recounts the best butterfly walks of the Greater Bay Area, from Monterey to Marin, and offers tips for finding, photographing, and fighting for these storied bugs. Interwoven are insights from O’Brien’s own deepening fixation with butterflies and the plight of protecting them from endangerment.
Named a Local Hero by Bay Nature in 2014, O’Brien has led efforts to restore Variable Checkerspots to the Presidio, monitored the endangered Mission Blue butterfly in the Marin Headlands, and has run the San Francisco butterfly count for the last 25 years—in the region that boasts the largest density of counts in the nation. His meticulously illustrated survey of Bay Area butterflies springs from the conviction that naming the creature in front of you is the first move toward conservation.
“In this book, I’m aiming for something a little different from the classic field guide,” says O’Brien. “Here is a book that celebrates realistic paintings, pithy anecdotes, conservation, and the downright joy these bugs have given me. Given all of us.”
Media Contact:
Kalie Caetano
Marketing & Publicity Director
For review copies, feature interest, and interview and image requests, get in touch: publicity@heydaybooks.com.
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Liam O’Brien is a self-taught lepidopterist and illustrator. He used to be a professional actor, having appeared in Les Misérables on Broadway, but shifted his powers of observation towards nature several decades back. He’s fascinated not only by butterflies but also by our relationships to them. He surveyed the county of San Francisco, where he lives, for which butterfly species remained in 2007 and 2009 and has been involved in the preservation and restoration of several local species throughout the Bay Area. O’Brien was the recipient of Bay Nature magazine’s Local Hero Award for Environmental Education in 2014. He lives in San Francisco. For more of his work, follow him on Instagram @robber_fly.
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Debuts November 2025 — In the Shadow of the Bridge
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Sumptuously Photographed Art Book Showcases the Wild Beauty and Biodiversity of the Birds of the Greater Bay Area
Photographer Dick Evans and award-winning writer Hannah Hindley explore the natural and social histories of Bay Area birds and the conservation dilemmas they face.
BERKELEY, CALIF. — More than half of all avian species in the United States can be found in the long shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge. It is here that the 4,000-mile avian superhighway known as the Pacific Flyway, converges. Stretching from Alaska to Patagonia, this massive migratory channel is trafficked by over a billion birds every year, making the greater San Francisco Bay Area one of the most remarkably biodiverse regions for birds, and a destination for bird lovers the world over. In the Shadow of the Bridge: Birds of the Bay Area captures the pockets of wilderness that make these Bay Area cities a birder’s paradise and gives voice to the environmental dilemmas that imperil it.
Featuring over 200 full color photographs by Dick Evans and poetic prose by award-winning writer Hannah Hindley, In the Shadow of the Bridge details the enduring abundance of avian biodiversity of the San Francisco Bay bioregion. A stunning array of native bird species roost among the nutrient-rich waters of the Bay and the sprawling California Delta that feeds it, ecosystems which also attract millions more winged visitors along their migratory journeys every year. This estuary is the largest of the Pacific Coast—and also among the most modified in the nation, causing habitat loss for both local and migratory species. Over the last half century, diminishing terrain combined with other shifting climatic conditions has caused over 3 billion birds to disappear from these skies.
Divided into three sections, Evans and Hindley explore the histories, communities, and complex conservation issues that intersect to make the greater Bay Area a remarkable place for the study of birds, and a potent catalyst for their preservation and protection. Informed and guided by the expertise of Point Blue Conservation Science, a nonprofit leader in climate-smart conservation, Evans and Hindley’s survey of this biodiversity hotspot extends for hundreds of miles in every direction of the Golden Gate Bridge—northward to Russian River, inland to Sacramento, southward to Monterey, and oceanward to the remote Farallon islands, accessible only by conservation scientists. With awe and admiration, the authors delight in the splendor of these winged wonders as well as in the human capacity to care for them.
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Praise for In the Shadow of the Bridge
“A celebration not only of the wonderful and varied birds of the Bay Area but also of the collaborative efforts to study and protect them. Photographer Dick Evans and essayist Hannah Hindley have beautifully captured the wonder and mystery of birds, the fascinating research to better understand them, and the joy of birding itself.” —Wayne Klockner, Executive Director, American Birding Association
“In the Shadow of the Bridge is a spectacular book, capturing the dance of light and color that can only be seen on the feathers of a bird. The Bay Area is a truly astonishing place for birds, and this photographic compendium celebrates its diversity of species, habitats, and behaviors in crystalline detail. From the mundane to the extraordinary, every scene in this book tells a story of wild beauty, patience, and discovery.” —John P. Dumbacher, Curator of Ornithology and Mammalogy, Institute of Biodiversity Science and Sustainability, California Academy of Sciences
“As graceful and impressive as the Golden Gate Bridge is, the natural world it spans is even more enchanting. This is the bay Dick Evans is drawn to and cannot turn away from. With his camera in hand, he seeks birds who grace air, sea and shore—from elegant Snowy Egrets to cartoonish Hooded Mergansers—as they thrive in a scene like no other. Dick’s passion for this place where ocean meets land is shared by Hannah Hindley whose words are as powerful as Dick’s photographs. Together they create a book, In the Shadow of the Bridge, that gives voice to a piece of California that nourishes an astonishing array of birds who deserve celebration.” —Chris Johns, Former Editor-in-Chief, National Geographic
“Anchored by Hannah Hindley’s liquid and radiant prose, the portfolio of Dick Evans attains something transcendent. His photography isn’t just about birds, it is about grace in evolution, its diversity, and its poetry.” —Obi Kaufmann, author of The California Field Atlas series
“In the Shadow of the Bridge beautifully weaves the lives of Bay Area birds into the region’s natural and urban landscapes, revealing how their presence shapes our sense of place. With lyrical prose and vivid observation, it celebrates the resilience, grace, and enduring connection between birds and the dynamic environment they inhabit.” —Glenn Phillips, Executive Director, Golden Gate Bird Alliance
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Kalie Caetano
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Dick Evans became interested in photography as a graduate student at Stanford University and continued his practice throughout a fifty-five-year career in the global metals industry that took him all over the world. San Francisco always remained home base, though, and he now lives in the city with his wife, Gretchen. Evans is the author of the photography books San Francisco and the Bay Area: The Haight-Ashbury Edition, The Mission (an Indie Book Award Finalist), and San Francisco’s Chinatown.
Hannah Hindley is a wilderness guide and the recipient of the Thomas Wood Award in Journalism, the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award, and the Barry Lopez Prize in Nonfiction. She graduated from Harvard with degrees in English and evolutionary biology; she holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from University of Arizona. Her environmental essays can be found in Bay Nature, The Sun, Hakai, and more. Hannah writes about small creatures, big landscapes, and the scientists who love them.
Debuts November 2024 — Portrait in Red
New Memoir Recounts A Madcap, Globetrotting Romp to Discover the Secrets of a Discarded Painting
Offbeat humor and countercultural sensibilities abound in this playful riff on art investigations from self-described flâneur L. John Harris
BERKELEY, CALIF. — When food writer L. John Harris is sent to Paris to write about the croque monsieur sandwich, the last thing he expects is to embark on the journey of a lifetime. However, after finding a half-finished portrait left on the street, unsigned but dated January 12, 1935, he decides to uncover as much as he can about the painting. Blending memoir, art criticism, and history, Portrait In Red: A Paris Obsession is the most unconventional real-life detective novel you will ever read (on sale November 5, 2024).
Harris’ search for information on this rescued painting transforms from a quest to uncover the individual artist and the mysterious subject at the center of the half-finished portrait to a deeper exploration into what makes art, and any endeavor, valuable. This investigation takes him from art appraisers to psychics, string theorists to tourists, Russian painters to friendly neighbors. Along the way, he encounters a host of eclectic characters, each offering a unique perspective on the painting and its enigmatic past. He hosts private viewings, guerrilla poster campaigns, and digital art competitions. With a sense of adventure, curiosity, and care, we witness someone’s trash turn into another’s cherished treasure as the search for art becomes its own art project.
Portrait In Red: A Paris Obsession is not just a story about a painting; it’s a celebration of creativity, perseverance, and the pursuit of meaning and beauty in the world full of abandoned talent.
Advance Praise for Portrait in Red
“What a fascinating odyssey L. John Harris recounts, a detective story that is deeply affecting in its humanity, credible in its research. The discarded painting that he picks up one day in Paris leads him on an irresistible quest for answers: Who created this compellingly frank image? Who is the girl portrayed? Who put the picture out with the trash? Here, fully embodied, is the passionate curiosity that drives all human seekers.”
—Lynne D. Ambrosini, Deputy Director and Chief Curator Emerita, Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati
“A lovely voice and a sweet, involving tale.”
—Lawrence Weschler, author of Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder
“Local color, endearing ruminations, and Harris’ obsessive love for the City of Light shine through in these pages. C’est formidable!”
—David Downie, author of A Taste of Paris
“A gem of a book—a journey of discovery that reveals much about art’s power to seduce us, and even more about the author’s passion for it.”
—Terrance Gelenter, host of Your American Friend in Paris
“Portrait in Red is a rich global tapestry that is inviting, inventive, and lively.”
—W. Scott Haine, author of The History of France
“An amusing and authentic story of a beautiful and mysterious painting.”
—Serge Sorokko, Serge Sorokko Gallery, San Francisco
“In Portrait in Red, L. John Harris takes on the role of a Paris flâneur who comments on all he sees, hears, feels, and tastes. Harris’s expert eye and palette tease out the nuances of life on the streets of the French capital.”
—Zack Rogow, coauthor of Colette Uncensored
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John Harris, born in Los Angeles, studied art and literature at UC Berkeley in the 1960s. Seduced by Berkeley’s food revolution in the 1970s, Harris worked at several iconic shops and restaurants and wrote The Book of Garlic (1974). He launched his cookbook company, Aris Books, in 1980 and his “Foodoodles” cartoon byline in Bay Area magazines led to a series of illustrated memoirs: Foodoodles (2010), Café French (2019) and My Little Plague Journal (2022). Mr. Harris coproduced with PBS in 2001 the film Los Romeros: The Royal Family of the Guitar and serves as the curator of the Harris Guitar Collection at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Harris’s next book is a history of Berkeley’s “gourmet ghetto,” to be published by Heyday.
Debuts November 2024 — The Laws Field Guide to Sierra Birds (Updated Edition)
Beloved Naturalist and Illustrator John Muir Laws Debuts an Updated Edition of His Classic Birds Guide
The Laws Field Guide to Sierra Birds features over 200 species with full-color illustrations to help hikers, birders, and nature enthusiasts identify the winged creatures of the Sierras.
BERKELEY, CALIF. — On the 20th anniversary of its original publication, Heyday proudly debuts an updated edition of John Muir Laws’ classic guide to the birds of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Born out of a partnership with the California Academy of Sciences, The Laws Field Guide to Sierra Birds (October 2024), serves as a quintessential resource for both experienced bird watchers and budding ornithologists, and after two decades in print and over 40,000 copies sold, has become an indispensable resource.
Featuring a unique color-coded taxonomy, in this conveniently portable guide, Laws walks readers through the rainbow of montane avifauna, from red to orange to yellow to green to blue birds, in addition to separate sections on waterfowl and raptors. This updated edition features all new illustrations from the celebrated nature journaler, whose bestselling field and drawing guides combine art and science to foster curiosity, community, and nature connection.
As president and co-founder of the Wild Wonder Foundation—a nonprofit dedicated to encouraging nature connection and conservation—Laws’ goal in all his work is to nurture and celebrate attention to the wonder and beauty in our natural world as an entry point to stewardship, conservation, and care. With The Laws Field Guide to the Sierra Birds, he invites readers to turn their eyes to the skies.
“My start in nature journaling and drawing came through workshops with John Muir Laws,” writes Amy Tan, author of The Backyard Bird Chronicles. “I not only learned to draw, I discovered I could live more deeply in the moment, with curiosity, awe, and gratitude. It was restorative in a time of turmoil.”
“My working definition of love is sustained, compassionate attention,” says John Muir Laws. “When you pay attention to another, it changes your relationship with them, and it also changes you. That attention is also what forms and sustains our relationship with the natural world. Your attention is one of the greatest gifts that you can give to the world. It is a celebration. It is a song of connection. It is a prayer to the wonder of what is around us.”
With his updated field guide to Sierra birds, Laws invites all readers to share in the joy of attuning to nature, to discover what the birds are doing, and to use this experience to open up to the beauty and diversity of the Sierra.
Reader Praise for Sierra Birds
“This lightweight book is easy to use, the illustrations are beautiful and easy to compare with the sightings, and it is easy to carry. Terrific reference to bring birds in the field into the heart and carry close in memory.”
—Bailey M.
“I’m jealous of the friend I’m gifting this to, and I’ll probably be getting myself a copy as well. I love how easy this is to use for identification! A must for anyone living in the Sierras.”
—Mary
“Another beautifully illustrated and easy to use field guide of Sierran birds. And if you ever get a chance to see John Muir Laws give a presentation, do so!”
—Glen W.
“This is a well prepared compact reference. Nature lovers can find excellent identification pictures and descriptive narrative to aid in enjoying our feathered friends.”
—Anonymous
“Finally a good bird book for Sierra hikers! This book is very easy to use because the birds can easily be found simply by looking at the color of what you’re seeing. It’s excellent for kids and advanced birders alike.”
—J. Haskel
“Everyone with a plan to hike the Sierras, or owns a home there should have one.”
—Sue L.
Media Contact:
Kalie Caetano
Marketing & Publicity Director, Heyday
For review copies, feature interest, and interview and image requests, get in touch: publicity@heydaybooks.com.
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John Muir Laws is a naturalist, educator, and artist with degrees in conservation and resource studies, wildlife biology, and scientific illustration. His books include The Laws Field Guide to the Sierra Nevada, The Laws Guide to Drawing Birds, The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling, and (with Emilie Lygren), and How to Teach Nature Journaling, all published by Heyday. He is cofounder of the Wild Wonder Foundation (wildwonder.org), an organization encouraging nature connection through art and science. Visit his website at johnmuirlaws.com.
Debuts September 2024 — California Against the Sea (paperback)
Pulitzer Finalist’s Prescient Exploration of Sea Level Rise Hailed as A Critical Guide to the Future
In her celebrated and awards-winning book, Los Angeles Times environmental reporter Rosanna Xia reveals what we stand to lose along our vanishing shorelines—unless we can imagine a more climate-wise path forward.
PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award Winner
A 2024 Great Read from Great Places
Selected by the Library of Congress and the California Center for the Book
A 2024 California Book Award Winner
Selected by the Commonwealth Club of California, Californiana Category
A 2024 Golden Poppy Award Winner
Voted best nonfiction book of the year by the California Independent Booksellers Alliances (CALIBA)
2024 Energy Writer of the Year
Awards by the American Energy Society
A 2024 Nautilus Silver Medal Winner
Restorative Earth Practices Category
A Best Book of 2023, Architect’s Newspaper • A Favorite Book of 2023, San Francisco Chronicle • A 2025 California Book Club pick by Alta Journal
BERKELEY, CALIF. — Wherever land meets sea, heating oceans swell into higher-than-high tides and city-leveling storms. Venice sinks, Louisiana shrinks, Indoneisans flee their seaside capital, and North Carolina’s beaches are disappearing like a time lapse with no end. For the last hundred years, California’s 1,200-mile Pacific coastline had enjoyed relative calm, but shifting tides exacerbated by climate change are bringing this serene century to a screeching close. In California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline, now releasing in paperback (September 24, 2024) and audiobook, Pulitzer finalist Rosanna Xia dives deep into the stakes, stopgaps, and potential paths forward for the 27 million people who call this coastline home.
By century’s end, sea level rise could threaten to push the Pacific shore inland by a measure of multiple football fields, an anticipated surge that could imperil tens to hundreds of billions of dollars of human settlement to say nothing of the risk posed to human and non-human life. Xia, a veteran environmental reporter for the LA Times, voyages across the West Coast to pull the curtain back on the trepidations of scientists, the tenacity of activists, and the battles intensifying in more than 20 coastal communities dotting the shoreline as they grapple with rising waters. The challenge, Xia says, is How do we get more people to care?
Through graceful in-depth reporting Xia explores how vested interests have trumped science, how low-income communities bare the brunt of environmental catastrophe (and are poised to do so again), how an attitude of human supremacy has hobbled our imaginations to envision what the coast could be, and how we may yet forestall impending devastation if we can embrace our collective capacity for change—in time.
“Few people are more qualified to explain and analyze this landscape,” writes Science. “[Xia] breathes exquisite detail and dialogue into a rich narrative held up by years of beat reporting.”
Declared a 2024 Great Read from Great Places by the Library of Congress, and winner of the PEN E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, the California Book Award, the Nautilus Book Award, and the Golden Poppy (voted on by more than 230 independent booksellers), California Against the Sea is a triumph of ecoreportage, an indispensable future-forward book that has earned a place among the pantheon of watershed environmental treatises.
“Coastal California offers a case study in what happens when some try to control a landscape and others move with it, a story deftly unfurled by Rosanna Xia in California Against the Sea,” writes the jury of the PEN E.O. Wilson prize in their citation of the book. “While largely focused on coastal erosion, California Against the Sea stokes a universal sense of urgency,” says Wesley Minter of Third Place Books (Seattle, WA). “This is a notable debut that deftly balances the hard realities of the present with a sense of pragmatic hope for the future.”
Advance Praise for California Against the Sea
“Just as the coast defines the liminal world between land and sea, so too does Rosanna Xia’s remarkable book exist in the overlap between development and erosion, between geological forces and human desire, between our ambitious past and our tenuous future. It’s viscerally urgent, thoroughly reported, and compellingly written—a must-read for our uncertain times.”
—ED YONG, author of An Immense World
“This book should be required reading for Californians—and all Americans. Exquisite and wrenching, Rosanna Xia has written an essential book that shows us what we stand to lose.”
—LIZZIE JOHNSON, author of Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire
“Fans of Xia’s work for the L.A. Times will recognize her virtuosic blend of propulsive boots-on-the-ground storytelling, explanatory reporting, and genuine curiosity and love for place. A profound and timely exploration of humanity’s various and shifting relationships to coastlines and the forces that shape them by one of the great environmental reporters working today.”
—LISA WELLS, author of Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World
“Xia’s prophetic and perceptive book reveals a California coastline denied by centuries of settlers more intent on dreaming than facing the unsteady reality of the living ocean’s edge. California Against the Sea is the invitation we need today to enter a future where we learn to work with nature instead of against it. Xia’s message should be heeded everywhere ocean meets land.”
—MEERA SUBRAMANIAN, author of A River Runs Again: India’s Natural World in Crisis, from the Barren Cliffs of Rajasthan to the Farmlands of Karnataka
“In the midst of the climate crisis, can the people of California treat the rising Pacific Ocean as something other than an adversary? In California Against the Sea, Rosanna Xia argues persuasively that such a transformation is not only possible but already underway, inspired by lessons from deep history and the recent past. Rigorously reported and beautifully written, this book is a crucial guide to the future.”
—MICHELLE NIJHUIS, author of Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction
“Xia’s California Against the Sea deftly charts the past, present and future of California’s changing coastlines in order to retrieve hope for more sustainable futures from headlines of environmental loss. This lucid account shows that sea level rise is less an intractable problem than an urgent invitation to rethink our relationships with oceans and with one another. A beautiful, revelatory and prescient book.”
—LUCAS BESSIRE, author of Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains
”Rosanna Xia’s ability to move effortlessly between the journalist’s voice, the historian’s voice, and even the poet’s voice makes her story of our climate precarity more than an account of evidence and circumstance. The book is rife with humanity, nuanced and powerful because of it.”
—OBI KAUFMANN, author of The Coasts of California
Post-Publication Praise for California Against the Sea
“What happens if, as the world warms and the Pacific Ocean rises, California’s coast and beaches drown? That’s the crisis that Los Angeles Times environmental reporter Rosanna Xia investigates in her thoughtful, balanced, deeply researched and reported California Against the Sea.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“When do seawalls make sense? And when is it better to give in to the tides? In California Against the Sea, Xia writes about the difficult realities of trying to incorporate fairness into our tally of costs and benefits.”
—The New Yorker
“An unsparing look at California’s contentious battle to cope with a changing climate.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Few people are more qualified to explain and analyze this landscape. Xia’s reporting on this topic earned her a spot as a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in 2020. In this, her first nonfiction book, she breathes exquisite detail and dialogue into a rich narrative held up by years of beat reporting.”
—Science
“Xia is a sympathetic and careful observer, detailing the politics and (sometimes questionable) ethics of American settlement along the California coast, the natural and human-driven processes propelling change, and how people are confronting a new reality where the high tides of today will become the low tides of tomorrow. Tension — with time, with ourselves — is at the heart of California Against the Sea, the winner of the 2024 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, a book of beauty, resilience, empathy, and rebirth.”
—Jury Citation, PEN E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award
“A beautifully written, highly relevant book about not just our relationship with and how we think about the natural world, but also how we relate to each other.”
—Book Riot
“The stories of each community Xia highlights give you hope that climate adaptation is possible.”
—Powell’s Books
“Perhaps the most important takeaway from this important book is that we are all in this together. Seemingly at-odds terminology like ‘managed retreat’ and ‘seawalls’ needn’t be fundamentally at odds. Not if we acknowledge a shared set of facts and begin planning for a future California coast that will remain hospitable, not just for us, but for our children and our children’s children.”
—Pacifica Tribune
“A book that should be read by everyone who lives along California’s coastline, and everyone who cares about this jagged, unpredictable marvel of a landscape.”
—Santa Barbara Independent
“Xia makes a compelling case that the way California has treated its coastline for generations—as a desirable commodity to be parceled off and sold to the wealthy, or elsewhere, as a dumping ground for industrial infrastructure—was never sustainable to begin with, and this moment offers us an invitation to rethink our relationship with the ocean we cherish.”
—Berkeleyside
“Our coastline is shifting, far faster than it ever has before. Xia covers these complicated issues with a deft hand. I finished the book informed, enlightened, and even a little bit hopeful for the future.”
—Napa Valley Register
“This is a very important book, which will resonate for decades.”
—Sausalito Books by the Bay
Media Contact:
Kalie Caetano
Marketing & Publicity Director, Heyday
For review copies, feature interest, and interview and image requests, get in touch: publicity@heydaybooks.com.
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Rosanna Xia is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and an environmental reporter for the Los Angeles Times, where she specializes in stories about the coast and ocean. She directed and produced the award-winning feature documentary film, Out of Plain Sight, and her celebrated book, California Against the Sea, received the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, a gold medal from the California Book Awards, and a “Great Reads from Great Places” citation from the Library of Congress, among other honors. She has been praised for her investigative reporting and narrative storytelling, and her coverage of a toxic dumpsite in the deep ocean has been anthologized in the Best American Science and Nature Writing series.
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