Obi Kaufmann, author of The State of Fire (published by Heyday), in a conversation titled “Our Beautiful, Burning World” at the 2025 Bay Area Book Festival with Leora Kava, Lauren Markham, and Rachel Richardson. Moderated by Vijaya Nagarajan and co-presented by Litquake.

The Marsh Theater, 2120 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA.

In the face of climate catastrophe, it’s natural to react with grief, sorrow, and hopelessness to the constant reminders of how fragile and impermanent our world is. Lauren Markham reckons with her grief in Immemorial, a speculative synthesis of reporting, memoir, and essay describing her desire to memorialize something in the process of being lost and mourn the abstracted casualties of what’s to come. The climate crisis affects all areas of our lives, especially motherhood for Rachel Richardson, who questions how best to raise her young daughters amidst a string of record-breaking fires across the California landscape in Smother, a collection of poems that weaves environmental and physical predation—both on the earth and on the female body. Obi Kaufmann offers a solution in The State of Fire, presenting fire as a force of regeneration rather than apocalypse, essential for a healthy and biodiverse Golden State, and sharing a refreshingly hopeful vision of California’s future in which we learn from the teachings of our surroundings. Assistant Professor of Critical Pacific Islands & Oceania Studies Leora Kava brings a piece of this future to life in Indigenous Pacific Islander Eco-Literatures, an anthology of contemporary eco-literature that celebrate the beauty and cultural symbolism of natural elements while bravely addressing the frightening realities of the climate crisis. A future of regeneration is precarious but reassuringly within reach, and this panel, moderated by Environmental Studies Associate Professor Vijaya Nagarajan, will be both a validation of our sorrow for the burning world and a beacon of hope as we work to revitalize it.