LitCrawl 2026
One of the most anticipated literary nights of the year, San Francisco’s Lit Crawl is a massive, one-night literary pub crawl through San Francisco’s Mission District that caps off our annual Litquake Festival. Lit Crawl SF brings together 250+ authors and close to 5,000 fans for the world’s largest free pop-up literary event.
Started in 2004, Lit Crawl cultivates a unique, resonant brand: smart and silly, worldly and wacky, with events presented in venues usual (bars, cafes, galleries, and bookstores) and unusual (tattoo parlors, barbershops, and laundromats).
Saturday, October 24, 2026
Time: 5:00pm – 9:00pm
Admission: FREE
RSVP to the Facebook event:
5:00pm – 6:00pm
Spill the TEA
A Tasting Menu of the Untranslatable and Unsayable
Curators: Yuliya Patsay.Anna Zhirova. Olga Zilberbourg
Readers: Evgeniya Dame, Ksenia Lakovic, Maggie Levantovskaya, Masha Rumer, Jen Siraganian, Irena Smith, Kristina Ten, Emcee, Yuliya Patsay
English is great at absorbing words from other languages, like ‘shadenfreude’ or ‘chutzpah’. But the words you probably know from Transeurasian languages, from Turkic to Slavic, are more ominous: kompromat, horde, vampire.
True, wars, including Russia’s ongoing assault of Ukraine, have dominated our newsfeeds. Luckily, the TEA Collective of Transeurasian Writers & Translators can help us move past the headlines and enrich our vocabulary and understanding of life elsewhere to include joy, camaraderie, and resilience in the face of fear and loss.
The TEA Collective invites you to a literary tea party with stories by mixed-genre writers with roots from Serbia, Ukraine, Russia, and the Armenian Diaspora that put into words what is difficult to say and nearly impossible to translate. We’ll integrate music and “tasting notes,” words in other languages hidden under your seats that will help us give voice to experiences and feelings that we didn’t know we had. See more on puncturedlines Book Sales provided by Globus Books
6:30pm – 7:30pm
Circle and Fist
Holding Tenderness while Fighting for the World We Need and Deserve
Curator: Tatiana Chaterji
Join restorative justice practitioners Tatiana Chaterji, Arnoldo Garcia, Rakhii Holman, and Rha Bowden through their poetry, music, and storytelling from the frontlines of heart-centered struggle. As RJ facilitators, we sit in a circle and facilitate repair, community-building, and healing with people suffering from systemic neglect and violence. Our spirits expand to hold grief and rage. As writers, musicians, and artists, we also feed fires of hope. This event is a window into the work of sustaining ourselves while witnessing immense levels of oppression – a window and the wind through that window, fresh air, new breath, breathing together toward freedom for us all. We will pull from our cultural traditions to express the idea of “circle and first”: stretching to both support others and simultaneously resist, agitate, and push back against injustice.
8:00pm – 9:00pm
SACRAMENTO NOIR
MAYHEM IN THE CAPITAL
Curator: Naomi Williams
Readers: Luis Avalos, Shelley Blanton-Stroud, Maureen O’Leary, Janet Rodriguez, Nora Rodriguez Camagna, and Jen Soong.
That city you all drive past on 80 and rarely think twice about? It’s both lovelier and creepier than you know. Join 7 authors from 2025’s award-winning SACRAMENTO NOIR anthology for an hour of unsettling tales of capital crimes and misdemeanors. Moderated by Naomi Williams. Come for the spine-tingling stories; stay for some fun audience giveaways!
Spill the TEA
Evgeniya Dame has published fiction in Zoetrope: All-Story, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, Subtropics, and Joyland. She is a recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship and a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, where she currently teaches in the Continuing Studies program. She lives in Berkeley.
Ksenia Lakovic is a bilingual writer in English and Serbian. A native of Belgrade, she moved to Los Angeles for PhD studies at UCLA, and now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Maggie Levantovskaya was born in Ukraine and grew up in San Francisco. She works as a Teaching Professor in the English department at Santa Clara University. Her writing can be found in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, Potomac Review, Pithead Chapel, Another Chicago Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, Longreads, and elsewhere.
Masha Rumer is the author of Parenting with an Accent (Beacon Press), winner of the 2023 Sarton Award for Nonfiction. Her writing about immigrant identity, parenting, and bilingualism has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, and elsewhere. Her newspaper reporting has won awards from the New York Press Association. She was born in the former Soviet Union and is currently working on her first novel.
Jen Siraganian is an Armenian-American writer, educator, and former Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, California. Her debut book, Everything Has Been Moved, Even the Dead, won the 2026 Perugia Press Prize and will be released in September 2026.
Irena Smith is the author of the award-winning memoir The Golden Ticket and the recently published Troika: Three Generations, Three Days, and a Very American Road Trip. She writes a Substack on Personal Statements and The Curmudgeon’s Guide to College Admissions.
Kristina Ten is the author of Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine, out last year from Stillhouse Press. Her stories appear in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction, and elsewhere. She has won the McSweeney’s Stephen Dixon Award and been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and the Locus Award. She was born in Moscow and raised in the States, with roots in Siberia, Georgia, and the Koryo-saram diaspora.
Emcee, Yuliya Patsay is a writer and comedian navigating American life with Soviet programming. She’s the author of the memoir Until the Last Pickle and creator of the Substack Buckle Up Bubelah.
Circle and Fist
Tatiana Chaterji is a classroom and popular educator, theater-based healing facilitator, and conflict worker. Her new book, Everyday Restorative Justice: Moving from Crisis Response to Positive School Culture (Teachers College Press) drops into the heart of pain in order to transform the brokenness around us. Tati’s poetry and lyric essays have been published by Seventh Wave, Rise Up Review, and other literary journals.
“Rahkii “Hyp” Holman is an Oakland-based, Roxbury-born artist and social justice advocate whose work began in socially conscious Hip-Hop, touring Europe and the U.S. He is the founder of Assinyeola Music Publishing, a mission-driven company advancing healing from multi-generational trauma through sync licensing, documentary filmmaking, and restorative justice curriculum. He is currently touring the U.S. with Honoring Amilcar, a documentary about his great uncle, liberation leader Amilcar Cabral. He is also a co-founder of Atunse Justice League, a restorative justice training, consultation, and facilitation company. Read more here.
SACRAMENTO NOIR
Luis Avalos is a Salvadoran-American fiction writer and essayist who earned an MFA in Creative Writing at UC Davis. His writing interlaces social, political and theoretical frameworks to move beyond one-dimensional narratives of marginalized people.
Shelley Blanton-Stroud is the author of the novel An Unlikely Prospect and the Jane Benjamin historical trilogy. A former writing instructor in the California State University system, she currently serves on the board of the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies at Claremont McKenna College.
Maureen O’Leary lives in Sacramento. Her novel The Ones Who Loved You releases in January 2027 from Counterpoint Press.
Janet Rodriguez is a writer, teacher, and editor living in Northern California. She is the author of the memoir, Making an American Family, A Recipe in Five Generations, and has been featured in Eclectica, Pangyrus, The Rumpus, and Hobart, among others. She holds an MFA in Creative writing from Antioch University, Los Angeles.
Nora Rodriguez Camagna grew up in the California migrant camps, Texas, and Mexico, and graduated from UC Berkeley. Her essay “Boysenberry Girls” was published in The Common’s Farmworker Portfolio.
Jen Soong is a writer, artist and educator. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Rumpus, The Audacity and Best Small Fictions.
Naomi Williams is the author of the novel Landfalls and the forthcoming story collection Strange Trouble. She splits her time between Sacramento and San Francisco.