The Program
6:00 - Reception with the authors
6:30 - Readings, discussion, and Q&A
7:30 - Book signing
Looking to discover your new favorite author? Join us for our signature reading series, Story Is the Thing, to hear four stellar Northern California fiction authors read from their debut and latest titles.
Our guests are Ellen Barker for Nothing North of Delmar, a novel of one woman’s post-college foray into the adult realities of landlords, economics, and urban politics; Portia Elan for her dazzling adventure across centuries and continents in search of the things that hold us together, Homebound; Andrew Lam for his literary exploration of love, lust, and loss among Vietnamese immigrants in America, Stories from the Edge of the Sea; and finally Victoria Tatum for her Chinatown-meets-Grapes-of-Wrath novel More Than Any River.
The Line Up
Ellen Barker grew up in Missouri and had a front-row seat to the demographic shifts, the hope, and the turmoil of the civil rights era of the 1960s. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Urban Studies from Washington University in Saint Louis, where she developed a passion for how cities work, and don’t. She began her career as an urban planner in Saint Louis and then spent many years working for large consulting firms specializing in urban infrastructure, first as a tech writer-editor and later managing large data systems. She now lives in Northern California with her husband. Her prior novels include the East of Troost series.
Portia Elan studied history at Stanford University and earned an MFA from the University of Victoria, British Columbia, before returning to California, where she has worked as a teacher and public librarian. A former Lambda Literary Fellow, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her wife and an abundance of cats. Homebound is her first novel.
Andrew Lam is a long time Bay Area journalist and author who writes about Vietnamese immigrants. He has published 4 books, including Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora, his memoir of being a Vietnamese refugee in America, which won a 2006 PEN Award. Birds of Paradise Lost, his first collection of short stories, won the Josephine Miles Literary Award. His most recent book, Stories from the Edge of the Sea, explores love and loss among Vietnamese in the Bay Area. He is the subject of a PBS documentary called My Journey Home. Lam lives in San Francisco and travels to his homeland Vietnam frequently. He is working on a novel.
Victoria Tatum received her MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State and her MA in Education from UC Santa Cruz. Her first novel, The Virgin’s Children, was released by a Canadian publisher formerly known as Rain Publishing in 2006. She and her husband have two adult children and live in Santa Cruz, California.
COVID SAFETY PROTOCOLS: We strongly encourage attendees to wear masks at our events, although they will NOT be required. We will have masks available for attendees who want them. Do NOT attend the event if you, or any member of your family, have any respiratory symptoms (e.g. cough, runny nose, and/or sore throat), or have had a significant exposure to someone who has tested positive for COVID-19.
ACCESSIBILITY: To request an accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) for this event, please email events [at] keplers [dot] org at least one week prior to the event.