Grace Talusan — Restless Books New Immigrant Writing Prize Winner— will speaking to celebrate the release of her memoir The Body Papers at The Bay Area Book Festival on May 5th. for an event called On Not Mothering, at Hotel Shattuck Plaza Crystal Ballroom 

Whether it's by choice or chance, not mothering is still considered taboo. Talked about in hushed tones and regarded with pity or disdain, women who don't mother are made to feel like failures. But what are the windows of possibility opened up by a child-free life? What other kinds of nurturing can happen in its place? Brazen in their vulnerability, Sheila Heti ("Motherhood"), Grace Talusan ("The Body Papers"), and Emilie Pine ("Notes to Self") break the silence on not mothering, addressing the assumptions, stigmas, and surprising rewards head-on. 

Grace Talusan was born in the Philippines and raised in New England. A graduate of Tufts University and the MFA Program in Writing at UC Irvine, she is the recipient of a U.S. Fulbright Fellowship to the Philippines and an Artist Fellowship Award from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Talusan teaches the Essay Incubator at GrubStreet and at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts. She is the Fannie Hurst Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University for 2019–2021. The Body Papers, winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, is her first book.

Sheila Heti is the author of eight books of fiction and non-fiction, including the novels Ticknor, Motherhood, and How Should a Person Be? and the story collection, The Middle Stories. She was named one of "The New Vanguard" by The New York Times book critics; a list of fifteen women writers from around the world who are "shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century." Her books have been translated into twenty-one languages.

Emilie Pine is associate professor of modern drama at University College Dublin, Ireland. Pine has published widely as an academic and critic on culture and memory. Notes to Self is her first collection of personal essays.

Where: The Bay Area Book Festival

When: May 4-5th, 2019