Our beloved Bay Area Book Festival is back with another exciting event: Berkeley #Unbound, an all-day, free virtual mini-festival with, of course, two riveting youth programs.

On Sunday, October 4 we will kick-off at 11:00 am with PROTEST + PRINT: Girls Using Words and Pictures for Activism with Girls Garage founder, builder, humanitarian design activist Emily Pilloton. Emily will be in conversation with HyeYoon Song, artist and educator and lead instructor for Girls Garage’s Protest + Print cohort, and Malaya Conui, student and visual artist.

 At Girls Garage in Berkeley, girls use power tools to build the world they want to see. But a different kind of world-building also takes place at Girls Garage: the kind that creates a vision for a better and more equitable future. Proving that words and pictures can be just as transformative as power tools, a class called Protest + Print empowers girls to translate their hopes, dreams, fears, and anger into activism around the issues they care about most. Led by instructor HyeYoon Song and Executive Director Emily Pilloton, Protest + Print is a cohort of high school girls channeling the legacy of printmaking to make art that’s visually arresting, powerfully participatory, and unapologetically activist. Also featuring teen Protest + Print participant and recent high school graduate Malaya Conui (Oakland School For The Arts, 2020), this conversation will center on how art and writing can amplify activist voices, particularly in a political moment charged with racial and gender inequity.

And check out our previous YA programs with awesome authors like Lois Lowry, Jan Terlouw, Misa Sugiura and Rahul Kanakia!