Mark your calendars for 7 pm on June 6, 2025, at NOISEBRIDGE, 272 Capp Street!

San Francisco Writers Workshop is hosting our annual benefit to support NOISEBRIDGE, the venue that has been generously providing us with a space to meet for the past three years. A legendary anarchist hackerspace in the San Francisco’s Mission district, NOISEBRIDGE doesn’t charge writers to gather every Tuesday night, but the organization certainly has a large rent bill to pay. This is our chance to help ensure their and our own future!

We’re delighted that this year our list of featured readers includes Tamim Ansary, who moderated our workshop for 22 years. Tamim will be presenting his new book, TRUTHER NARRATIVES. Alongside Tamim, we’re incredibly proud to introduce a few of our current regulars. We will have a book raffle, a storytelling game, food, and an opportunity to tour Noisebridge. PLEASE HELP US SPREAD THE WORD!

Suggested donation starts at $10, and please give as much as you can! If you can’t come to the event and want to help, please use one of the donations options listed on Noisebridge’s website.

Boasting a woodworking space, electronics, sewing, and music rooms, 3D printing and laser cutting equipment, and meetups on everything from philosophy and writing to game design, math, physics, and AI, NOISEBRIDGE is a bustling community. They strive for excellence among their membership as well as consensus on all of their decisions. They are a “do-ocracy,” encouraging members to get engaged on all aspects of running a collaborative space. None of this is easy to achieve, and it’s been inspiring to see this community work through issues that arise.

Tamim Ansary was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, and came to the United States as a junior in high school. His new book, Truther Narratives, looks at conspiracy theory as a special case of a larger issue: the role that narrative plays in shaping social reality. Ansary is the author of The Invention of Yesterday that looks at world history as the story of ever-increasing human interconnectedness, Destiny Disrupted, a history of the world through Islamic eyes, Games without Rules, a history of Afghanistan from an insider’s point of view, West of Kabul, East of New York, a literary memoir about straddling a cultural fault line in the world (Islam and the West), The Widow’s Husband, a historical novel set against the background of the First Anglo-Afghan war, and some 30 nonfiction books for children. In Road Trips, he tells the story of morphing from an Afghan into an American just as the sixties were giving way to the seventies. Ansary’s work has won the Northern California Book Award for nonfiction and was selected as a One City One Book pick by both San Francisco and Waco, Texas. In 2001, an email he sent to 20 friends reputedly became the first viral phenomenon of the Internet Age, reaching tens of millions around the world within days. Ansary directed the San Francisco Writers Workshop for 22 years.

Monya Baker spent close to a decade as a senior editor with Nature magazine. Her reported articles have appeared in the Economist, New Scientist, Slate, Wired, and elsewhere. She has published fiction with Nature Futures and Flash Fiction Magazine. Her novel-in-progress, That They Might Have Joy, placed first in the Mendocino County Writers’ Conference Contest. She is a co-moderator at the San Francisco Writers Workshop.

Lilian Delcid is a local writer born in Maryland and raised in the Mission. She specializes in obsessing over and torturing the people in her head who, strangely, always have the same problems she does. Her inspirations include Matthew McIntosh, Emma Donoghue, and Sidney Gish.

Brian Hurley is the Publishing Director at Sasquatch Books, an independent publisher distributed by Penguin Random House. He has been an editor at Oxford University Press, The Rumpus, and a data-driven startup that was acquired by PRH. Books he edited have been Amazon and Wall Street Journal bestsellers, and have sold over 500,000 copies. Authors he has worked with have won the Pulitzer Prize and been named one of Time’s 100 most influential people. He founded a small press called Fiction Advocate devoted to innovative literary criticism. He was named a Rising Star by Publishers Weekly in 2024. A native San Franciscan, he is working on a novel.

Zero Ramos Laforga is a Filipino queer trans poet, photographer, musician, and educator based in San Francisco. His poetry has previously been published in Ignatian Literary Magazine, The Quarter(ly) Journal, Here: a poetry journal, and most recently The Ana. 

Jasper Lydon is a researcher and writer on America’s alternative communities, from anarchist compounds in New Mexico to urban farmer collectives in Detroit. Their work has been featured in HuffPost and Communities Magazine. More notably, they have shucked over 2,000 different types of okra.