Since we’ve returned to in-person meetings after the pandemic, Noisebridge Hackerspace has provided us a space to hold our weekly meetings, for free.
Noisebridge is a unique space, allowing room for artists, makers, coders, and creatives of all kinds to experiment with their projects. A membership-based organization, it survives based on financial contributions of its paying members, while allowing groups like ours to meet on its premises without any charge.
Due to a series of financial setbacks (including the need to upgrade its infrastructure to code), this organization finds itself in a precarious situation. They lost access to some of the funds they were counting on to make rent. While they have a path toward financial solvency (in part, by growing their membership base), they are asking for our help to fundraise as a stop-gap measure.
For us writers, Noisebridge has been an incredibly welcoming home. While we remain committed to the SFWW being free for all participants, think about what you’d spend on a writing class or working with a coach. Ask yourself, isn’t it worth a few dollars a month to have a place like Noisebridge that I can come to?
Dear San Francisco Writers Workshop community, we hope to see many of you at our Lit Crawl event on October 25, 2025. Our theme this year is “We’ve Got Notes for You!” Five of our current and former regulars will read their work and tell us how workshop feedback has informed their revision process. Then, we’ll offer you all a chance to provide a live critique on a piece of writing!
As many of you know, Lit Crawl is the final night of San Francisco’s annual Litquake festival. Beginning October 9, Litquake is bringing a slew of amazing international and local authors for signings, readings, panels, and parties. Then, it all ends with a literary pub crawl (aka Lit Crawl) through the Mission District. Our event is scheduled for Phase 2 of 3.
We will see you on: October 25, 2025 at 6:30 pm Noisebridge, 272 Capp Street
Our featured readers:
Beverly Parayno is from East San Jose. Her debut story collection WILDFLOWERS (PAWA Press, 2023) was shortlisted for the 43rd Annual Northern California Book Award in Fiction, winner of a 2024 IPPY Bronze Medal and 2024 National Indie Excellence Award in AAPI Fiction. She lives in the Sierra Nevada foothills.
Jo Beckett-King is the author of the Bea Bellerose mysteries published by Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. Her debut middle-grade novel, The House of Found Objects, was published in July 2025, and a sequel is scheduled for release in summer 2026. In addition to her middle-grade fiction, she writes for adults; her work has been listed for the Bath Children’s Novel Award, the Bristol Short Story Prize, and the Bridport Prize in the UK.
Peng Ngin left his native Malaysia to attend Vassar College. He moved to the Bay Area for graduate school at UC Berkeley, where he took his first creative writing classes. Peng returned to his lifelong interest in writing and literature during the pandemic. He lives in San Francisco and works as an investment manager.
Tim Sullivan is a San Francisco–based educator and theatre director whose fiction explores reinvention, queer life, class, and labor. He’s writing a debut novel inspired by his time as a toll collector on the Massachusetts Turnpike.
Tony Tepper: 1954 Born, lovechild of Audrey Hepburn and Sherlock Holmes, left on doorstep of Tingpangoli Monastery in the Pamir Mountains. 1963 Learns to eat oatmeal. 1995 Listens to Bob and Ray while working for Dickensian firm, accidentally swallows butterfly. 2012 Falls in love with language, but love is unrequited. 2023 Dreams of beauty in eye of storm.
Our own Jo Beckett-King will appear at Books Inc. in the Marina tomorrow, Sunday, August 3rd, 2025, at 5 pm, to present her debut THE HOUSE OF FOUND OBJECTS.
This mystery about a twelve-year-old Bea from Passaic, New Jersey is aimed at middle-grade readers, so feel free to bring your kids (RSVP here) and/or buy a copy for yourself and all the young readers in your life. Jo has been a loyal regular at SFWW for the last few years and we’ve loved her novels and stories and benefited greatly from her feedback. If you can’t make it to the event tomorrow, please order a copy through Books Inc. or elsewhere and make sure that your local library carries a few copies. Let’s make sure Jo’s debut is a huge success!
More about the book: Bea is visiting her family in Paris for the summer when her grandmother’s most precious heirloom—a drawing by Henri Matisse—goes missing. After a cryptic clue arrives on Bea’s doorstep suggesting its whereabouts, Bea is determined to pursue the lead. Without the French skills to navigate her way around the landmarks of Paris, she teams up with her cousin, Céline, whose clear-eyed French directness makes her a perfect partner for curious, problem-solving Bea. The girls embark on a city-wide search, deciphering riddles, solving puzzles, and cracking codes as they try to locate the Matisse, find a thief, and identify their mysterious benefactor.
We look forward to celebrating Jo’s book with some of you tomorrow!
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!
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.
Dear writers, this year, we’ll be taking TWO Tuesdays OFF for the holidays. There will be no meetings on December 24 and December 31. We will be back at Noisebridge on January 7, 2025, 7-9 pm.
Happy writing! Your moderators, Judy, Kurt, Monya, Olga
San Francisco Writers Workshop is proud to host an event at the annual Lit Crawl festival. Come out to the San Francisco’s Mission district to celebrate literature and our community. Bring friends and help us spread the word!
When: Saturday, October 26, 6:30 – 7:30 pm
Where: Noisebridge, 272 Capp Street, San Francisco
What: A reading and a participatory literary game!
Writers bios:
Ken Grosserode is an attorney and writer in San Francisco. He lives with his partner in what was once a nunnery. His influences include Iris Murdoch, Donna Tarrt, and the ghosts of various Catholic nuns.
Karen Gu is a software engineer and writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work explores power, identity and feminism through science fiction, fantasy, and friends.
Jiyoung Han is a writer from Seoul, South Korea. She daylights as a sustainability researcher looking to make carbon reduction easier for everyone. Her writing often uses fantastical elements to examine the impacts of colonialism on people’s day-to-day lives.
Kurt is a fiction writer, focused on strange tales of idiocy and culture, inspired by Northern California.
Judy Viertel has been published in Gargoyle Magazine, Gold Dust Magazine, Identity Theory, and Short Story America: Anthology Five. She’s one of four moderators for that venerable but ornery West Coast institution, the San Francisco Writers Workshop. If you were wondering if she can dance the shim sham, the answer is yes. She certainly can.
On July 27, 2024, San Francisco Writers Workshop will take part in Oakland’s Festival for Literary Arts & Performance, the annual BEASTCRAWL. Please come to support our writers in the Phase 2 of the fesitval and come early to attend Phase 1, and stay late to cheer for groups reading in Phase 3. Study the FULL PROGRAM of the festival in advance and make a walking map!
Details for our event:
July 27, 5:30 pm Binny’s Cocktail Lounge 532 8th St, Oakland, CA
Connor O’Mara is a writer from northern Colorado. He often writes about tragedy set in the Mountain-West, finding inspiration from the people and towns he loved.
Cynthia Gómez writes horror and other types of speculative fiction, set primarily in Oakland. The Nightmare Box and Other Stories, her first collection, was released in July 2024.
Oakland-based David Ira Cleary has published in Asimov’s, Interzone, Persistent Visions, and elsewhere. His work is included in The Year’s Top Robot and AI Stories, coming out in October 2024.
Joel Streicker’s fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and translations of Spanish-language literature have appeared hither and yon. He’s literally a prize-winning author—just ask him! Or check out his website: https://joelstreicker.com.
Madison Wilson is a fiction writer from the Bay Area. She is interested in telling stories about forgotten women and their inner lives.
Tahirah Nailah Dean writes about the difficulties of finding love and marriage from the perspective of a Muslim woman. Her work has appeared in Al Jazeera and Insider.
San Francisco Writers Workshop is hosting our annual benefit to support the venue that has been so generously providing us with a space to meet for the past two years: Noisebridge, a legendary anarchist hackerspace in the San Francisco’s Mission district. Noisebridge doesn’t charge writers to gather every Tuesday night, but they certainly have a large rent bill to pay. This is our chance to help ensure their and our own future!
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 vibrant and 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.
The event will include featured readers, a storytelling game, food and non-alcoholic drinks, and an opportunity to tour Noisebridge. PLEASE HELP US SPREAD THE WORD!
Mark your calendars for 7 pm on May 31, 2024, at Noisebridge, 272 Capp Street. Suggested donation starts at $10, and please give as much as you can!
Colleen Shoshana McKeeis the author of six books of poetry, fiction, and memoir. Her latest collection is Routine Bloodwork, a finalist for the Charlotte Mew Award from Headmistress Press.
Divyanka Sharma is a tech strategist, fiction writer, poet, and documentary filmmaker. Her creative pieces have been published online and in print, including with Empyrean, the other side of hope, The Wire.in, among others. Her writing explores the immigrant experience of movement and adaptation and her work is informed by her birth country of India and adopted home in the United States.
Howard Isaac Williams‘ essays, remembrances, reviews, poetry and fiction about culture, Nature, messenger lore, Afghanistan and other topics have been published in The Atlantic (online), Philosophy Now and over 20 other venues. His unpublished novel The Chastisement is the only book about Chinghis Khan researched in both Mongolia and Afghanistan.
L.M. Pino is a queer Mexican writer living in the Bay Area. Her latest short story, The Woman Without Skin, is forthcoming in Ignatian Literary Magazine.
Nina Rodenko is a winner of the 2022 Clark-Gross Scholarship Award for her debut novel, United Selves of Veronica, which is currently in its final draft. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Bookstr, Prometheus Dreaming, and Watershed Review. Born in Ukraine, Nina lives in San Francisco.
Olga Zilberbourg’s English-language debut LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES (WTAW Press) explores “bicultural identity hilariously, poignantly,” according to The Moscow Times. She serves as one of the co-moderators of the San Francisco Writers Workshop.
At 2pm on Saturday, April 6 (TOMORROW!), SF Writers Workshop folks are reading at Noisebridge. We’ve got five snappy little stories:
Housnar the Jupiterean and his confounding fermion gamble
A man turning into his father–yeah, but maybe for REAL
The perils of resorting to AI story composition
A fraught attempt at creating a savior in a Mission District hackerspace
A fire-haunted Chinese-American funeral
Bonus: a thematically relevant, mad lib-style group activity!
Ostensibly part of the Mission Arts Performance Project, this will be a casual, free event. Come hang out with Judy Viertel, Joel Streicker, Jason Tan, David Ira Cleary, and Robin Hansen. Maybe we’ll grab a beverage afterwards…
San Francisco Writers Workshop is proud to participate in San Francisco’s Lit Crawl 2023 festival. For more than eight decades, this free, drop-in critique group has met weekly, nurturing a wide range of local authors. Come hear from the recent participants at our home base!
Event details: October 21, 5 pm Noisebridge, 272 Capp Street
Originally from the North of England, Jo Beckett-King is a writer and translator currently based in San Francisco. Her fiction has been short- or longlisted for the UK’s Bridport Prize, the Bristol Short Story Prize, and the Bath Children’s Novel Award. She is represented by Elise Howard at DeFiore & Company.
Tahirah Nailah Dean is a lawyer by day and writer by night. She writes about the difficulties of finding love and marriage from the perspective of a Muslim woman. Her work has appeared in Al Jazeera and Insider. She is a recipient of the 2023 Hurston/Wright Fellowship and winner of the 2021 MFest Short-Story Competition. Tahirah is currently working on a novel.
Cynthia Gómez writes feminist anti-capitalist horror and speculative fiction. Her work has been published in Strange Horizons, Fantasy Magazine, and elsewhere. Her collection, “The Nightmare Box and Other Stories,” will be published by Dread Stone Press in summer 2023.
Mike Karpa’s short fiction and memoir has appeared in Tin House, Tahoma Literary Review, Oyster River Pages and Foglifter Journal. His first novel Criminals was a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2022. His new novel, The Wealthy Whites of Williamsburg, won best gay book at the 2023 SF Book Festival.
Graham Smith built a solar-powered car in a locomotive shop and once traveled to an uninhabited island just to get some eggs. He was dredged, like an ancient bicycle, from the mud of the Upper Mississippi and continues to roll on through the hinterlands of San Francisco Bay.
Joel Streicker’s stories have been published widely. Recent winner of Cutthroat Magazine’s and Blood Orange Review’s fiction contests, he has also published poetry and nonfiction in English and Spanish. His translations of such writers as Samanta Schweblin, Mariana Enríquez, and Pilar Quintana have appeared in numerous journals.
Jason Tan graduated from St. Olaf college with a degree in Latin and Asian Studies. He writes primarily fantastical novels about people who are trying to figure out the rest of their lives. He lives in San Francisco.
San Francisco Writers Workshop 