Art & the Artist in the Age of Autocracy: A Conversation & Block Party (City Lights)

Art and the Artist in the Age of Autocracy: A Conversation and Block Party

Hosts: City Lights Booksellers & The Approach

Wednesday, October 15, 2025 at 7:00 pm PT

This event will be held in Kerouac Alley (between City Lights Bookstore and Vesuvio Cafe) It is free to the public.

Moderated by Lauren Markham with Chris Feliciano Arnold, Justin Carder, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Carvell Wallace


EVENT:

Litquake presents the creators and writers for The Approach, a new free newspaper, at City Lights for a conversation about the role of art, writing, and ideas in our age of rapidly accelerating autocracy.

What is the political power of art—and what are its limitations?

Join creators and writers for The Approach, a new free newspaper, at City Lights for a conversation about the role of art, writing, and ideas in our age of rapidly accelerating autocracy. We’ll celebrate the release of issue two with a short panel in Kerouac Alley and some communal art offerings, replete with drinks from Vesuvio and continued post-panel gathering in the alley.


SPEAKERS:

Lauren Markham is an award-winning writer based in California covering issues of migration, the environment, and other social issues for places like Harper’s, Mother Jones, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, and VQR. She is the author of The Far Away Brothers (2017), A Map of Future Ruins (2024) and Immemorial (2025). She is currently working on a novel.

Chris Feliciano Arnold is the author of The Third Bank of the River, and has written essays and journalism for The Atlantic, Harper’s, The New York Times, Outside, Sports Illustrated, Vice News, The Believer, Folha de S. Paulo and more. The recipient of a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, he has published fiction in Playboy, The Kenyon Review, Ecotone and other magazines. Along the way, his work has been noted in The Best American Sports Writing and The Best American Short Stories. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area where he is Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s College of California.

Justin Carder is an interdisciplinary designer specializing in publication and experience design. The founder of Wolfman Books and The Bathers Library, he has worked with Transit Books, McSweeny’s, Stranger’s Guide, KADIST, Southern Exposure, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and more. He is the host of 40 Trillion DPI and the designer for The Approach.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds, was a Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist. It was a a winner of a California Book Award. Her first novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree was the silver medal winner in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and a New York Times editor’s choice. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Cut, Zyzzyva, and elsewhere.

Carvell Wallace is a writer and podcaster who has contributed to The New Yorker, GQ, New York Times Magazine, Pitchfork, MTV News, and Al Jazeera. His debut memoir, Another Word For Love (MCD, 2024), explores his life, identity, and love through stories of family, friendship, and culture and is a 2024 Kirkus Finalist in Nonfiction. He was a 2019 Peabody Award nominee, a 2022 National Magazine Award Finalist, a 2023 winner of the Mosaic Prize in Journalism, and a 2025 UCross Fellow. He lives in Oakland.


About The Approach:

The Approach is a newspaper meets literary magazine meets underground organizing pamphlet focusing on how to approach—thwart, upend, sabotage, survive—autocracy. The Approach only exists in print, and features the voices of our best thinkers and culture workers on how to navigate our current states of emergency, and what might emerge instead.


LITQUAKE

Litquake is a project of the Litquake Foundation, a 501(c)3 nonprofit registered in the state of California. Litquake’s diverse live programs aim to inspire critical engagement with the key issues of the day, bring people together around the common humanity encapsulated in literature, and perpetuate a sense of literary community by providing a vibrant forum for Bay Area writing. Because they believe in literature as a public good, they work to produce events that are accessible to all.

Visit them at https://www.litquake.org

This event made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation.