Local Author Showcase: Annual New Book Celebration on June 21, 2025

The Author Showcase will take place at Clio’s Bookstore (353 Grand Ave, Oakland, CA 94610) from 2:00 to 5:00 PM.

On Saturday, June 21st, the Berkeley Branch of the California Writers Club will honor its members who have published a new title in the past year. This is a proud moment for this century-old writing club, highlighting the diverse literary accomplishments and talents of this notable group. A wide range of literary genres will be featured, including historical fiction, mystery, fantasy, non-fiction, and poetry.

The celebration will take place starting at 1:30 p.m. with the final Club meeting of this year’s board, with the author presentation beginning at 2 p.m. Each author will present and read from their book, and address one question. The literary event will last approximately 90 minutes and provide readers with an engaging experience, insights and ideas for readers, writers, and those who want to be writers, and and a stack of new books to read this summer!

June 21st will be a great opportunity to promote Bay Area authors making their mark on the local literary landscape. Please RSVP through EventBrite or learn more about these local authors below.

Learn more about Bay Area authors with new books in 2025

This year, we are eager to feature:

• Dickson Schneider
• Paul Corman-Roberts
• Victoria Zackheim
• Terry Tierney
• Rocky Leplin
• Bob Haus
• Keith Gaboury
• Lenore Weiss

Learn more about some of these authors below!

Dickson Schneider, author of Every Angler’s Guide to Amazing Lures and Flies

I retired at the end of 2022 after twenty-five years teaching as a temporary part-time lecturer at a state university in California. Like all of us, I began to reflect on my life and how I spent it. This book has three stories: A story of teaching a painting class in 2005. A story of my career as a working artist spanning forty years. And, among the thousands of brilliant, lovable, and wonderful students I was lucky to teach, it is a story about two particular and interesting students who changed me.
Some of this is true. All of it is memory.

About the author:

California artist and writer Dickson Schneider was born in Seguin Texas, 1955. He lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. He taught painting and drawing at CSU East Bay for 25 years and has shown his work all over the world. His book Every Angler’s Guide toAmazing Lures and Flies was published by Viking in 1997.

His artwork can be found at Dicksonschneiderart.com

Keith Gaboury, author of Still Human

With poems set in San Francisco, Oakland, and New York City, Still Human is a surrealistic poetry collection that explores gender, sexuality, and human identity. Along with illustrations that poetically complement certain poems, the collection views the world through a surrealistic lens. In order to discover a place in one’s town, city, and country, the poems dive into the dichotomy between urban and rural, male and female, animal and human.

About the author:

Keith Gaboury earned a MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. Kelsay Books published The Cosmos is Alive in 2023 and Falkenberg Press published Still Human in 2025. Keith lives in Oakland, California. Learn more at keithgaboury.com and keithgaboury.me.

Rocky Leplin, author of The Japanese Man with the Ring in His Nose

It’s 1982. A Japanese man sails for America, where he plans to establish a chain of sashimi and chips restaurants. A pagan rabbi who was taught Judaism in the Czar’s Academy for the DeYiddification of Young Boys develops an allergy to sashimi and chips. An ice skater escapes the Soviet Union on skates, then utters the Giggle Heard Round the World—the sexiest mirthful articulation of all time. And a Swiss skiing instructor follows her across the French Riviera in wild disguises, hoping for romance.

All converge on the First Annual Las Vegas International Ice
Follies, then on each other, and even Vegas is unprepared for the collision. Meanwhile, the ghost of a Marine in the Korean War, who doesn’t know the war is over, mistakes the Japanese man for the enemy, and seeks not just to haunt him, but to barbecue him!

Rocky Leplin’s engagingly eccentric flair for the zany ranks him oblongly in the mirthful tradition of American humorists from Mark Twain to Christopher Moore. Prepare for an excess of hijinks!

About the authors

Rocky Leplin is a second-generation San Franciscan. He graduated from the UCLA film Division and has a master’s in music composition from Oregon State. He’s written 500 songs, two musicals, and ten books, including a 412-page novel in rhymed verse about a lost whale. He has won awards for a book, a poem, and two short stories. He has been an elementary music teacher, a middle school English teacher, a classical music reviewer for SF East Bay newspapers, and a word processing specialist at Universal, Disney, and Paramount Studios. He boards dogs at Rocky’s Rover Roadhouse.

His website is lostwhalepress.com.

Victoria Zackheim, author of The Curtain Falls in Paris

The Curtain Falls in Paris reveals how an engrossing mystery is woven into the colorful background of a Paris theater. Disgraced American reporter Aria Nevins, looking for a new beginning, finds herself in the middle of a murder that takes backstage during an historic performance. Teamed with the mysterious Chief Inspector Noah Roche, the reporter comes into conflict with the detective’s systematic way of working, producing a relationship that is both complex and intense.
The tension builds as the investigation takes readers into the lives of cast and crew, each person with something to hide and, in the eyes of the detectives, a motive for committing this crime. The descriptions of Paris, the environs, and how Noah and his team— and the unwelcomed Aria— solve this murder lays the groundwork for the next two novels in this Aria/Noah series.

About the author

Victoria Zackheim is the author of novels The Bone Weaver and The Curtain Falls in Paris (May 2025), with two sequels (2026, 2027). She is the creator/editor of seven anthologies, including the international bestseller The Other Woman, adapted to the theater and performed in several dozen theaters across the United States, and Faith. She wrote the documentary Where Birds Never Sang: The Story of Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen Concentration Camps, which aired nationwide on PBS. She teaches creative nonfiction in the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program and is a frequent conference speaker and writing instructor in the US and abroad. A freelance editor, Victoria has worked with many authors on their novels, including international bestseller Anne Perry and New York Times bestseller Caroline Leavitt, and the memoirs of Robb Forman Dew, Gillian Herbert and many more. She is a San Francisco Library Laureate and lives in Northern California.

Paul Corman-Roberts, author of 19th Street Station Volume II

19th Street Station Volume II is a love letter to an Oakland that doesn’t exist anymore, just as the original volume from 2011 was about a previous Oakland whose time was passing.  Included in this chapbook are narrative and experimental poems and prose that explore a landscape finding itself on the bleeding edge of an artistic renaissance but also the foreboding end of that movement in favor of economic gentrification that would not sustain itself during a pandemic. 

About the author

Paul Corman-Roberts is the author of the Firecracker nominated poetry collection Bone Moon Palace (Black Lawrence 2021) and the recently released chapbook 19th Street Station Volume 2 (Collapse Press 2025.) His short story “Cemetery Hook Up” was nominated for the Best American Short Fictions anthology this year. He currently teaches workshops for the Older Writer’s Lab, SF Creative Writing, and the Oakland Unified School District while raising his hellspawn in Oakland CA. He occasionally fills in as drummer for the US Ghostal Service, Jen Blowdryer’s Punk/Soul and his own project, The There Their They’re.

This event is free but please reserve your ticket so we know how many people to expect.