“Writing to Resist” feat. Cory Doctorow, Carol Queen, and David Holper, May 18th, 2025
We wrap up one of our most tumultuous seasons ever with an electrifying panel of experts bringing urgent perspectives about technology, physicality, and spirituality. Bring your questions about writing, resistance, and shaping the future for these renowned authors and activists.
Meet the Panelists!
Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow is is a New York Times bestselling science fiction author, activist and journalist who has published more than 30 books, including novels for adults and young adults, graphic novels for middle graders, young adults and adults, both fiction and nonfiction, a picture book, serious nonfiction books on tech and policy, and collections of essays and short stories. For more than 23 years, he has been an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San-Francisco based nonprofit that campaigns for digital human rights. He holds two honorary doctorates and has been inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame, and is visiting faculty at the UK Open University, the University of North Carolina, Cornell, and MIT. Cory’s 2023 novel, The Lost Cause, a solarpunk science fiction novel of hope amidst the climate emergency, explores our relational divides around science and disinformation. His most recent novel is Picks and Shovels, a historical technothriller set in the Bay Area in the early 1980s. His most recent nonfiction book is The Internet Con, a Big Tech disassembly manual. In October, Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish Enshittification, a manifesto for a new, good internet.
Cory writes the Pluralistic.net newsletter.
Carol Queen
Big-time sexologist Carol Queen has been a force of sex-positive feminism and a global thought leader in our cultural understanding of human sexuality. A two-time Community Grand Marshal of the San Francisco LGBTQ Pride Parade, she’s authored numerous life-changing books such as Real Live Nude Girl: Chronicles of Sex-Positive Culture, Pomosexuals, Exhibitionism for the Shy, and The Leather Daddy and the Femme. Teaching and writing from her own experience and that of her communities even as she references academic thought on these subjects, Queen has written for juried journals and compendiums such as The Journal of Bisexuality and The International Encyclopedia of Human Sexuality, and contributed to many anthologies. Carol works for Good Vibrations as The Staff Sexologist, Company Historian, and curator of the Antique Vibrator Museum. With her partner Robert Morgan Lawrence she co-founded the Center for Sex & Culture. As a young activist, she helped found one of the first gay youth groups in the United States in the mid-1970s, and participated in developing safer sex educational strategies in response to the emerging AIDS crisis in the 1980s. Queen is also a professional editor and commentator, and is known for coining new terms such as “absexuality.”
Her website is www.carolqueen.com.
Photo: Tristan Rrane
David Holper
Poet and writer, teacher and visionary David Holper is the author of three poetry collections—Language Lessons: A Linguistic Hejira, The Bridge, and 64 Questions. David’s won numerous accolades and awards for his poetry, and served as the inaugural Poet Laureate for the City of Eureka as it entered and endured the pandemic. Holper has revived the Dharma Bum spiritual pilgrimage on Mt. Tamalpais by Beat poets, inspired by the prayerful way of walking around a mountain practiced by Japanese monks. The unlikely heroine of his new novel, The Church of the Very Last Chance, is a Russian travel vlogger who finds herself the accidental leader of a worldwide, earth-connected spiritual revolution. Satire, politics, magical realism, and humor “cut through the darkness to find the light within each of us, the spark to make our private and public worlds brighter” in a perfect example of how we as a global community could find common cause and get governments to change.
David’s website is www.davidholper.com
About our Moderator, Kristen Caven
Kristen Caven is our Berkeley Branch historian and 2017 recipient of the Jack London Award. As the CWC state Writer-in-Residence in Joaquin Miller Park, she mines Miller’s writings and literary constellation for inspiration, some of which she will share at her Zoom presentation, “Joaquin Miller Reconsidered: A Closer Look at Oakland’s OG Poet,” on Thursday, April 24th, sponsored by the CWC, Friends of Joaquin Miller Park, and the Oakland Public Library. This panel is part of Kristen’s weekly interviews between Mother’s and Father’s Day this year, celebrating the launch of her audiobook, The Winning Family: Where No One Has to Lose, which views parenting as an act of resistance. In October, she received a grant to host “Dimond Dirndl Day” at Oakland’s Oaktoberfest, featuring her animated play, The Dirndl Diaspora.
Kristen’s website is www.kristencaven.com.
Schedule
$5 for members, $10 for guests, free tickets available*
Community
12:00 Club leaders check-in
12:30 Welcome and networking with members & guests
Program
1:00 p.m. Club Announcements & Election
1:30 p.m. Write to Resist panel discussion
2:30 p.m. Conversation
3:00 p.m. Author Support Group more info here.
See meetings for more info.
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