Read and learn and share together!
Join a Bathers Library reading group!
SCHEDULE
(Time • Title • Start Date)
FALL
MONDAYS
5-7pm • On the Haitian Revolution, Humanism, and Black Radical Critique • 10/27 [Cancelled]
7-9pm • Do They Owe Us a Future? (Of Course They Fucking Do!) • 10/20
TUESDAYS
5-7pm • Reading the Freakiest Novel of All Time • 11/4
WEDNESDAYS
5-7pm • Hospicing Modernity • 11/5
7-9pm • Cyberfeminist Counternarratives: The Internet Beyond 'The Big Daddy Mainframe' • 11/12
THURSDAYS
5-7pm • We Who Have Never Known Men • 10/30
SATURDAYS
10am-12pm • Chinese Century: Between Sino-Optimism, Techno-Orientalism, & Futility • 10/25
2-4pm • Diary Study: from day planner to pocket camera • 10/25
SUNDAYS
10am-12pm • Staging the Revolution: Marxist, Anticolonial, and Workers Theater • 10/26
10am-12pm (online) nurturing liminality at the edges of ourselves and the world • 11/2
WINTER
MONDAYS
7-9pm • In Care and Defiance • 1/19
TUESDAYS
7-9pm • Investigating the Sex Pest • 1/27
WEDNESDAYS
5-7pm • Seeking Change: An Amateur Study of the I Ching through Collective Scholarship • 1/7
5-7pm • Third World Marxism • 2/18
7=9pm • Tuning in to Proust (and hopefully, ourselves) • 1/7
FRIDAYS
5-7pm • Traumatized and Psychologized: Examining Trauma Culture • 1/9
SATURDAYS
10am-12pm • A Streetcar to Subduction • 1/31
12-2pm • Bodies, Beauty & Ghosts: Memoirs as acts of emancipation • 1/10
SUNDAYS
10am-12pm • ART MONSTERS: ON ART-MAKING & PARENTING • 1/18 (monthly)
12-2pm • The Stakes of Magic: Examining Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch • 1/11
2-4pm • Caregiving as Radical Play • 1/11
5-7pm Working Class Lesbians • 1/11
SIGN UP
DESCRIPTIONS
FALLSino-Optimism, Techno-Orientalism, & Futility
facilitated by
Tiny Lei
“Everyone get more Chinese now,” or so we say. This reading group will critique—or celebrate?—the topic of the so-called Chinese Century by engaging with related concepts such as sinofuturism/optimism and techno-orientalism. In this landscape, what does Chinese-ness entail?
tiny lei is an artist, ethnic studies scholar, and writer currently residing in oakland, california. her work focuses primarily on the topic of sino diaspora and movement — physical or figurative.
facilitated by
Kelly Neuner
In this group, we’ll explore feminist approaches to the Internet and techno-social spaces and systems through Mindy Seu’s Cyberfeminism Index, a catalog of more than 700 entries spanning academic articles to net art. We’ll pair readings with other digital media cataloged in the Index across thematic areas like technodiversity, the sexual history of the Internet, and sonic cyberfeminism – informed by the group’s specific interests – and attend Mindy Seu’s next performance lecture in November. Through discussion and optional written and/or creative reflections, we’ll expand our understanding of the histories, presents, and possible futures of our cyberspaces.
Kelly Neuner (they/them) is a designer, researcher, and artist who likes to learn about the past and present and dream about the future. They are interested in collective imagination and exploring the relationships between society, culture, and technology. They are a member of Design Science Studio, a cultural incubator focused on creating equitable and regenerative futures, where they work on participatory art projects, workshops, and worldbuilding.
facilitated by
Danielle Shi
Where do we begin with keeping a regular record of events, written on the daily? How do we architect a place for the passage of time to find a home, to allow our vagueness and fuzziness to take form? We’ll open up diaries by Sei Shonagon, Anaïs Nin, Sarah Manguso, Roland Barthes, Virginia Woolf, and Franz Kafka for our own perusal, exploring concepts like dailiness, creativity, and grief and the specter of war, as well as the aesthetic possibilities of the diary form, its shapeliness.
Danielle Shi (she/her) is a Chinese-born writer and photographer based in Berkeley, Calif., working on a novel manuscript, The Shelter. She blogs at danielleshi.com and can be found in-residence at Kala Art Institute this cold season, learning some photography chops. She runs the chapbook press Doll Hair with her partner Tim.
facilitated by
Brenna Wood Fitzpatrick
Everyone’s obsessed with the end of the world: the rich are busy building bunkers, robots, and spaceships, asking daring questions like, “How best do I control the help during an apocalypse? Perhaps with a shock collar?”; the zealots see a genocide and rejoice that perhaps it is a stepping stone to their glorious Rapture and ascension; the Silicon Valley geeks are grovelling to become the favorite pet of their prophesized AI overlords; meanwhile, even the fascists seem to have given up on trying to sell us on their Glorious Future™, since who believes in a future anymore, anyways? (Well, I do.) We’ll explore these different popular ideas and fantasies about the “end of the world,” but also practice imagining what the future could look like after we have all done absolutely everything in our power to fight facism, climate change and oppression.
Brenna is an Oakland-based tenant attorney. She grew up in Silicon Valley before moving to the East Bay to study environmental sociology and environmental philosophy. She’s been involved in anti-displacement advocacy ever since, and has no plans to move to Mars.
facilitated by
Avery Huetter & Michelle Ngo
Welcome to our hospicing modernity reading group! If you’re someone that’s critical of colonialism and interested in what it means to transform society from the roots, we’d love to share the book Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira with you.
Michelle Ngô (she/they) is an emerging Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) practitioner rooted in Oakland, CA, where they are growing, healing, and co-creating alongside a vibrant and supportive community. Their practice is deeply informed by an openness to multiple forms of art, expression, and healing. It spans ancestral traditions, experimental poetics, ritual, and everyday acts of care
Avery is a massage therapist and journalism fellow. She grew up in Oakland, getting an associates from Laney before heading to New Orleans for a Bachelors in Sociology. For fun she enjoys reading, dancing, and taking way too many art classes!
facilitated by
Finnegan Clegg
Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers (originally written in a Parisian prison on the backs of paper bags) was recieved upon publication as “homosexual, criminal, perverse, religious, sacrilegious, schizophrenic, honest, appalling, incredible.” This reading group is for anyone interested in reading one of the most bizarre and imaginative books ever written, and digging into a discussion on beauty, depravity, and sexuality.
Finn Clegg is a lover of the strange and beautiful. He is currently living in Oakland and spends most of his time reading and playing music. He also attends Laney College.
facilitated by
Aja Lenae (they/them)
honoring historical, conceptual, artistic, and spiritual practices of liminality, we will read and discuss Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ M Archive: After the End of the World (a series of poetic artifacts that speculatively documents the persistence of Black life following a worldwide cataclysm). as we are tasked with navigating the destabilizing crossroads of so many personal, relational, communal, and global endings, how can we nurture our comfortability with the grey, the in-between, the mysterious and obscured in service to the new liberatory worlds we are building and dreaming of? this group is open to all desiring to learn from lineages of Queer Black feminist co-learning in right relationship.
aja lenae (they/them) (pronounced like “asia”) is a multi-devotional creator, awe connoisseur, teacher, lifelong student, community weaver and youth collaborator rooted and raised in the bay area, california. they are interested in multi-artform storytelling as an act of bridging time and sunning our hard things softened. their offerings are soiled in their prayers for liberation and generational healing.
facilitated by
Vika
The ongoing Haitian revolutionary project is an imperative to create. Black radical intellectuals and artists have long turned to the Haitian Revolution—its history, figures, and symbols—in their theorizations of a global revolutionary project. This reading group explores the Haitian Revolution and its particular understanding of “humanism,” with an eye toward the ways this understanding has been taken up in Black radical critique, as well as its significance for anti-colonial and anti-capitalist struggle in the present.
Vika (she/they) is a multimedia artist, scholar, and musician. She is currently a Doctoral Candidate in comparative literature (French, English, and Spanish). Her dissertation intervenes in contemporary post-colonial readings of the Haitian Revolution and Black radical tragedy that render its history, figures, and politics in terms of foreclosure as tragic.
facilitated by
Muffy Koster
Whether as a forum for representing struggles on the factory floor, a podium for speaking against colonial domination, or a framework for working out theoretical concepts of social change, the play has operated as a container for expressions of the political will of the people for over a century. This series will feature scripts and treatises on theatricality from the last one hundred years that configure theater as a realm of praxis where the proletariat, the colonized, and their advocates can rehearse for the revolution.
Muffy Koster is a community archivist, movement artist, and writer living in San Francisco. She is also a Performance Studies PhD student at UC Berkeley, where she is studying the intersections of performance and the workplace.
facilitated by
Kelly Donohue
I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman is a gorgeous and freaky novel about a young woman coming of age on an alien(??) planet and trying to make meaning of it all. Originally written in 1995, it’s been having a MAJOR resurgence since being re-released in 2022. But what is it about the idea of being raised in captivity with 39 other women in an underground prison that the collective is finding so resonant? In this group we’ll try to figure it out.
Kelly Donohue is a poet/researcher/astrologer/teacher who spends a lot of time thinking about systems and parties.
WINTER
facilitated by
Jack Lembke
Especially in The Bay, the very earth beneath our feet presents us with the ultimate opportunity to explore the felt interplay of time and space. Awe is a step away! Curious adventurers like you and I will converge for conversations and field trips across The Bay. Opholite of the Contra Costa Hills, fortified cliffs of the Marin Headlands, and other wonders provide the literal landscape of our history. From page to pavement, let’s step outside and play in the reverberations of deep time together!
Jackson Lembke
Born Jackson Lembke
Sept. 19 1996
6'2
Blood Type A-
& Parenting
facilitated by
Margaret McCarthy
How do art-making and parenthood inspire, challenge, and oppose each other? For decades, parenthood, especially the role of the mother and/or primary caretaker, has been popularly understood as antithetical to art-making. We call bullsh*t. Let’s read extracts from some of the very recent and exciting books exploring the work and lives of artist parents current and historical, the obstacles they/we face, and how these dual, vital, roles illuminate each other.
Margaret McCarthy (she/her) is a writer, performer, nonprofit executive, and proud mother of her favorite three-year-old. She has performed her work at SOMArts, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Artist Television Access, and for nine years as an ensemble member of the San Francisco Neo-Futurists, where she also served as Co-Artistic Director. She is on the board of the Center for Artistic Activism.
facilitated by
Elizabeth Barelli
This reading group explores how women reclaim identity and power through writing, memory, and creative expression. Across memoir, essay, criticism, and art, these works examine the act of looking back—whether into personal pasts, inherited traumas, or cultural narratives—not as nostalgia, but as a radical form of freedom. Together, they show how rewriting stories and re-seeing history can transform both self and society, giving women agency to author their lives beyond silence, constraint, and erasure.
Elizabeth is a visual artist and community organizer.he way humans relate to art, the blurry lines between the natural and the human-made, and the nature of the creative process. She draws references from philosophy, feminist theory, mythology and literature to illustrate personal narratives.
She created MAD, a support community and book club for Mothers in Art and Design in the Bay Area reclaiming their creative practice, with a growing Mother's Library; and she is currently working on participative art projects around the concept of Care.
facilitated by
Vincente Perez, PhD &
Tala aka Mecca Monarch
Despair and surrender are impossible choices when you are caregiving. Even when it feels like the end of the world, bellies must be filled, minds must be activated, and lessons must be passed on. We will read and experiment with how to do communal caregiving in the midst of social upheaval in an educational, kid friendly, accessible, covid conscious setting that returns us back to experimentation and play.
Dr. Vincente Perez (He/They) is a poet and scholar working at the intersection of poetry, Hip-Hop, and critical theory. He believes poetry molds the mind otherwise. His poems have appeared in his chapbook Other Stories to Tell Ourselves as well as Huizache, Obsidian, Electric Literature, and more.
Tala Khanmalek | mecca monarch (all pronouns) is a queer, disabled, Iranian writer, editor, scholar and activist living in South Berkeley with their toddler.
facilitated by
Rachel Sure
The work and art of caring for each other and the earthly plane twists into defiance when confronting the enclosure of care work and the commons—criminalizing our solidarity to each other and the earth’s survival. We will read texts exemplifying radical acts of caring solidarity, as well as exploring the development and hegemony of modern concepts of ‘health/care”. Discussions will elicit inquiry and action towards deep care as revolutionary praxis.
Rachel Sure (they/she) is an anarchist, harm reductionist, and defiant careworker inside and outside the medical industrial complex. They coordinate gathering spaces of solidarity and discussion amongst affinity groups in the far/hard/post-left persuasion.
facilitated by
Beatrice Kilat
From Pepe le Pew to the Shitty Media Men List, come explore the etiology and persistence of the sex pest throughout popular culture and in particular in radical, anarchic and leftist spaces. We will watch contemporary programs, read classic texts, current articles and miscellaneous tweets as we consider and confront the sex pest as a source of interpersonal and community conflict.
Beatrice Kilat is a writer and critic in Berkeley.
facilitated by
Kaeiolu
From emptiness and humility (read: yin), we will begin to study the I Ching, a sacred Book of Changes that is the foundation for an enormous breadth of Asian cultural cosmology and history. The interpretation we will focus on is by Benebell Wen, a Taiwanese American Taoist and occultist. With study, divination practice, and collective intention-setting, we may observe the changes to find clarity and orient ourselves to the values we hope to grow.
Kaeiolu
facilitated by
Jenny
Step one in becoming a witch: Learn from the witches that came before. In this course we’ll read Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch, which examines the subjugation and destruction of women via witch hunting in the transition to capitalism. Federici illuminates how the enclosure of reproductive labor, destruction of women’s social relationships, and utter extermination of magical belief form the invisible underbelly of the capitalist monster. We’ll discuss how witchcraft and witch hunting shape/challenge/queer our relationships with feminism, spirituality, and community care in the belly of the beast. This class is for anyone interested not only in understanding magic and witchcraft as historical artifact, but as the yet-alive vessels through which we may build toward re-enchanted and decolonial futures.
jenny (they/them) is a human on earth (oakland) trying to learn things and build things. they like reading and climbing and looking for crabs by the bay.
facilitated by
Niki Franco
Colonized people across the global south (Third World) adapted Marxist theory and praxis into their own respective contexts and sprouted revolution across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, challenging the idea of Western supremacy and hegemony.
As the US enters an increasingly fascistic political juncture, this reading group is an invitation to sit with the texts and traditions of Black and brown revolutionaries. We will explore how they adapted revolutionary praxis to their own cultural and material contexts. Our goal is not to idolize or simply historicize, but to actively engage with their lessons to inform our own visions, strategies, and actions for building a liberated future from Oakland to the rest of the world.
Niki Franco is a queer Black Caribbean community organizer, writer, and facilitator of spaces for collective study. Her work experiments with truth telling, radical history, and revolutionary imagination.
Niki is also the host of the podcast Getting to the Root of It with Venus Roots and is currently the Co-Director of Dissenters, a national anti-imperialist youth organization.
Her forthcoming debut book, unveiling the CIA's entanglements between Miami, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, is set to publish in 2026 by 1804 Books.
facilitated by
Kassandra Mayhew
Are we all traumatized? What is trauma and what is not? What role does class, media, and history play in how we define trauma? This reading group will attempt to examine the definitions of trauma and commodification of trauma and the concept of healing through books, articles, and other media that address “trauma culture.” Mental health providers and consumers of therapy are all encouraged to join!
Kassandra is a psychotherapist in training and former communications strategist from Oakland with a background in media studies and literature. She sometimes organizes and sometimes lays in the sun.
(and hopefully, ourselves)
facilitated by
Kelly Egan
Let’s oppose the pace of everything else and gather in the dark heart of January to slowly read Proust aloud together. Like, the first 50 pages or so of Swann’s Way. I imagine this as a brainwave-changing experience, as well as a sort of subliminal and osmotic master class in writing or thinking about the details of our own interiority. Hot drinks and sweets, obviously.
Kelly Egan is a poet, amateur diviner, and student of the occult arts. She has an MFA in poetry from Saint Mary’s College of CA and has authored two poetry chapbooks—Millennial, from White Stag, and A Series of Septembers, from Dancing Girl Press. She studies astrology, tarot, dreamwork, and the paranormal in official and unofficial settings.
facilitated by
Ach Kab, Em Tillotson
This is a space for working class lesbians to gather and connect about our desirous and criminal bodies. We will read essays, poems, and short stories by Dorothy Allison, Pat Parker, Red Arobateau, and Joan Nestle, among others. Through these writings, we will examine and celebrate ourselves as perverts, outsiders, and revolutionaries.
Ach Kab is a butch Arab worker with the Industrial Workers of the World. Their practice is grounded in deep support and collaboration, working primarily as an arts administrator, theater electrician, production manager, and grant writer. They love to dance, craft, wrestle, play the banjo, explore secrets, and listen.
Em Tillotson is a community archivist and historian, activist, carpenter, and angry working-class butch dyke. M organizes intergenerational community spaces and events with the Bay Area Lesbian Archives, where she helps transform archiving into a relational practice—one that centers queer joy and the slow labor of collective memory. A strong believer in direct action, Em is currently facing state repression—alongside other dykes and trans folks—for her anti-Zionist activism.