City Arts & Lectures

This week, our guest is poet Natalie Diaz in conversation with essayist and author Hilton Als.  Natalie Diaz is an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian community and is the director of the Fort Mojave Language Recovery Program, where she works with the last remaining speakers of the Mojave language. Language and loss are explored throughout Diaz’s poetry, in collections including When My Brother Was an Aztec and Postcolonial Love Poem, which won her the Pulitzer Prize.

Hilton Als is another writer whose work explores American identity, in theater reviews, articles, and essays for The New Yorker, where he’s contributed since 1989. Als received the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism, “for bold and original reviews that strove to put stage dramas within a real-world cultural context.”  His writing explores race, sexuality, class, art, and American identity provocatively, exploding the boundaries of the genre in which it is contained.  His most recent book is a memoir, My Pinup.

On February 9, 2023, Natalie Diaz and Hilton Als came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco for an onstage conversation, during which Diaz read from her work.

Robert Reich, the former Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton, is one of today’s leading voices addressing issues of income inequality.  Reich served in three presidential administrations, and recently retired from teaching at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Policy after nearly 20 years.  His classes were among the most popular on campus, and the end of his teaching career inspired the documentary “The Last Class”.  Reich publishes extensively on social media and is the author of more than 20 books including his new memoir, “Coming Up Short”. 

On July 23, 2025, Reich spoke with Monika Bauerlein, the CEO of the Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit multimedia news organization that houses Mother Jones magazine and the radio show and podcast Reveal. 

This week, we're going into the archives for a conversation with Bruce Springsteen, recorded in 2016. The legendary rock star had just published his autobiography, Born To Run. It was later adapted into a Tony-award winning one-man-show, Springsteen on Broadway. On October 5, 2016, Springsteen came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to talk to Dan Stone about his life in rock and roll. Fans had travelled across the country for the chance to hear “The Boss” and the energy in the room was more stadium concert than book talk. The conversation still managed to be intimate and deeply personal, including Springsteen’s candid thoughts on failure and fame.

Alejandro Heredia is an Afro-Dominican working at the intersection of literature and activism. He immigrated to the United States from the Dominican Republic at the age of seven. His debut novel, Loca, explores migration, identity, and the queer experience.

On June 11, 2025, Heredia visited the KQED studios in San Francisco for a conversation with Poulomi Saha, an English professor and co-director of the Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley.

Eve Ewing is a professor at the University of Chicago and the author of four books including Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism. It looks back on the history of America’s education system and offers a path forward by imagining public school as a public good. On July 7, 2025, Ewing spoke to Shereen Marisol Meraji, a professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Journalism.

We’re going back into the archives for a conversation with David Mitchell, recorded in 2021.  In novels like Cloud Atlas, and The Bone Clocks, Mitchell weaves together the supernatural and the natural. He’s also one of the most structurally inventive writers of our time, featuring multiple genres in a single book. 

 On May 8, 2021, Mitchell talked to Pico Iyer, whose books include Aflame, The Art of Stillness and The Half-Known Life: In Search of Paradise. What transpired was a nuanced examination of creativity by two formidable writers.

A conversation about the evolving world of psychedelics. While scientific breakthroughs continue to reshape our understanding of how these substances work, psychedelics are also at the center of debates about religious freedom, mystical experiences, politics, and how we treat mental health.

For more than thirty years, Michael Pollan has been writing about the places where the human and natural worlds intersect: on our plates, in our farms and gardens, and in our minds. His acclaimed books include How to Change Your Mind, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and The Botany of Desire. Pollan co-founded the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics.

Gül Dölen is professor at UC Berkeley in the Departments of Neuroscience and Psychology. Her research expertise and interests include behavioral and systems neuroscience, psychedelics, social behavior, evolution, synaptic plasticity, extracellular matrix, oxytocin and stroke, autism, PTSD, and addiction.

Indre Viskontas is a cognitive neuroscientist with the University of San Francisco and a faculty member at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. She has published groundbreaking work on the neural basis of memory and creativity, and co-hosts the podcast Inquiring Minds. Her past City Arts guests include Atul Gawande and Temple Grandin.

Shoshana von Blanckensee is a novelist whose debut work, Girls Girls Girls, explores coming of age, queer identity, and San Francisco in the 1990s. It follows Hannah, a young queer Jewish woman, as she embarks on a cross-country journey with her high school girlfriend - in search of acceptance and a vibrant queer community.

On June 13, 2025, Shoshana von Blanckensee visited the KQED studios in San Francisco for a conversation with Poulomi Saha, an English professor and co-director of the Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley.

Shelley Sella is a board-certified OB-GYN who recently retired after decades as an abortion provider. Her book, Beyond Limits: Stories of the Third-Trimester Abortion Care, looks at one of the most highly politicized areas of medicine, upending many common myths about abortion care and the women who seek it.  On May 21, 2025, Sella came to KQED studios in San Francisco to talk to Gretchen Sisson,  a sociologist and the author of Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption. 

In 2017, 37-year-old Jacinda Ardern was elected the 40th Prime Minister of New Zealand, becoming the country’s youngest Prime Minister in more than 150 years and the youngest woman to serve as head of government anywhere in the world.  She was first elected to Parliament in 2008 and left as Prime Minister in 2023. Her tenure as Prime Minister coincided with a tumultuous time in New Zealand, including a mass shooting, a volcanic eruption, and the COVID-19 pandemic. In her new memoir, A Different Kind of Power, Ardern describes how a Mormon girl plagued by self-doubt made political history and changed our assumptions of what a global leader can be - caring, empathetic, and effective.

On June 9, 2025, The Right Honourable Dame Jacinda Ardern came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to talk with Maya Shankar, a cognitive scientist and host of the podcast A Slight Change of Plans.