Sebastopol's first ever lit crawl debuts this Saturday

122 writers will read their work between 2 and 6 pm at various locations throughout the city

Lit Crawl Sebastopol, which is free, runs from 2 to 6 pm at various locations around town. The day culminates in an “Evening with Alka Joshi,” a ticketed event that’s a fundraiser for SebARTS.

This Saturday, April 13, more than 120 writers from all over the Bay Area will descend on Sebastopol for the town’s first ever Lit Crawl, which is being organized by Sebastopol Center for the Arts.

SebARTS director Serafina Palandech said one of the center’s volunteers, who’d attended LitCrawl San Francisco, suggested the idea to her.

“We partnered with Litquake, the literary organization that created Lit Crawl San Francisco and used their model to replicate our lit crawl here in Sebastopol,” Palandech said.

How do you navigate your way through what SebARTS is promising will be “four hours of literary mayhem”? They have a cool online schedule, which tells you which writers will be appearing where and when. (Just click on the colored bars for more details.) You can also filter by venue or literary type.

“There are seven or eight locations,” Palandech said, “and each location has between two and three readings between 2 and 6 pm.”

Those locations include Milk and Honey, Silk Moon, The Redwood, Luminarium, Sebastopol Area Senior Center, Sebastopol Regional Library and Third Pig Bar. Copperfield’s Books has also joined in the fun with readings starting at 1:30 pm that day.

“It’s kind of like a film festival,” Palandech said. “You look at the schedule, choose what you want to hear, but then you can also just wander from place to place.”

Which makes it a little more like a pub crawl—except the locations are pouring libations of language instead of beer.

An Evening with Alka Joshi

This day of literary adventure ends with “An Evening with Alka Joshi” at Sebastopol Center for the Arts at 6:30 pm.

Joshi is the internationally bestselling author of the Jaipur Trilogy: The Henna Artist, The Secret Keeper of Jaipur and The Perfumist of Paris. Her debut novel, The Henna Artist, was a New York Times/ LA Times/Publishers Weekly/Toronto Star Bestseller, and was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.

Joshi published The Henna Artist—her first book—at age 62, after working on the book for ten years. Her talk is titled, “My 10-Year Journey to Overnight Success.”

The Henna Artist has been translated into 29 languages and is currently in development at Netflix as a TV series.

Joshi was born in India and came to the U.S. with her family at the age of nine. She has a BA from Stanford University and an MFA from California College of Arts. She is currently working on her fourth novel.

Get tickets for “An Evening with Alka Joshi.”