Babylon Salon
presents a special performance
Saturday, September 12, 2026
in The Sycamore's outdoor patio
2140 Mission St, San Francisco [16th St BART]
Come for drinks at 5 // Show starts at 5.30pm
featuring
Vanessa Hua
[Coyoteland]
"No one writes like Vanessa Hua. With power, grace, and profound insight, Hua brings to life a community that—like the rest of today’s fraught world, and whether all of its inhabitants acknowledge it or not—is in a state of ongoing crisis. A tremendous, mesmerizing gift from this one-of-a-kind storyteller."—R. O. Kwon, nationally bestselling author of Exhibit
Vanessa Hua is the nationally bestselling author of Coyoteland, A River of Stars and Forbidden City, and story collection Deceit and Other Possibilities, a New York Times Editors’ Pick. A National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, she has also received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, a California Arts Council Fellowship, and a Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing, as well as honors from the de Groot Foundation, the Society of Professional Journalists, and the Asian American Journalists Association. She was a finalist for the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, and the New American Voices Award. Previously, she was an award-winning columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. She teaches at the Warren Wilson MFA Program and elsewhere. This fall, she is an Ann Getty Visiting Artist-Scholar at USF. Her debut memoir, Uprooted, is forthcoming.
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June Martin
[Love Aggression]
"A firecracker. June Martin bursts onto the scene with this surreal comic novel, a book with heart, soul, and viscera. She anatomizes a scene the way a Victorian doctor dissects a corpse, and just as thrillingly for the bystander; the organs are bold and strange. LOVE/AGGRESSION’s picaresque opening gives you all the clues to its tightly machined finale, but you won’t solve them. A debut to be reckoned with, by a writer you owe it to yourself to read.” — Isaac Fellman, author of Dead Collections, The Two Doctors Górski, and Notes from a Regicide
June Martin claimed the mantle of World's Greatest Writer in early 2021 when it became clear that no one but her deserved it. Her attention flits from literary fiction to weird ghost stories to comics at a moment's notice.
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TK Rex
[The Wildcraft Drones]
“Gorgeous, hopeful, and strange, The Wildcraft Drones is a history of the next four millennia that will make you cry — in mourning, and for joy. This is the future that cyborg oak trees and pirate drones want. I do too.” — Annalee Newitz, bestselling author of Automatic Noodle and The Terraformers
Raised haphazardly by a poet and a journalist across several western states, T. K. Rex has been a professional writer for more than two decades, starting with their first published poem in their senior year of high school. Attempting normalcy with a degree in advertising, they spent sixteen years crafting copy and user experiences for global brands, inevitably veering off course to follow their undying love of dinosaurs into collaborations with paleontologists and articles for Earth Magazine. In 2018, T. K. finally centered the least sensible of all their lifelong passions: writing science fiction and fantasy. Since their first workshop at the Writers Grotto in San Francisco, their stories have appeared in over forty publications, including Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Apex, Escape Pod, and their debut collection, The Wildcraft Drones, published in 2026 by Stelliform Press. Their second book, The Cursed Blade of Wek, is slated for 2027 with Neon Hemlock, and their short story “Haunting Beauty” has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. They’ve attended the Clarion, Futurescapes, and Taos Toolbox workshops; are a member of SFWA, the Authors Guild and AWP; and frequently read at and host literary events around the San Francisco Bay Area. When they’re not writing, they’re probably wandering through the woods, or wish they were wandering through the woods. On a very good day, they’re wandering through the woods with their camera, taking pictures of bugs and mushrooms.
—
Shoshana von Blanckensee
[Girls Girls Girls]
“Girls Girls Girls floored me—the nostalgic angst and agony of it, the heat and beauty and tenderness. Shoshana von Blankensee puts it all on the page so viscerally: lust, hunger, death, sex, grief, love and every other thing a human body is and does. It’s completely extraordinary.” —Catherine Newman, New York Times bestselling author of Sandwich and We All Want Impossible Things
Shoshana von Blanckensee lives in Berkeley, California, with her partner and kids. She is an oncology nurse by day and a writer by any available moment. Girls Girls Girls is her debut novel.
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