What Color Is Your Parachute? meets Out of Office in this inspiring, practical playbook to achieve sustainable work-life balance while optimizing your happiness, personal growth, and bank accounts.

Pouring yourself into a single full-time job is the riskiest move you can make. Your parents’ advice to focus on one career path? It doesn’t work anymore, for reasons ranging from recessions to student loan debt, the gig economy, climate disasters, and a global pandemic (to name a few). We need a dramatically different relationship with work, one that allows us to define ourselves beyond our paid labor.
 
The answer? A Portfolio Life. An anti-hustle, pro-rest approach to work-life balance, a Portfolio Life is built on three tenets:

1. You are more than any one role or opportunity.
2. Diversification will help you navigate change and mitigate uncertainty.
3. When (not if) your needs change, you can and should rebalance.

 
In The Portfolio Life, Harvard professor, serial entrepreneur, and self-described "human Venn diagram" Christina Wallace adapts tried-and-true practices from the business sector to help you eschew the cult of ambition and experience the freedom of building the flexible, fulfilling, and sustainable life you want. Drawing on research, case studies, and her own experience, she walks you step-by-step through the process of designing a strategy for the long haul. Because you deserve rest, relationships, and a rewarding career—not someday, but today. After all, you only live once.
 

Christina Wallace is a self-described "human Venn diagram" who has crafted a career at the intersection of business, the arts, and technology. She is currently a Senior Lecturer of Entrepreneurial Management at Harvard Business School and an active startup mentor and angel investor. She was previously cohost of The Limit Does Not Exist and co-authored New To Big (April 2019, Currency). A serial entrepreneur, Christina spent a decade building businesses in fashion, media, and edtech, including a venture inside the American Museum of Natural History focused on getting girls into STEM. She was a management consultant with the Boston Consulting Group and began her career at the Metropolitan Opera. Christina holds undergraduate degrees in mathematics and theater studies from Emory University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. She lives in Cambridge with her husband, Chas Carey, and their two children, Arden and Sebastian.

Christina Wallace photo courtesy of Jenny Anderson.

Simone Stolzoff photo courtesy of Bradly Cox. Arielle Pardes photo courtesy of the author.

The Next-Generation Women Leadership Playbook

In To the Top: How Women in Corporate Leadership Are Rewriting the Rules for Success, accomplished leadership advisor Jenna Fisher reveals how the world faces a once-in-a-generation opportunity to close the gender gap at the top of organizations today.

You'll discover how traits often held by women--including compassion, empathy, communication, mentorship, and collaboration--are now in high demand. And why, in this time of volatility and disruption, women are standing on the most solid foundation for success than ever before.

Drawing on scientific research and the powerful stories of women business leaders who have already made it to the top, the book sets out how we can seize this opportunity in front of us. You'll learn:

• Why corporate progress for women has historically been stubbornly slow and strategies for breaking through systemic biases to take a seat at the top table
• Why women are particularly well-suited to lead companies through the complex challenges facing our world
• The specific leadership skills that are in high demand and how to develop a compassionate and commanding leadership presence
• The stories of women business leaders at the top of organizations today--their success, their missteps, and their lessons for success

An essential and insightful treatment of women leadership in a world that desperately needs more of it, To the Top is the first book since Lean In that promises to energize and accelerate the potential of woman leaders everywhere.

Jenna C. Fisher is a leadership expert at Russell Reynolds Associates, a global leadership advisory firm with 46 offices in 26 countries. Her work has been published by The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, CFO Journal, and Agenda.

Jenna Fisher photo courtesy of the author.

Palo Alto, California, is home to stratospheric real estate prices and equally high expectations, a place where everyone has to be good at something and where success is often defined by the name of a prestigious college on the back of a late-model luxury car. It's also the place where Irena Smith--Soviet émigré, PhD in comparative literature, former Stanford admission reader--works as a private college counselor to some of the country's most ambitious and tightly wound students . . . even as, at home, her own children unravel.

Narrated as a series of responses to college application essay prompts, The Golden Ticket combines sharp social commentary, family history, and the lessons of great (and not so great) literature to offer a broader, more generous vision of what it means to succeed.

Irena Smith is a Bay Area-based college admissions counselor, former Stanford admissions officer, and first-time author. She was born in the Soviet Union in the waning days of the Brezhnev regime and emigrated to the United States with her parents when she was nine years old. There, in spite of her fierce insistence that she would never, ever learn to speak English, she went on to receive a PhD in comparative literature and taught literature at UCLA and Stanford before transitioning to college admissions and writing.

Some praise for The Golden Ticket:

Tackling childhood and parenting in a new way, The Golden Ticket shows that growing up in America is an increasingly difficult job. With humor and pathos, Irena Smith draws the reader behind the curtain of college admissions, where life is more complicated than any kid's file.”
—Malcolm Harris, author of Palo Alto and Kids These Days

“At a time of an unprecedented youth mental health crisis, Irena Smith's addictively engaging, literary, witty, and heartrending memoir couldn't be more timely and important. Thank goodness she had the courage, smarts, and  perfect perspective—at "the intersection of unbridled ambition and family dysfunction"—to create it.”
—Katherine Ellison, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and author of Buzz: A Year of Paying Attention

Irena Smith photo courtesy of the author.

From Kirthana Ramisetti, the author of Dava Shastri's Last Day comes Advika and the Hollywood Wives, a gripping tale of marriage, scandal, fame, and identity as a woman grapples with life as the new wife of a renowned Hollywood film producer—perfect for readers of Taylor Jenkins Reid.

At age 26, Advika Srinivasan considers herself a failed screenwriter. To pay the bills and keep her mind off of the recent death of her twin sister, she’s taken to bartending A-list events, including the 2015 Governors Ball, the official afterparty of the Oscars. There, in a cinematic dream come true, she meets the legendary Julian Zelding—a film producer as handsome as Paul Newman and ten times as powerful—fresh off his fifth best picture win. Despite their 41-year age difference, Advika falls helplessly under his spell, and their evening flirtation ignites into a whirlwind courtship and elopement. Advika is enthralled by Julian’s charm and luxurious lifestyle, but while Julian loves to talk about his famous friends and achievements, he smoothly changes the subject whenever his previous relationships come up. Then, a month into their marriage, Julian’s first wife—the famous actress Evie Lockhart—dies, and a tabloid reports a shocking stipulation in her will. A single film reel and $1,000,000 will be bequeathed to “Julian’s latest child bride” on one condition: Advika must divorce him first.

Shaken out of her love fog and still-simmering grief over the loss of her sister—and uneasy about Julian’s sudden, inexplicable urge to start a family—Advika decides to investigate him through the eyes and experiences of his exes. From reading his first wife’s biography, to listening to his second wife’s confessional albums, to watching his third wife’s Real Housewives-esque reality show, Advika starts to realize how little she knows about her husband. Realizing she rushed into the marriage for all the wrong reasons, Advika uses the info gleaned from the lives of her husband’s exes to concoct a plan to extricate herself from Julian once and for all.

Kirthana Ramisetti earned her MFA in creative writing from Emerson College, and has had her work published in the New York Times,The Wall Street Journal, Entertainment Weekly,The Atlantic and more. Her debut novel, Dava Shastri’s Last Day, was publishedin 2021. She lives with her husband in New York City. 

Devi S. Laskar is a poet, novelist, essayist, photographer, artist, former newspaper reporter and lifelong TarHeel. She is the author of award-winning The Atlas of Reds and Blues, which was named by The Washington Post as one of the 50 best books of 2019. Her second novel, Circa was published by Mariner Books last year and selected as the June 2022 Goop Book Club pick. Her third novel, Midnight, At The War will be published by Mariner in 2025. She holds degrees from Columbia University, University of Illinois and UNC-CH. A native of N.C., she now lives in California with her family. You can learn more at: devislaskar.com

Kirthana Ramisetti photo courtesy of SubUrban Photography. Devis S. Laskar photo courtesy of the author.

In celebration of National Poetry Month, Book Passage proudly presents poets of the SF Writers Grotto. Come and enjoy a discussion of each poet's work/book, and an open mic session afterwards.

Shikha Malaviya is an Indian American poet, writer, and publisher. She is co-founder of The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, a mentorship model press publishing powerful voices from India & the Indian diaspora. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and featured in Catamaran, PLUME, Prairie Schooner & other fine publications. Shikha has been a featured TEDx speaker and was selected as Poet Laureate of San Ramon, California, 2016. She has been an AWP poetry mentor in their Writer-to-Writer program for seven seasons and is currently a Mosaic America Fellow, committed to cultural collaboration in the San Francisco Bay area and beyond. Her book of historical persona poetry, In Her Own Voice: Poems of Anandibai Joshee, is forthcoming in July, 2023 from HarperCollins, India. Her previous book of poems is Geography of Tongues.

https://shikhamalaviya.com/
Book information:
https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9780986065200/geography-of-tongues.aspx

Maw Shein Win's recent poetry book is Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn), which was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for the PEN America Open Book Award, and shortlisted for the California Independent Booksellers Alliance's Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. Win's previous collections include Invisible Gifts (Manic D Press); her chapbooks include Ruins of a glittering palace (SPA) and Score and Bone (Nomadic Press). Win’s Process Note Series on periodicities : a journal of poetry and poetics features poets on their process. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito and often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers. www.mawsheinwin.com 

Order link for STORAGE UNIT FOR THE SPIRIT HOUSE (Omnidawn):

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/S/bo68377474.html

Tonya M. Foster is a poet and essayist. She is the author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court, the bilingual chapbook La Grammaire des Os; and coeditor of Third Mind: Teaching Creative Writing through Visual Art. A poetry editor at Fence Magazine, Foster’s writing and research focus on poetry, poetics, ideas of place and emplacement, and on intersections between image and text. Her poetry, prose, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Other Influences; New Weathers Anthology: Poetics from the Naropa Archive; The Difference Is Spreading: Fifty Contemporary Poets on Fifty Poems; Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, March, 2021); and in journals such as Michigan Quarterly Review, Tripwire, boundary2, MiPOESIAS, NYFA Arts Quarterly, Poetry Project Newsletter, among others. Tonya is a recipient of awards and fellowships from the Creative Capital Foundation, Radcliffe Institute @ Harvard University, the Ford and the Mellon Foundations; and has been an Artist-in-Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts, Black Space Residency @ Minnesota Street Project, SF Museum of the African Diaspora, and at Macdowell. Her next collections are Thingifications (forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse), AHotB (A History of the Bitch), and Monkey Talk, a cross-genre series about race, paranoia, aesthetics, and surveillance. Dr. Foster holds the George & Judy Marcus Endowed Chair in Poetry at San Francisco State University.

https://tonyafosterpoet.com/ 

Book info: https://tonyafosterpoet.com/books.html

Jenny Qi is the author of Focal Point, winner of the 2020 Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize. Her essays and poems have been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. A 2022-23 Brown Handler Resident Writer, she has also received support from organizations such as Tin House, Omnidawn, Kearny Street Workshop, the San Francisco Writers Grotto, and the San Francisco Foundation. The only daughter of Chinese immigrants, she grew up mostly in Las Vegas and now lives in San Francisco, where she completed her Ph.D. in Cancer Biology. She has been translating her late mother’s memoirs of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and immigration to the U.S. and is working on more essays and poems in conversation with this work. 

www.jqiwriter.com

Book info: https://jqiwriter.com/books/ 

Discounted orders for bookstores & reading venues: accounts@steeltoebooks.com

Rachel Sarah's new book Climate Champions explores 15 contemporary climate champions are on the frontlines of science to create a sustainable future on Earth.

They are climate scientists, journalists, professors, academics, researchers, and policy makers from around the world who draft policies with real-world impact, run science labs to find new answers to old problems, and lead organizations at the forefront of change. These women do not shy away from showing how racial and social injustices lie at the root of so many climate-related issues.

Their stories are accessible and energetic, with spotlights on the triumphs and struggles of women who are working to protect the planet.

As young readers learn how these champions are rising up around the world, they will learn how to be part of the solution.

Rachel Sarah is a journalist and the author of Girl Warriors. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, New York Times, Yahoo, POPSUGAR, and more. Rachel was a 2022 Kiplinger Fellow, one of twenty-two journalists from around the world selected for the Public Affairs Journalism’s inaugural class in climate change reporting. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area on Ohlone land. Visit her online at RachelSarah.com.

Nikki Roach [featured in Climate Champions] (PhD), is a conservation scientist, yoga teacher, dancer, and writer. She received her doctorate from the Applied Biodiversity Science Program at Texas A&M in 2020. An Oakland local, Nikki was born and raised in the Bay Area's liberal hub and incredible ecosystems. Drawn to the water, she began her career in conservation working in the South Bay Salt Ponds studying waterbirds. Since then, she has traversed rural and biodiverse places across the America's working with birds, small mammals, and amphibians, to untangle the anthropogenic impacts on vulnerable species. Nikki has lived across the US, in the marshes of the lowcountry in South Carolina, to the cloud forests of Colombia, South America. From 2017 - 2020, Nikki lived in Colombia, where she conducted her PhD work on the vulnerability of threatened amphibians to climate and land use change. She also worked with coffee farmers on sustainability projects. After almost a decade away, Nikki returned to her beloved Bay Area to work as the Policy and Communications Coordinator for the San Francisco Bay Joint Venture - part of the USFWS Migratory Bird Joint Venture Program - which spans North America.    

Nikki is a connector and believes trusting relationships are the foundation for impactful conservation projects. She s a member of three International Union for Conservation of Nature, Species Survival Commission, Specialist Groups (Climate Change, Amphibians, and Small Mammals); an Associate Scientist for the International NGO Re:wild; and a member of the Generative Council at the Center for Nature and Leadership.    

She currently lives in Berkeley with her new pup Rocco, is working on a book about her PhD work in Colombia, and is enjoying getting to know her hometown again. http://www.nikkixnature.com/

Molly Kawahata [featured in Climate Champions] is the Founder of Systemic Impact Strategies, a strategy and communications consultancy, and a former Climate Advisor to the Obama White House. She is the subject of Patagonia’s film, The Scale of Hope, which shares her story, her work to reframe the climate narrative, her passion for alpine climbing, and her journey living with Bipolar 2 Disorder. She regularly does podcasts, keynotes, and talks to corporate audiences and organizations to discuss mental health, climate change, and other topics. She is an Advisory Board Member to the Environmental Voter Project, a Member in Residence with See Change, and an Advisory Council Member to the AAPI Victory Fund. Outside of work, Molly loves ice climbing and can usually be found at her local crag or in the mountains.

https://mollykawahata.com/

Rachel Sarah photo courtesy of Nan Phelps; Nikki Roach photo courtesy of publicist; Molly Kawahata photo courtesy of publicist

A stunning, revelatory memoir about a 330-mile walk from Washington, D.C., to New York City — an unforgettable pilgrimage to the heart of America across some of our oldest common ground. 

Neil King Jr.’s desire to walk from Washington, D.C., to New York City began as a whim and soon became an obsession. By the spring of 2021, events had intervened that gave his desire greater urgency. His neighborhood still reeled from the January 6th insurrection. Covid lockdowns and a rancorous election had deepened America’s divides. Neil himself bore the imprints of a long battle with cancer.

Determined to rediscover what matters in life and to see our national story with new eyes, Neil turned north with a small satchel on his back and one mission in mind: To pay close attention to the land he crossed and the people he met.

What followed is an extraordinary 26-day journey through historic battlefields and cemeteries, over the Mason-Dixon line, past Quaker and Amish farms, along Valley Forge stream beds, atop a New Jersey trash mound, across New York Harbor, and finally, to his ultimate destination: the Ramble, where a tangle of pathways converges in Central Park. The journey travels deep into America’s past and present, uncovering forgotten pockets and overlooked people. At a time of mounting disunity, the trip reveals the profound power of our shared ground.

By turns amusing, inspiring, and sublime, American Ramble offers an exquisite account of personal and national renewal — an indelible study of our country as we’ve never seen it before.

Neil King Jr. grew up in Colorado in a house with the Rocky Mountains out the back door and the flat plains out the front. He went to school in Chicago and then New York City, where he studied philosophy at Columbia University. He worked a multitude of jobs, from busboy and ranch hand to cab driver and private investigator, before settling into a career in journalism. He worked in Florida for the Tampa Tribune and later for the Prague Post in the newly born Czech Republic. For 20 years he traveled to more than 50 countries in all continents to write and report and poke around as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. During his years in Washington, DC, he served as chief diplomatic correspondent, national political reporter and, at the end, the Journal’s global economics editor. He now travels and writes on his own. He is the founder and editor of Gotham Canoe, an online journal dedicated to life out of doors. American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal is his first book. He lives with his wife in Washington DC.

Neil King photo courtesy of Jeff McGuiness

President Gerald Ford suffered two attempts on his life during his term in office: one by a young woman in Charles Manson's Family, Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, and the other by a far more unlikely candidate — an average middle-aged mother of five — Sara Jane Moore. After thirty years in contact with Moore in prison, journalist Geri Spieler deconstructs her life in Housewife Assassin, tracing the path from Moore's small-town upbringing in West Virginia to that fateful moment when she tried to assassinate the president.

Throughout Moore's dodgy life she hid her identity and misled those around her. Through the turbulent 60s and 70s, she married five times, abandoned children, faked amnesia, befriended Patty Hearst's father, became a revolutionary, and worked as an FBI informant turned double agent feeding information to the underground radicals, all before the assassination attempt.

From Spieler's insider correspondence and independent research, including interviews with President Ford himself, she confirms details (the gunshot missed the President's head by six inches) and debunks others (Sara Jane did not "shoot wild" as the press had reported) to deliver a compelling profile of a society lady turned elusive assassin.

Geri Spieler has written about the only woman who shot at a sitting US president. Using her high-level investigative skills, she got Washington to open the file of what happened the day she shot at Pres. Ford instead of what the FBI covered up. In her breakthrough book, Housewife Assassin-The Woman Who Tried to Kill President Ford, (Diversion Books), Spieler reveals the true story of that woman, Sara Jane Moore, who was a mother and doctor’s wife who lived in the country club community of Danville in 1975 and 18 months, she became the first woman who tried to assassinate the president and missed his head by six inches. She is the president of the San Francisco Peninsula branch of the California Writers Club and has authored articles in numerous publications. She has written for the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and Forbes, and as a Research Director for Gartner, a global technology advising company. She was a regular contributor to Truthdig.com, an award-winning investigative reporting website.  She has written San Francisco Values: Common Ground for Getting America Back on Track. She is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists, the Authors Guild, Women’s National Book Association, the Internet Society, and the Book Critics Circle.

Geri Spieler photo courtesy of the author