Clare Frank fought fires for nearly 30 years and served as the State of California’s first and only female Chief of Fire Protection. Her new book Burnt: A Memoir of Fighting Fire is an inspiring, richly detailed, and open-hearted account of an extraordinary life in fire. It chronicles the transformation of a young adult determined to prove her mettle into a scarred and sensitive veteran, grappling with the weight of her duties as chief of fire protection —  one of the highest-ranking women in Cal Fire history — while record-setting fires engulf her home state. Mentors and managing, funerals and scandal, pickup basketball, car crashes, and always fire — no one has written about this world, from this perspective, like Clare Frank. She masterfully mixes irreverence and awe, taking readers inside station houses, on daily calls, and along on wildfire campaigns where antics and dark humor balance terrifying risk, trauma, and a sense of almost holy responsibility.

Over the course of her career, Frank earned a spot on an elite state command team, a bachelor's in fire administration, a law degree and bar card, a master's in creative writing, and several leadership awards. Now, she brings her story to the Mill Valley Public Library. Join us for a conversation with Clare Frank about her new book, firefighting, and everything in between.

Clare Frank started firefighting in California at 17 and was promoted up the ranks, becoming the state’s first and only female chief of fire protection. Along the way, she earned a BS in fire administration, an MFA in creative writing, and a JD. She has lectured at colleges, universities, and state and national fire conferences, and lives near Lake Tahoe with her husband and two dogs. This is her first book.

Clare Frank photo courtesy of the publisher

Join us for a free talk in the outdoor Redwood Amphitheater with internationally bestselling author Peter Wohlleben, whose powerful follow-up to The Hidden Life of Trees is a book that will deepen our understanding of ancient forests, reaffirm our dependence on trees, and celebrate their ability to survive human caused climate change.

Light refreshments and book sale and signing will follow the talk. Dress in layers and bring a cushion for this rustic outdoor space.

An illuminating manifesto on ancient forests: how they adapt to climate change by passing their wisdom through generations, and why our future lies in protecting them.

In his beloved book The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben revealed astonishing discoveries about the social networks of trees and how they communicate. Now, in The Power of Trees, he turns to their future, with a searing critique of forestry management, tree planting, and the exploitation of old growth forests.

As human-caused climate change devastates the planet, forests play a critical role in keeping it habitable. While politicians and business leaders would have us believe that cutting down forests can be offset by mass tree planting, Wohlleben offers a warning: many tree planting schemes lead to ecological disaster. Not only are these trees more susceptible to disease, flooding, fires, and landslides, we need to understand that forests are more than simply a collection of trees. Instead, they are ecosystems that consist of thousands of species, from animals to fungi and bacteria. The way to save trees, and ourselves? Step aside and let forests — which are naturally better equipped to face environmental challenges — to heal themselves.

With the warmth and wonder familiar to readers from his previous books, Wohlleben also shares emerging scientific research about how forests shape climates both locally and across continents; that trees adapt to changing environmental conditions through passing knowledge down to their offspring; and how old growth may in fact have the most survival strategies for climate change.

At the heart of The Power of Trees lies Wohlleben's passionate plea: that our survival is dependent on trusting ancient forests, and allowing them to thrive.

Peter Wohlleben is the author of several books about the natural world, including The Hidden Life of Trees, The Inner Life of Animals, and The Heartbeat of Trees. His books for children include Can You Hear the Trees Talking?, Do You Know Where the Animals Live?, and Peter and the Tree Children. A longtime former forester, Wohlleben runs a forest academy in Germany that supports sustainable forest management and teaches adults and children about the many wonders of the forest. To learn more about Peter and his books, visit his website at peterwohllebenbooks.com.

Jane Billinghurst (translator, not appearing) is a nature lover, master gardener, editor, translator, and author of six books. She has translated and edited several books by Peter Wohlleben, including the New York Times bestseller The Hidden Life of Trees. She lives in Anacortes, Washington, next to 2,800 acres of community forest lands.

Peter Wohlleben photo courtesy of the author

This powerful and moving novel from the New York Times bestselling author of A Long Petal of the Sea and Violeta weaves together past and present, tracing the ripple effects of war and immigration on one child in Europe in 1938 and another in the United States in 2019.

Vienna, 1938. Samuel Adler is five years old when his father disappears during Kristallnacht — the night his family loses everything. As her child’s safety becomes ever harder to guarantee, Samuel’s mother secures a spot for him on a Kindertransport train out of Nazi-occupied Austria to England. He boards alone, carrying nothing but a change of clothes and his violin.

Arizona, 2019. Eight decades later, Anita Díaz and her mother board another train, fleeing looming danger in El Salvador and seeking refuge in the United States. But their arrival coincides with the new family separation policy, and seven-year-old Anita finds herself alone at a camp in Nogales. She escapes her tenuous reality through her trips to Azabahar, a magical world of the imagination. Meanwhile, Selena Durán, a young social worker, enlists the help of a successful lawyer in hopes of tracking down Anita’s mother.

Intertwining past and present, The Wind Knows My Name tells the tale of these two unforgettable characters, both in search of family and home. It is both a testament to the sacrifices that parents make and a love letter to the children who survive the most unfathomable dangers — and never stop dreaming.

Isabel Allende is the author of a number of bestselling and critically acclaimed books, including Violeta, A Long Petal of the Sea, The House of the Spirits, Of Love and Shadows, Eva Luna, and Paula. Her books have been translated into more than forty-two languages and have sold more than seventy-four million copies worldwide. She lives in California.

Javier Zamora was born in El Salvador in 1990. His father fled the country when he was one, and his mother when he was about to turn five. Both parents’ migrations were caused by the U.S.-funded Salvadoran Civil War. In his debut New York Times bestselling memoir, SOLITO, Javier retells his nine-week odyssey across Guatemala, Mexico, and eventually through the Sonoran Desert. His debut poetry collection, Unaccompanied, explores the impact of the war and immigration on his family. Zamora has been a Stegner Fellow at Stanford and a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard and holds fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation.

Javier's memoir SOLITO will be available for purchase at the event in both English and Spanish language editions.

Isabel Allende photo courtesy of the publisher. Javier Zamora photo courtesy of Gerardo Del Valle.

What happens when we are brave enough to speak our truths to the ones we love the most?

Join award-winning actress and activist Laura Dern and her mother, legendary actress Diane Ladd, for a deeply personal conversation on love, art, ambition, and legacy, inspired by her own heart-to-hearts. 

During the pandemic, Laura and Diane began walking and were able to break down the traditional barriers between mothers and daughters. They spoke honestly about the moments in their lives that impacted them deeply, and their new book – Honey, Baby, Mine – a compilation of their reflections, taking readers on an intimate tour of their lives and revealing universal lessons. 

These moderated conversations with Laura and Diane will be a celebration of the power of leaving nothing unsaid, and will make you want to call the people you love the most and start talking.

Tickets to this event include access to a moderated conversation with Laura and Diane and a signed copy of Honey, Baby, Mine.

Laura Dern is an award-winning actress, producer, creator, and activist. She has received a number of accolades, including an Academy Award, an Emmy, and five Golden Globe Awards. Dern is also a passionate environmentalist.

Diane Ladd is an international award-winning actress, receiving a BAFTA Award, a Golden Globe Award, and Women of the Year award. She is a three-time Oscar and three-time Emmy nominee, having appeared in more than 187 film and television shows. She is a director, writer, producer, and author with degrees in esoteric psychology/nutrition, a lifetime member of the Actors Studio, and on the National Board of Directors for SAG/AFTRA.

Laura Dern & Diane Ladd photo courtesy of Jona Frank

The powerful story of an inspiring doctor who made a difference, by helping to create a program to care for Boston’s homeless community — by the Pulitzer Prize–winning, New York Times bestselling author of Mountains Beyond Mountains

Tracy Kidder has been described by The Baltimore Sun as a “master of the nonfiction narrative.” In Rough Sleepers, Kidder shows how one person can make a difference, as he tells the story of Dr. Jim O’Connell, a gifted man who invented ways to create a community of care for a city’s unhoused population, including those who sleep on the streets — the “rough sleepers.”

When Jim O’Connell graduated from Harvard Medical School and was nearing the end of his residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, the chief of medicine made a proposal: Would he defer a prestigious fellowship and spend a year helping to create an organization to bring health care to homeless citizens? Jim took the job because he felt he couldn’t refuse. But that year turned into his life’s calling. Tracy Kidder spent five years following Dr. O’Connell and his colleagues as they served their thousands of homeless patients. In this illuminating book we travel with O’Connell as he navigates the city, offering medical care, socks, soup, empathy, humor, and friendship to some of the city’s most endangered citizens. He emphasizes a style of medicine in which patients come first, joined with their providers in what he calls “a system of friends.” 

Much as he did with Paul Farmer in Mountains Beyond Mountains, Kidder explores how a small but dedicated group of people have changed countless lives by facing one of American society’s difficult problems instead of looking away.

Tracy Kidder has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Robert F. Kennedy Award, among other literary prizes. His books include Mountains Beyond Mountains, Strength in What Remains, The Soul of a New Machine, House, Among Schoolchildren, Old Friends, Hometown, and A Truck Full of Money.

Dr. James O’Connell graduated summa cum laude from the University of Notre Dame in 1970 and received his master’s degree in theology from Cambridge University in 1972. After graduating from Harvard Medical School in 1982, he completed a residency in Internal Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). In 1985, Dr. O'Connell began fulltime clinical work with homeless individuals as the founding physician of the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, which now serves over 13,000 homeless persons each year in two hospital-based clinics (Boston Medical Center and MGH) and in more than 60 shelters and outreach sites in Boston. With his colleagues, Dr. O’Connell established the nation’s first medical respite program for homeless persons in September, 1985, with 25 beds in the Lemuel Shattuck Shelter. This innovative program now provides acute and sub-acute, pre- and post-operative, and palliative and end-of-life care in the freestanding 104-bed Barbara McInnis House. Working with the MGH Laboratory of Computer Science, Dr. O’Connell designed and implemented the nation’s first computerized medical record for a homeless program in 1995. From 1989 until 1996, Dr. O'Connell served as the National Program Director of the Homeless Families Program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Dr. O’Connell is the editor of The Health Care of Homeless Persons: A Manual of Communicable Diseases and Common Problems in Shelters and on the Streets. His articles have appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, Circulation, the American Journal of Public Health, the Journal of Clinical Ethics, and several other medical journals. Dr. O’Connell has been featured on ABC’s Nightline and in the feature-length documentary Give Me a Shot of Anything. He has received numerous awards, including the Albert Schweitzer Humanitarian Award in 2012 and The Trustees’ Medal at the bicentennial celebration of MGH in 2011. Dr. O’Connell has collaborated with homeless programs in many cities in the USA and across the globe, including Los Angeles, London, and Sydney. Dr. O’Connell’s book Stories from the Shadows: Reflections of a Street Doctor was published in 2015 in celebration of BHCHP’s 30th anniversary. Dr. O’Connell is president of BHCHP and an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Tracy Kidder photo courtesy of Fran Kidder; James O'Connell photo courtesy of the publisher

Join us for two exciting author events at College of Marin: in this event, Margaret Wilkerson Sexton will talk about her brilliant novel, On the Rooftop. Admission is free and all are welcome. You don't need a ticket. Parking for these events is easy and free.

More information: https://library.marin.edu/ or (415) 485-9475. These events are sponsored by the Emeritus Students of College of Marin.

A stunning novel about a mother whose dream of musical stardom for her three daughters collides with the daughters’ ambitions for their own lives — set against the backdrop of gentrifying 1950s San Francisco

At home they are just sisters, but on stage, they are The Salvations. Ruth, Esther, and Chloe have been singing and dancing in harmony since they could speak. Thanks to the rigorous direction of their mother, Vivian, they’ve become a bona fide girl group whose shows are the talk of the Jazz-era Fillmore.

Now Vivian has scored a once-in-a-lifetime offer from a talent manager, who promises to catapult The Salvations into the national spotlight. Vivian knows this is the big break she’s been praying for. But sometime between the hours of rehearsal on their rooftop and the weekly gigs at the Champagne Supper Club, the girls have become women, women with dreams that their mother cannot imagine.

The neighborhood is changing, too: all around the Fillmore, white men in suits are approaching Black property owners with offers. One sister finds herself called to fight back, one falls into the comfort of an old relationship, another yearns to make her own voice heard. And Vivian, who has always maintained control, will have to confront the parts of her life that threaten to splinter: the community, The Salvations, and even her family.

Warm, gripping, and wise, with echoes of Fiddler on the Roof, Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s latest novel is a moving family portrait from “a writer of uncommon nerve and talent” (New York Times Book Review ).

Margaret Wilkerson Sexton studied creative writing at Dartmouth College and law at UC Berkeley. Her most recent novel, The Revisioners, won a 2020 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work and was a national bestseller as well as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her debut novel, A Kind of Freedom, was long-listed for the National Book Award. She lives in Oakland with her family.

Anita Gail Jones - Born and raised in Albany, Georgia, Anita maintains a strong connection with this southwest corner of the state. This region is the setting for her upcoming debut novel, The Peach Seed. The manuscript was selected as a 2021 Finalist in the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction and was acquired by Retha Powers at Holt in a two-book deal for publication in August 2023.
In 2002, Anita and her husband, Rob Roehrick, founded the Gaines-Jones Education Foundation, awarding need-based college scholarships to Black students in southwest Georgia and the San Francisco Bay Area. Her oral tradition storytelling grew out of an early desire to write and illustrate children’s stories.

Margaret Wilkerson Sexton photo courtesy of Smeeta Mahanti. Anita Gail Jones photo courtesy of the author.

Join us for two exciting author events at College of Marin: in this event, Ingrid Rojas Contreras will discuss her delicious memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds. Admission is free and all are welcome. You don't need a ticket. Parking for these events is easy and free.

More information: https://library.marin.edu/ or (415) 485-9475. These events are sponsored by the Emeritus Students of College of Marin.

From the bestselling author of Fruit of the Drunken Tree, comes a dazzling, kaleidoscopic memoir reclaiming her family's otherworldly legacy.

For Ingrid Rojas Contreras, magic runs in the family. Raised amid the political violence of 1980s and '90s Colombia, in a house bustling with her mother’s fortune-telling clients, she was a hard child to surprise. Her maternal grandfather, Nono, was a renowned curandero, a community healer gifted with what the family called “the secrets”: the power to talk to the dead, tell the future, treat the sick, and move the clouds. And as the first woman to inherit “the secrets,” Rojas Contreras’ mother was just as powerful. Mami delighted in her ability to appear in two places at once, and she could cast out even the most persistent spirits with nothing more than a glass of water.

This legacy had always felt like it belonged to her mother and grandfather, until, while living in the U.S. in her twenties, Rojas Contreras suffered a head injury that left her with amnesia. As she regained partial memory, her family was excited to tell her that this had happened before: Decades ago Mami had taken a fall that left her with amnesia, too. And when she recovered, she had gained access to “the secrets.”

In 2012, spurred by a shared dream among Mami and her sisters, and her own powerful urge to relearn her family history in the aftermath of her memory loss, Rojas Contreras joins her mother on a journey to Colombia to disinter Nono’s remains. With Mami as her unpredictable, stubborn, and often amusing guide, Rojas Contreras traces her lineage back to her Indigenous and Spanish roots, uncovering the violent and rigid colonial narrative that would eventually break her mestizo family into two camps: those who believe “the secrets” are a gift, and those who are convinced they are a curse.

Interweaving family stories more enchanting than those in any novel, resurrected Colombian history, and her own deeply personal reckonings with the bounds of reality, Rojas Contreras writes her way through the incomprehensible and into her inheritance. The result is a luminous testament to the power of storytelling as a healing art and an invitation to embrace the extraordinary.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her debut novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree was the silver medal winner in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and a New York Times editor's choice. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Believer, and Zyzzyva, among others. She lives in California.

Margo Candela was born and raised in Los Angeles and began her writing career when she joined Glendale Community College’s student newspaper. She transferred to San Francisco State University as a journalism major, and upon graduation began writing for websites and magazines before writing her first two novels, Underneath It All and Life Over Easy. She returned to Los Angeles to raise her son and wrote More Than This and Goodbye to All That. The Neapolitan Sisters is her fifth novel and her first after a decade-long hiatus from writing. She now lives in San Francisco.

The Neapolitan Sisters - Three sisters. Three vastly different lives. A maelstrom of family secrets. For fans of María Amparo Escandón and Laurie Frankel, Margo Candela pens a riotous, provocative tale of family and sisterhood. Growing up with a kind but alcoholic father and a suspicious, passive aggressive mother, the Bernal  sisters each developed their own way of coping: Dulcina had her art and drugs and alcohol, Claudia plunged into her studies and fled to Princeton, and Maritza watched one Disney movie after another in between devouring romance novels.

Told in alternating points of view, The Neapolitan Sisters is a humorous yet moving look at what it means to be a sister, daughter, and ultimately, your own self, despite the pressures that come with being part of a family.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras photo courtesy of Jamil Hellu. Margo Candela photo courtesy of Dennis Menendez.

Please join us for a presentation by Dr. Lisa Damour about her latest book in which she will address the fact that adolescent mental health isn't about feeling good, calm, or relaxed, but about having the right feelings at the right times, and knowing how to manage those feelings effectively. She will offer guidance on how to help teens open up, and how to keep teens from being overwhelmed by their emotions or feeling at the mercy of their moods and provide concrete strategies for supporting teens as they manage their feelings at home, with their peers, online, and at school.

Recognized as a thought leader by the American Psychological Association, Dr. Lisa Damour co-hosts the Ask Lisa podcast, writes about adolescents for the New York Times, appears as a regular contributor to CBS News, and works in collaboration with UNICEF. She is the author of two New York Times best sellers, Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood and Under Pressure: Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety in Girls; in addition to the soon-to-be-published book, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents.

Dr. Lisa Damour photo courtesy of the New York Times

New York Times bestselling author Julie Lythcott-Haims in back with her third book, Your Turn: How to Be an Adult. Her newest book has been called a "groundbreakingly frank" guide to adulthood.

Julie Lythcott-Haims believes in humans and is deeply interested in what gets in our way. Her work encompasses writing, speaking, teaching, mentoring, and activism. She is the New York Times bestselling author of How to Raise an Adult which gave rise to a popular TED Talk. Her second book is the critically-acclaimed and award-winning prose poetry memoir Real American, which illustrates her experience as a Black and biracial person in white spaces.

Julie holds degrees from Stanford, Harvard Law, and California College of the Arts. She currently serves on the boards of Black Women's Health Imperative, Narrative Magazine, and on the Board of Trustees at California College of the Arts. She serves on the advisory boards of LeanIn.org, Sir Ken Robinson Foundation and Baldwin For the Arts. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her partner of over thirty years, their iterant young adults, and her mother.

Julie Lythcott-Haims photo courtesy of Come Plum

Emerging technologies in reproductive science won’t just change the ways we become parents — they’ll play a key role in the evolving definition of “family.”

Traditional family structures are adapting to make room for children conceived in previously unimaginable ways. Whole industries and internet-enabled communities are being built around reproductive technologies. And there’s more change coming as science continues to move forward. Combining intimate personal stories with cutting-edge research, Reconceptions invites readers to reconsider their own ideas about parenthood and embrace a new vision of the meaning of family.

In 2012, Rachel Lehmann-Haupt, an award-winning journalist, chose to begin a family on her own as a single mother by choice. In the years since her son was born, Rachel’s interest in collaborative reproduction has only grown — leading her to search for pioneers in reproductive science and the different permutations of families that this science is making possible. In Reconceptions, she shares intimate stories from the bleeding edge of society’s redefinition of family — including her own experience of creating a new kind of tribe with her son’s “dosies,” or donor siblings, and their parents. In these pages, readers will meet:
 

• Tyra, the egg donor and professional surrogate who doesn’t want kids of her own, but stays in touch with several of the families she’s helped in the conception of their children. 
• Sam, the single father by choice who worked with a surrogate and donor egg to conceive his son who he is now raising with his girlfriend.
• Rob and Scotty, the gay couple whose egg donor is now a friend and fixture at family social gatherings.
• The author’s Facebook group of mothers who conceived their children with the same sperm donor — and how the group served as a much much-needed support system through the worst of the COVID pandemic.

Reconceptions offers a compelling vision of what advances in reproductive science mean for the definition of family in the 21st century and beyond, and imparts a modern story for anyone looking to better understand their own familial relationships — no matter what their family looks like.

Rachel Lehmann-Haupt is an award-winning author and expert on the future of family life, career timing, and the influence of science and technology on fertility, pregnancy and family. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the New York Observer, Newsweek, New York, Vogue, Outside, Wired and Neo.Life. Kirkus Reviews said her her first book, In Her Own Sweet Time: Unexpected Adventures in Finding Love, Commitment and Motherhood (Basic Books, 2009), "gracefully combines a revealing, engaging memoir with admirably nuanced social commentary.” She is also founder of StoryMade Studio, a boutique storytelling studio serving a wide range of clients, including the TED conference and the Mayo Clinic.

Jane Metcalfe is the CEO and founder of NEO.LIFE, a media and events company tracking how digital tools and an engineering mindset are transforming human biology. She is chair of the Human Immunome Project, a global consortium of researchers, industry, and NGOs working to build working models of the human immunome, and also co-chair of the Futures Council of the Focused Ultrasound Foundation.    

Prior to that, Jane made chocolate on a pier in San Francisco as the President of TCHO Chocolate.    

But Jane is probably best known as the cofounder and former president of Wired Magazine / Wired Ventures, Inc., the legendary media company that chronicled the digital revolution as it was happening from a front row seat. Under Jane’s and her cofounder Louis Rossetto’s leadership, the magazine grew to an internationally renowned brand and a diversified media company featuring U.S., U.K., and Japanese editions, a book division, a television show and HotWired, the first original online content backed by Fortune 500 advertising, inventing the advertising banner along the way (which they discussed but didn’t patent). There was also HotBot, at the time the fastest search engine in the world. 

Rachel Lehmann photo courtesy of the author; Jane Metcalfe photo courtesy of