Occidental Center for the Arts Literary Series hosts the writers of Red Flag Warning: Mutual Aid and Survival in California's Fire Country: edited by Dani Burlison & Margaret Elysia Garcia. (AK Press) A guide for living physically, mentally and emotionally amid ecological destruction. Readers are invited to examine what fire can and does mean to them and what it means for us to re-imagine the world. Presenters from this collection include Dani Burlison, Manjula Martin, Hiya Swanhuyser Beatrice Camacho, and Amy Elizabeth Robinson.
Free admission, all donations gratefully accepted. Selected readings, and conversation with the audience, followed by book sales and signing. Refreshments for sale. OCA’s facilities are accessible to people with disabilities.
Dani Burlison (she/her) is a writer and teacher from rural Northern California. Her books include “Red Flag Warning: Mutual Aid and Survival in California’s Fire Country” (co-editor, AK Press, 2025), “Some Places Worth Leaving” (Tolsun Books, 2020), and “All of Me: Love, Anger and the Female Body” (PM Press, 2019). She makes zines, is a co-founder of the CAW anarchist collective, and has been a staff writer at a Bay Area Alt-weekly and a columnist at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Dani’s writing can also be found in Ms. Magazine, Yes! Magazine, KQED Arts, The Rumpus, Earth Island Journal, Portland Review and elsewhere. She teaches at SRJC and is a single mom of two young adults.
Manjula Martin is author of The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History. She is coauthor of Fruit Trees for Every Garden, which won the 2020 American Horticultural Society Book Award. Martin edited the anthology Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living, and she was managing editor of the National Magazine Award–winning literary journal Zoetrope: All-Story. She lives in western Sonoma County, California.
Hiya Swanhuyser is a a writer from Northern California. She is a founding member of Substrate Arts, a co-operative online magazine covering Bay Area creative scenes. Her writing has appeared in the Press Democrat, the North Bay Bohemian, KQED Arts, Mission Local, the Believer, Fandor's Keyframe, and others. She is writing a book about the Montgomery Block, a little-known Bohemian mecca that once stood where the Transamerica Pyramid is now. She grew up on a semi-communal family farm in Occidental.
Beatrice Camacho is the UndocuFund Director and a Community Organizer. She is a first-generation Chicana raised in Sonoma County to low-income, working-class parents who immigrated from Northern Mexico. As a lifelong renter, growing up on Section 8 Housing, she knows the importance of dignified and affordable housing. She is trained in Restorative Justice and Restorative Practices. An organizer with the North Bay Organizing Project since 2018, she organized the Sonoma County Tenants Union, organizes community pop-up healing clinics, and co-founded the statewide California UndocuFund Network.
Amy Elizabeth Robinson lives in the Monan’s Rill community in the Mayacamas mountains of Sonoma County, California, on Wappo land. Her family’s home was lost and her community devastated by the Glass Fire of 2020, but after a few tumultuous years they have returned. Amy is a historian, writer, poet, mother, and organizer. She studies Zen and the creative process with Rachel Boughton, Roshi at Flower Mountain Zen, works at Sonoma County Library (where she is a proud union member), and is on the Steering Committee for the North Bay chapter of the Working Families Party. You can learn more about her and her writing at Still Life, Turning Planet.