What Haunts Us Still: Surviving and Storytelling

This chilling and visionary conversation brings together three groundbreaking voices in contemporary horror and speculative fiction who use storytelling to interrogate history, identity, and the legacies that refuse to stay buried. Through unsettling narratives and fearless imagination, they reveal how horror becomes a vital tool for reckoning, resistance, and truth-telling. Tananarive Due, award-winning author and scholar, is a leading force in Black horror and speculative fiction whose work draws on Black history, family, and lived experience to explore generational trauma, injustice, and survival. From the multi-award-winning The Reformatory to classics like The Good House and My Soul to Keep, Due transforms real-world horrors into powerful narratives of memory and reckoning. Stephen Graham Jones, The New York Times bestselling author and professor, reshapes contemporary horror through Indigenous perspectives that challenge colonial myths and genre conventions. In works such as The Buffalo Hunters Hunter, The Only Good Indians, and My Heart Is a Chainsaw, he interrogates violence, belonging, and cultural endurance with relentless innovation and emotional force. Moderated by Ayize Jama-Everett, novelist and cultural thinker whose own boundary-defying work spans horror, science fiction, philosophy, and spirituality, this conversation will explore how horror functions as cultural critique, creative liberation, and a mirror to the fears societies try to bury. Join us for a compelling discussion on the power of horror to illuminate hidden histories, disrupt dominant narratives, and imagine new ways of surviving and storytelling in a haunted world. Introductory live music performance by Kevin Goldberg (Bushwick Book Club Oakland) This event took place in Downtown Berkeley, at the Bay Area Book Festival, May 29-31 2026.  Support our work and help to keep the Bay Area Book Festival 96% free! https://givebutter.com/writingthefuture Check out our upcoming events www.baybookfest.org Follow us on instagram: https://www.instagram.com/baybookfest/