Sonoma Authors Festival offers free program to public and students

In its second year the Sonoma Valley Authors Festival kicks off Friday with a free program for Sonoma Valley students chock full of speakers across a breadth of topics. On Saturday, the festival offers a free evening event on the Plaza, open to the public with music and speakers.

Billy Collins, a former U.S. Poet Laureate and a presenter at last year’s inaugural Authors Festival, has been invited back and will speak at the ticketed festival event at the Lodge at Sonoma, as well as the free Authors on the Plaza event on Saturday, May 4, from 5 to 7 p.m., as well as Students Day on Friday.

“Billy Collins is coming back. He was so popular last year we had to move him to a bigger venue this year,” said Janet Hansen, librarian at Sonoma Valley High School, one of the schools taking part in Students Day.

Festival co-founder Ginny Freeman said she was particularly impressed to find last year that students would be so interested to listen to a poet.

This year Freeman is anticipating students will find two Google employees of particular interest – neither of whom have written a book, but will be talking about the wave of the future in artificial intelligence.

The speakers Charina Chou and Andrew Zaldivar will discuss AI and the technology involved, as well as present a hands-on demonstration. Zaldivar has an “amazing” backstory, Freeman said.

He is Latino and African-American, raised by a single father on welfare. They needed food stamps and rent subsidies to get by. He rose from poverty to earn a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience from the University of California, Irvine.

Students Day features two other returning speakers from the inaugural school event – Alex Filippenko and Pedro Irazoqui. Hansen said students are “excited” to see both again.

Filippenko is an astrophysicist who, Freeman said, “looks and talks like Robin Williams.”

“He makes everyone love astrophysics. He’s so user friendly,” Freeman said. Filippenko was voted “best professor” at UC Berkeley nine times.

Irazoqui is an electrical engineer and the director of implantable devices at Purdue University, Freeman’s alma mater. It was on a trip to Indiana with her husband and co-founder of the festival, David Freeman, to attend a lecture at Purdue University that Freeman discovered him. Irazoqui works on biomedical engineering devices such as one that can be implanted in a person to send biological signals for muscle movement or emotional health such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Hansen said that, while most of the new speakers are unknown to the students, a few names, such as Anthony Ray Hinton, have already reached a youth audience; Hinton’s book “The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row” is about the 30 years he spent on death row for a crime he did not commit.

More than 6,000 books – written by the authors who are presenting – will be given out to the students for free. In all, Students Day will feature 14 speakers appearing throughout the day at Sonoma Valley High School, Adele Harrison and Altimira middle schools and Sonoma Academy.

Saturday’s free Authors on the Plaza event features Collins and Roger McNamee. McNamee wrote the recently published, “Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe,” released in February.

McNamee is a Silicon Valley tech venture capitalist and early investor and mentor to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg who has had a serious change of heart about the social media behemoth, calling Facebook a catastrophe and a failure.

Preceding Collins and McNamee will be a 30 minute set of music by Philip Claypool and Carlos Reyes. The event will take place behind City Hall with chairs available to the first 340 people; others are invited to bring their own chairs or blankets to spread out across the Plaza.

Email Anne at anne.ernst@sonomanews.com.