Friends of the Oakland Public School Libraries (FOPSL) is pleased to bring you another series of online ‘Author Chats’ via Zoom on Thursday evenings in April to help raise funds to support Oakland public school libraries, including purchasing new books, resources for librarians, and ebooks for the new OUSD Digital Library.  

Authors include:

April 15, 7 pm - Daniel Handler

April 22, 6 pm - Te-Ping Chen

April 29, 7 pm - Gail Tsukyama

Daniel Handler is the author of seven novels, including Bottle Grove, All the Dirty Parts, and Adverbs. As Lemony Snicket, he is responsible for numerous books for children, including A Series of Unfortunate Events, which was adapted by Netflix. His books have sold more than 70 million copies and have been translated into 40 languages, and have been adapted for screen and stage. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, the illustrator Lisa Brown, with whom he has collaborated on several books, and one son.

Te-Ping Chen is an Oakland native, journalist and fiction writer. She is a Wall Street Journal correspondent in Philadelphia who was previously based in Beijing and Hong Kong, reporting on everything from rice cookers to wrongful convictions to Edward Snowden. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker and Granta. Her recently-released debut collection of short stories, Land of Big Numbers, received stellar reviews from the Los Angeles Times, NPR Books, Booklist, the AP, Esquire, and many more. Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan called it "gripping and illuminating."

Gail Tsukiyama is the bestselling author of The Color of Air, Women of the Silk and The Samurai's Garden, as well as the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Award and the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award. Gail was born in San Francisco, California to a Chinese mother from Hong Kong and a Japanese father from Hawaii. Gail is also currently the executive director of WaterBridge Outreach: Books + Water, a nonprofit organization that provides books and access to water in developing countries.