The Howard Zinn Book Fair returns on December 6, 2026, to the City College of San Francisco Mission Campus. The book fair “is an annual celebration of The People’s History — past, present, and future. We bring together left authors, readers, organizers, and community members to debate and discuss strategies for a better world.”
This year’s theme is “A Time of Monsters: A Time to Fight.” The organizers state,
We live in a time when many are asked to survive what can only be called monstrous: authoritarianism, war, state violence, environmental destruction, economic insecurity, forced displacement, attacks on civil rights, and the everyday cruelties of systems built to dehumanize.
But monsters are not only figures we fear. They live in our stories, our myths, our politics, our histories, and our imaginations. They are used to mark some of us as dangerous, disposable, foreign, criminal, or less than human. Sometimes the monster is the system. Sometimes the monster is the story we have inherited. Sometimes we are the ones made into monsters in someone else’s version of the world.
This year’s theme, A Time of Monsters: A Time to Fight, invites us to ask: Who names the monster, and for what purpose? What are we being taught to fear? What forms of violence are normalized? What old monsters are returning under new names, and what new ones are being produced by technology, empire, capitalism, borders, policing, and ecological collapse?
And crucially, how do we fight back?
Visit zinnbookfair.org for the schedule, list of speakers, and tables (including HowardZinn.org).
