 In the words of Margaret Atwood, I believe in the resistance, as I believe there can be no shadow unless there is also light. So people were asking us why we decided to do this event. Well, it's pretty obvious if you look at the news every day. And as with the majority of the United States, our organization, Lickwick, was festering over the recent election, the accusations, the grudges, the exaggerations, the lies. And to be honest, in our last board meeting in December, our fabulous board members said we need to do something and we hardly agreed. And this came together with lightning speed. And so we're so grateful to everybody. But this week, as we know, there's going to be marches and protests in over 600 cities around the country. So we personally at Lickwick have a message for the president-elect. We know that you like to count numbers and crowds. Thank you very much for uniting America. We do feel very united right now. So in times like this, it is the duty of the creative class to stand tall, report, and hold account. We are very proud to present tonight's diverse and eclectic Bay Area literary voices who speak to our nation's fear, anger, and perhaps even optimism. We're hoping there'll be at least an ounce of optimism. Special thanks to all of the authors participating tonight. I did want to let you know the sad news, which is that the storm has forced cancellation of three of our speakers tonight, Ishmael and Tennessee Reed, as well as Faith Adiel. We're sorry about that, but nature intervened. We do want to thank Luis Herrera, the librarian here, fabulous man, as well as Michelle and David and everyone else here from the public library.