Howard Zinn Book Fair
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a TIME
OF MONSTERS
A TIME TO FIGHT
Sunday, December 6, 2026
10am–6pm
CCSF Mission Campus, 1125 Valencia St, San Francisco
The Howard Zinn 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. Founded in 2014, our volunteer-run event typically hosts 60 workshops and 100 publishers, and welcomes over 2500 attendees.
Sunday, December 6, 2026
→
San Francisco
→
CCSF Mission Campus
→
Sunday, December 6, 2026
→
San Francisco
→
CCSF Mission Campus
→
Sunday, December 6, 2026
→
San Francisco
→
CCSF Mission Campus
→
Sunday, December 6, 2026
→
San Francisco
→
CCSF Mission Campus
→
Sunday, December 6, 2026
→
San Francisco
→
CCSF Mission Campus
→
This year’s theme
A Time of Monsters:
What are the monsters of our time?
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?
A Time to Fight
How do we fight back?
Across history, ordinary people have confronted fascism, exploitation, racism, militarism, patriarchy, colonialism, surveillance, and repression. They have resisted not only through protest and direct action, but also through education, art, mutual aid, labor organizing, storytelling, music, community care, and the stubborn act of imagining a different world.
We invite panelists, writers, organizers, artists, educators, students, workers, and community members to explore the monsters of our time and the movements rising to meet them.
- What must be challenged, transformed, or dismantled?
- What fears must be unlearned?
- What solidarities must be strengthened?
- When do we need to be the monster?
- What can history teach us about resisting cruelty without losing our humanity?
At a time when so much is designed to isolate, divide, and exhaust us, the Howard Zinn Book Fair offers a space to think together, learn together, and remember that the fight for justice is also a fight for imagination, connection, and collective life.
We can’t wait to gather with you in San Francisco on Sunday, December 6, 2026.
Who was
Howard Zinn?
Howard Zinn was a historian, writer and activist most famously known for a People’s History of the United States. His work popularized the practice of telling a “history from below” of workers, women, immigrants, racialized people, LGBTQ+ people, dissidents and radicals. To learn more about his legacy visit our friends at the Zinn Ed Project and HowardZinn.org.