Portrait of a Mestiza
Join us along with LCW author Marianna Marlowe for a conversation on her new memoir, Portrait of a Mestiza, with writer and sexual ethics educator Natasha Singh at an event hosted by Book Passage and organized by Left Coast Writers®
Saturday June 13th, 2026 — 2 PM
Book Passage-Corte Madera|| 51 Tamal Vista Dr. Corte Madera ||
Following her acclaimed 2025 memoir Portrait of a Feminist, Marlowe’s latest book is a powerful exploration of hybrid identity, belonging, and life between cultures. Born to a Peruvian mother and American father, she traces a journey across continents—and through the intersecting forces of race, class, and gender, religion, migration, and family.
In a series of intimate essays, Marlowe reflects on marriage, motherhood, faith, and the search for identity in the “in-between” spaces Gloria Anzaldúa called the borderlands. Portrait of a Mestiza is ultimately a meditation on contradiction, cultural inheritance, and forging a new consciousness beyond categories.
“Marlowe’s voice cuts clean…the collection’s achievement lies in her willingness to dwell in contradictions, and the uncomfortable space of feeling perpetually in between.” — Kirkus Reviews
Marianna Marlowe is a Latina writer exploring issues surrounding gender identity and cultural hybridity. She holds a Ph.D. in Literary Studies as well as a Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies from the University of Washington, and a Bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley. Author of two memoirs published by She Writes Press, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area where she is at work on a third book.
When Carmela Donitella, youngest of a large Sicilian-American family, discovers someone is blackmailing her father who wants to open an orphanage, she enlists the help of her four older sisters, aka the Sister Mob.
literary anthologies on France, Italy, Mexico, and Greece. She has written for many publications, including National Geographic Traveler, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times and her short fiction has placed in the Kurt Vonnegut, Zoetrope, and Katherine Anne Porter contests. 
PROLES themes resonate today: 
“A disturbingly topical tale about a young spiritual drifter (Simon Bussbaum), thrown in with a group of disenfranchised males brutalized by cultural, educational, personal, and political neglect. “Proles” refers, of course, to “proletariat” and that’s not the only connection to “1984”, Orwell’s brilliant and now-we-can-say prescient masterpiece.
Joan Virginia Allen doesn’t just talk about dynamic aging—she lives it. As a retired elder law and estate planning attorney turned dynamic aging life coach, memoirist, and publisher of the online “Dynamic Aging 4 Life Magazine,” Joan is committed to changing the narrative around aging.
biomechanist Katy Bowman—a groundbreaking work that has helped people worldwide to experience greater physical mobility and vitality as they age.
Laurie McAndish King is an award-winning travel writer and photographer with an eye for the quirky. Her subjects include 20-foot-long Australian earthworms, an Ivy League astrophysicist’s explanation of how flying saucers are powered, and finding the perfect site for watching eagle sex. King’s essays and photography have appeared in Smithsonian magazine, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, Travelers’ Tales’ The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Lonely Planet’s The Kindness of Strangers, and other magazines and literary anthologies. Her three books of travel essays—insightful, poignant and often quite funny—are available from Book Passage: 
Join us as we celebrate the life and work of writer, traveler and centenarian Ethel Mussen, who passed away this year, a few years ahead of her 104th birthday. Some of us had the pleasure of her friendship, of knowing and traveling the world with her. Many of us have been delighted by Ethel’s travel tales published in the Wanderland Writers anthologies and elsewhere.
We have fond memories of Ethel Mussen, the world-traveling centenarian who—when she wasn’t out and about sharing her life stories, her wisdom and her the wide-eyed enthusiasm for ideas, people, places, good works and life in general— lived high on a hill above Berkeley.
our lives. Brilliant. Highly recommended.” 
found dead under the Golden Gate Bridge, an apparent suicide, she wrestles with a storm of sadness, guilt, and confusion. Haunted by her failure to prevent this tragedy, she’s determined to understand what went wrong.
Cyn Lubow, LMFT is a psychotherapist in private practice and an award-winning poet and filmmaker. Her professional articles have been reprinted and referenced in numerous publications on the web, and her “Transforming Depression into Empowerment” chapter is published in the anthology Goddess Shift: Women Leading for a Change. Cyn’s films have been distributed worldwide. Her feature documentary is included in the catalogs of dozens of college and university libraries. This is her first novel.