Friends of the Oakland Public School Libraries (FOPSL) is pleased to have brought you three author chats to support Oakland’s underfunded public school libraries. Our spring author chats included Daniel Handler, Te-Ping Chen, and Gail Tsukiyama. Read more about our April Author Chat authors below.

Daniel Handler is the author of seven novels, including Bottle Grove, All the Dirty Parts, and Adverbs. As Lemony Snicket, he wrote numerous books for children, including A Series of Unfortunate Events. 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 best-selling 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 countriesh