Yarn: Storytelling with Heather Gold and Friends

Julia Jackson is a comedienne and solo artist known for her biting social commentary, as well as actually biting audience members from time to time. This rising comedy star has performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and was a Semi-Finalist in the San Francisco International Comedy Competition. Her solo performance piece “Children Are Forever: All Sales Are Final” won the Best Non-Fiction Show Award at the 2016 United Solo Festival in New York City, and the script was published in the 2016 Plays and Playwrights by Indie Theatre Now. Julia has worked with Robin Williams, Dana Carvey, and Paul Mooney, appeared in the film Some Prefer Cake. 

The Boston Globe wrote, "There are countless ways to make someone laugh, and Betsy Salkind knows most of them. Want sarcastic wit? Political humor? Or maybe just a good animal mime? Salkind can pull all that off and more.” Best known as “Squirrel Lady,” Betsy began her career in improv/sketch troupes: Guilty Children and Terrorist Bridesmaids. She is author and star of Anne Frank Superstar and has appeared on Girls Night Out, Last Comic Standing, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and Showtime's Fierce Funny Women. She was a staff-writer for Saturday Night Special and Roseanne, and is author of two illustrated children’s style books for adults: More Than Once Upon A Time and Betsy's Sunday School Bible Classics. She also writes for the blog "Ethel's Law," and contributed to the anthology No Kidding: Women Writers on Bypassing Parenthood. 

Virgie Tovar is an author, activist and one of the nation's leading experts and lecturers on fat discrimination and body image. She is the founder of Babecamp, a four-week online course designed to help women who are ready to break up with diet culture, and started the hashtag campaign #LoseHateNotWeight. Tovar edited the ground-breaking anthology Hot & Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love and Fashion (Seal Press, November 2012) and The Feminist Press will be publishing her forthcoming book of non-fiction, You Have the Right to Remain Fat (August 2018). She holds a Master's degree in Sexuality Studies with a focus on the intersections of body size, race and gender. Virgie has been featured by the New York Times, Tech Insider, MTV, Al Jazeera, NPR, Self magazine, Yahoo and the San Francisco Chronicle. She lives in San Francisco. 

Cintra Wilson is originally from San Francisco, where she spent several years performing and writing for the stage. These writings begat journalistic writings, which in turn begat books and occasional forays into TV and screenwriting. After a very brief pit-stop in LA, she moved to New York, for obvious reasons. Current Salon contributor and former New York Times Critical Shopper, as well as creator and voice of "Winter Steele" for MTV's Liquid Television, Wilson is author of the books Fear And Clothing: Unbuckling American Style; Caligula For President: Better American Living Through Tyranny; Colors Insulting to Nature; A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Re-Examined As A Grotesque, Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations; and a varitety of plays and short fiction such as Red Spiral Notebook, The Abounding Gutter, XXX Love Act, Soul Hunt, The Bitsy La Fever’s Kingdom of Passion Trilogy, and many others.