Science + Literature: Perceiving One Another

Ed Yong’s An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us—a 2025 Science + Literature Selected Title—challenges readers to move beyond our sensory biases to better understand the ways in which creatures, animals, and our fellow humans experience the world. Join Yong for a reading and conversation on the connective possibilities of science writing and of curiosity. Moderated by Sabrina Imbler, 2023 Science + Literature honoree, and author of How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures.

Limited free copies of An Immense World will be available at the event, first come, first served. The program will be followed by a book signing.

Doors will open at 5:30pm, and the program will begin at 6:00pm PDT.

Presented in partnership with the National Book Foundation and Litquake.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

Ed Yong is a Pulitzer Prize–winning science writer based in Oakland. He is the author of two bestselling books: I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life, and An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, which won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize. He was a guest editor of the Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology, a Guggenheim Fellow, and is a member of Liminal—a science communication collective, co-founded by his wife Liz Neeley. He has a corgi named Typo.

Sabrina Imbler is a staff writer at Defector, a worker-owned site, where they cover creatures and the natural world. Their first full-length book, How Far the Light Reaches, won a Los Angeles Times book prize in science and technology. Their chapbook Dyke (geology), was selected for the National Book Foundation Science + Literature program. Their newsletter, Creatures NYC, lists all the wildlife-related events happening in NYC. Sabrina lives in Brooklyn with their partner, two cats, and a school of fish.

ABOUT LITQUAKE:

Since being founded in 1999, Litquake has hosted 10,500 authors for 275,000 attendees and distributed 12,000 free books to San Francisco schoolchildren. With over 225 literary partners, Litquake functions more than ever as an umbrella organization stitching together the Bay Area’s literary scene. In its lively, diverse and inclusive celebration of San Francisco’s thriving contemporary literary scene, Litquake, which enters its second quarter-century in 2025, seeks to foster an interest in literature, perpetuate a sense of literary community, and provides a forum for Bay Area writing as a complement to the city’s music, film, and cultural festivals. Litquake's annual festival takes place October 9–25, 2025.

Host or Publisher National Book Foundation