Join us as we celebrate the launch of Rosanna Xia's new book, CALIFORNIA AGAINST THE SEA. Rosanna will be joined in conversation by Ruby Daniela Blei!

This event will include a conversation, short reading, and Q&A.

Books will be available for purchase at the event from our friends at Dog Eared Books!

About CALIFORNIA AGAINST THE SEA

From a celebrated environmental journalist, the riveting exploration of sea level rise along the West Coast through human stories and ecological dramas.

Along California’s 1,200-mile coastline, the overheated Pacific Ocean is rising and pressing in, imperiling both wildlife and the maritime towns and cities that 27 million people call home. In California Against the Sea, Los Angeles Times coastal reporter Rosanna Xia asks: As climate chaos threatens the places we love so fiercely, will we finally grasp our collective capacity for change?

Xia, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, investigates the impacts of engineered landscapes, the market pressures of development, and the ecological activism and political scrimmages that have carved our contemporary coastline—and foretell even greater changes to our shores. From the beaches of the Mexican border up to the sheer-cliffed North Coast, the voices of Indigenous leaders, community activists, small-town mayors, urban engineers, and tenacious environmental scientists commingle. Together, they chronicle the challenges and urgency of forging a climate-wise future. Xia’s investigation takes us to Imperial Beach, Los Angeles, Pacifica, Marin City, San Francisco, and beyond, weighing the rivaling arguments, agreements, compromises, and visions governing the State of California’s commitment to a coast for all. Through graceful reportage, she charts how the decisions we make today will determine where we go tomorrow: headlong into natural disaster, or toward an equitable refashioning of coastal stewardship.

About Rosanna Xia

Rosanna Xia is an environmental reporter for the Los Angeles Times, where she specializes in stories about the coast and ocean. Her work spans feature writing to investigative reporting and engages themes of climate and social justice. Xia’s reporting has uncovered the dumping of toxic DDT waste off the Los Angeles coast; set the record straight on the seizure of Bruce’s Beach from its Black proprietors (prompting an unprecedented reparative land return in 2022); explored the impacts of coastal gentrification; and articulated the dangers posed to shorelines by pollution and heating oceans. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2020 for explanatory reporting on sea level rise, which inspired the work that culminated in California Against the Sea. Her writing has been anthologized in the Best American Science and Nature Writing series.

About Daniela Blei

Daniela Blei is a historian and book editor who works with faculty, independent scholars, and universities around the world on a variety of projects. Writing about places where the past and present meet, from the natural world to the built environment, her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She is currently writing a book about the forgotten past and disappearing future of six of the world's most famous beaches. She was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley and taught history and humanities at Reed College before returning to the Bay Area, an on-and-off home for more than two decades.