Author: Bob Calhoun and Alia Volz in Conversation

A perfect pre-Halloween conversation between two very San Francisco authors, in celebration of the book The Murders That Made Us. 

Watch on YouTube.

Bob Calhoun is a San Francisco Bay Area author, journalist and former punk wrestler and peepshow emcee. Since 2015, he has recounted his city’s most gruesome and lurid events in his regular SF Weekly column, “Yesterday’s Crimes.” His punk wrestling memoir, Beer, Blood & Cornmeal: Seven Years of Incredibly Strange Wrestling (ECW Press), is a national bestseller that Wired.com called “breezy and hilarious.” His follow-up, Shattering Conventions: Commerce, Cosplay and Conflict on the Expo Floor, was spun off into a long-running column and video feature for Meetings Today, the trade magazine of the meetings and conventions industry. Calhoun's work has also appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Salon.com, RogerEbert.com, Gawker and Bold Italic.

Alia Volz is the author of the new memoir Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020), winner of the Golden Poppy Award for Nonfiction from the California Independent Bookseller Alliance and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography.

She’s a homegrown San Franciscan. Her work has been published in The Best American Essays, The New York Times, Bon Appetit, Salon and The Best Women’s Travel Writing. Her family story has been featured on Snap Judgement, Criminal and NPR’s Fresh Air.

Alia has received fellowships from MacDowell and the Ucross Foundation and has twice been awarded the Oakley Hall Memorial Scholarship from the Squaw Valley Community of Writers.