The Heyday of Malcolm Margolin: The Damn Good Times of a Fiercely Independent Publisher

Malcolm Margolin and Kim Bancroft
In Conversation With Vincent Medina, Tribal Scholar
Wednesday, September 17, 2014
01:12:51
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Episode Summary

For forty years, Heyday Books has been publishing California's stories—stories no one else has told—from native peoples and newly arrived immigrants, stories about the delicate Calliope hummingbirds and 14,000 foot peaks, to the explorations of California's most original thinkers, poets, and visual artists. Bancroft's new book describes an organization run on passion and devoted to beauty. Malcolm's friend and colleague, Vincent Medina, a member of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe of the San Francisco Area, will join the discussion.


Participant(s) Bio

Kim Bancroft is a longtime teacher turned editor and writer. Kim has edited several memoirs, including Ariel: A Memoir, by Ariel Parkinson; The Morning the Sun Went Down, by Darryl Babe Wilson; and Ruth’s Journey: A Survivor’s Memoir, by Ruth Glasberg Gold. Most recently, she edited Literary Industries, the 1890 memoir of her great-great-grandfather Hubert Howe Bancroft, historian, and founder of the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley (Heyday, 2013). She is also the author of The Heyday of Malcolm Margolin: The Damn Good Times of a Fiercely Independent Publisher.

Malcolm Margolin is executive director of Heyday, an independent nonprofit publisher and unique cultural institution, which he founded in 1974. Margolin is the author of several books, including The Ohlone Way: Indian Life in the San Francisco–Monterey Bay Area, named by the San Francisco Chronicle as one of the hundred most important books of the twentieth century by a western writer. He has received dozens of prestigious awards, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fred Cody Award Lifetime Achievement from the San Francisco Bay Area Book Reviewers Association, and a Cultural Freedom Award from the Lannan Foundation. He helped found the Bay Nature Institute and the Alliance for California Traditional Artists.

Vincent Medina, Jr, a member of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe of the San Francisco Bay Area, works for Heyday Books, where he focuses on sharing the stories of the larger California Indian world. He authors the lively multimedia blog Being Ohlone in the 21st Century, and is active in the revitalization of the Chochenyo language, the indigenous language of the eastern shores of the San Francisco Bay that many linguists had long labeled "extinct." Using wax cylinder recordings and ethnographic notes, he has helped bring the language into modern times. Vincent is currently in college and lives in San Lorenzo, California, which is part of his Jalquin Ohlone ancestral homeland.



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