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Event Details
March 14, 2019|6:00 pm - 9:00 pm
San Francisco Design Center
101 Henry Adams St.San Francisco, CA 94103 United States

Join Jumpstart on March 14th as we celebrate the power of the written word at our Scribbles to Novels gala in San Francisco. This annual event underscores the importance of early literacy development in young children and reinforces our critical vision — to work toward the day every child enters kindergarten prepared to succeed. We will celebrate Jumpstart’s 25th anniversary with cocktails, a seated dinner, full program, and an opportunity to mingle with leaders in business, finance, law, and early education. Last year, 250 advocates showed their support for Jumpstart, raising over $400,000 for Jumpstart programs in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Please contact Anjali Billa, Director of Development, at anjali.billa@jstart.org with any questions.
Moderator
AYELET WALDMAN is the author of A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life, the novels Love and Treasure, Red Hook Road, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, and Daughter’s Keeper, as well as of the essay collection Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace. She is the editor of Inside This Place, Not of It: Narratives from Women’s Prisons and of Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation.
Authors
TARA COTTRELL is a writer, content strategist and mom. She consults and writes for lifestyle and wellness brands in Silicon Valley and is an advocate for at-risk youth through the Court Appointed Special Advocates program of San Mateo. Her book with Dan Zigmond, Buddha’s Diet, has been translated into six languages and has been featured in the Washington Post and O Magazine. Her short fiction has appeared in The Missouri Review, ZYZZYVA, the Indiana Review, Palo Alto Weekly and on NPR. When she’s not working, writing, or parenting, she’s buying shoes. She lives in Palo Alto, California.
DAN ZIGMOND is co-author with Tara Cottrell of Buddha’s Diet: The Ancient Art of Losing Weight Without Losing Your Mind (2016), and author of the forthcoming Buddha’s Office: The Ancient Art of Waking Up While Working Well (2019). He is a contributing editor at Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, and has written for The San Francisco Chronicle, Lion’s Roar, and other publications. He is also the Director of Analytics for Instagram and oversees all data science and data engineering for the company. Prior to that, Dan was the Director of Analytics for the Facebook News Feed, led the data teams for YouTube and Google Maps, and held a variety of senior leadership roles at other tech companies, including Microsoft, WebTV, and JUST. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Computational Neuroscience from the University of Pennsylvania and a Masters of Fine Arts in Writing and Literature from Bennington College. He serves as an advisor to a variety of tech startups and venture capital firms, and sits on the board of the San Francisco Zen Center and Jikoji Zen Center.
CHRISTY HALE has illustrated numerous award-winning books for children. She also wrote The East-West House: Noguchi’s Childhood in Japan (Lee & Low 2009); Dreaming Up: A Celebration of Building (Lee & Low 2012) which was an ALA Notable, a Boston Globe Horn Book Honor Award Recipient, an International Reading Association Award winner, a California Eureka! Award winner, and much more; and Water Land: Land and Water Forms Around the World (Roaring Brook, 2017) which received starred reviews from Booklist and Horn Book. Look for her bilingual author/illustrator project Todos Iguales/All Equal: Un corrido de/A Ballad of Lemon Grove (forthcoming from Lee & Low Books, Spring 2019). Also an art director, designer, and educator, Hale teaches Writing for Picture Books at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. She lives in Palo Alto, California and is available for presentations for all ages.
SARA ZARR is the acclaimed author of six novels for young adults. Her most recent work is Gem & Dixie, published by Balzer+Bray in April 2017. She’s a National Book Award finalist and two-time Utah Book Award winner. Her books have been variously named to annual best books lists of the American Library Association, Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly, School Library Journal, the Guardian, the International Reading Association, the New York Public Library and Los Angeles Public Library, and have been translated into many languages. In 2010, she served as a judge for the National Book Award.
Sara has written essays, creative nonfiction, and short fiction for Image, Hunger Mountain online, Response, Gather, and Relief Journal as well as for several anthologies, and has been a regular contributor to Image’s daily Good Letters blog on faith, life, and culture. From 2012-2015, Sara also hosted and produced the This Creative Life podcast. In fall 2014, she received a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. Her first book, Story of a Girl, was made into a 2017 television movie directed by Kyra Sedgwick. She divides her time between Utah and California.