Emma Silvers

Writer and editor

United States

Hi there. I'm a journalist with 15+ years of experience in print and digital media. Born and raised in the Bay Area, I've worked as an editor at The San Francisco Chronicle, KQED, SF Weekly and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. My arts and culture writing has won awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and the California Newspaper Publishers Association. I hold an M.S. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

I'm available for writing and editing assignments. Longform features and reported essays are my favorites. Also known to do copywriting for museums, galleries, breweries, bands and...? Let's talk about it: [email protected]

Portfolio
KQED
01/19/2023
The Anti-Abortion Movement Next Door

Teresa Conemac, a volunteer with the Christian anti-abortion organization 40 Days for Life, waits outside a Planned Parenthood clinic in Napa on Nov. 4, 2022. She talks to people coming and going, shares widely debunked claims about the dangers of abortion and birth control, and refers people to the Napa Women's Center, a facility next door opened by faith-based nonprofit Napa Valley Culture of Life.

KQED Arts
10/27/2017
How We Keep Killing Talented Women, Over and Over

America loves to watch a woman fall apart. The prettier she is, the more magnetic her presence, the less attainable her talents, the better. The swan dive from good graces is longer, then, and that much more satisfying.

Datebook | San Francisco Arts & Entertainment Guide
11/24/2021
Mauri Luisa Skinfill, 54, mourned as pillar of S.F. indie rock scene

Mauri Luisa Skinfill started playing rock 'n' roll because a guy told her she couldn't. At UC Berkeley in the mid- '90s, she walked into her then-boyfriend's dorm to find him playing the Pixies song "Wave of Mutilation" on the guitar.

SFChronicle.com
11/08/2020
Jon Payne made a home filled with music in Boulder Creek - then fire struck

The only real witnesses were the chickens. Jon and Elizabeth Payne can guess how their home in Boulder Creek burned to the ground. How the fire might have spread through the house's three levels - perhaps starting at the top floor, with the view of Eagle Rock that made it feel like a tree house, through their bathroom with the claw-foot tub.

KQED
04/28/2017
A New Guest at Your House Show: The Middleman

It's 2017 in San Francisco, a juicer valued at $120 million just turned out to be pointless, and I'm watching two twenty-somethings in startup hoodies making googly eyes at each other from the confines of a bean bag chair.

San Francisco Chronicle
03/31/2021
You turned to music to cope with the pandemic. What about musicians?

In March 2020, as news broke that Austin, Texas, had canceled the South by Southwest festival for the first time in its 33-year history, Jeremy Stith realized he might not play another live show for a while. He knew COVID-19 was bad, of course, but if he's honest, he was initially excited for the break.

San Francisco Chronicle
01/05/2022
Laughing through an N95: Comedy copes with COVID

On Valentine's Day in 2021, Baruch Porras-Hernandez stood in Kerouac Alley in North Beach and faced his first live audience in nearly a year. The San Francisco writer and comedian had grown accustomed to Zoom performances, but now people had gathered in person to see him, and the eyes staring at him over KN95 masks conveyed both excitement and deep fear.

San Francisco Chronicle
07/17/2020
SF neighbors turned their apartments into a once-in-a-lifetime bar

Like all good debaucherous nights, it starts out tame. It's 6 p.m. on a foggy Saturday when Judy Tsang leans out the back window of her Hayes Valley apartment. "How was your week?" she calls to her neighbors a few windows over. Tom Broxton is busy pouring brandy, while Sarah Hingston arranges a platter of homemade bruschetta.

KQED
03/24/2021
Amina Shareef Ali Comes Back to Life | KQED

But In the Dark is deeper, more nuanced, more vulnerable, with good reason. These songs span a period of time in which Ali experienced seismic shift after shift. She became a parent. She went back to school to become a therapist. And then she came out as a transgender woman.

San Francisco Chronicle
01/24/2021
Oakland's Alley doesn't miss a beat going virtual

The first time Jacqualine Simpkins set foot in the Alley, she felt overcome, and not in a good way. It was 1995, and she was visiting Oakland from her home in Bellevue, Ohio, finally seeing the Prohibition-era piano bar owned by her uncle and his longtime girlfriend.

Cal Alumni Association
09/21/2020
On the Frontlines: Women Led the Fight Against the 1918 Pandemic

IT IS UNCLEAR WHEN AGNES EDWARDS slept. As a sophomore at Berkeley in the fall of 1918, she packed her schedule with social activities. In her letters home to her parents, movies, dances, and hikes with friends mingled with pep rallies and volunteer work at the newly opened Red Cross chapter on campus.

Datebook | San Francisco Arts & Entertainment Guide
05/21/2020
Punk publisher V. Vale looks to post-pandemic world in 'Lockdown Lullabies'

V. Vale has seen some wild stuff. The writer, publisher and self-described amateur anthropologist lived in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood during the 1960s, after all. In the '70s, he documented the city's punk scene in Search and Destroy, a zine he launched with $200 from Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg.

San Francisco Chronicle
07/31/2020
They've survived earthquakes and Prohibition: Can SF's historic bars outlast COVID?

After a while, you barely remember what a Friday night in the Mission used to feel like. Two years after the coronavirus first sent civic life into a tailspin, some people are out - slowly, they emerged from their Zoom trivia nights and into the street, cautiously meeting up with one friend, two at most, and deciding on a bar for the evening.

Rolling Stone
06/20/2017
Booker T. Talks 'Emotional' Return to Monterey Festival 50 Years Later

Of the now-legendary performances at the Monterey International Pop Music Festival in 1967, perhaps none carried the social weight of Otis Redding's. In a sharply segregated music landscape, the young soul singer had been a staple on R&B charts since 1963. But backed by Stax Records' house band Booker T.

San Francisco Magazine
01/18/2018
Life After Last Call

Downtown San Francisco at night is prettier the farther away you get from it, and the lights are looking positively cinematic on this particular Friday at 2 a.m.

Datebook | San Francisco Arts & Entertainment Guide
10/04/2019
Debbie Harry recounts a career laden with drugs and rock 'n' roll

Debbie Harry doesn't need to prove a damn thing. That much was obvious the evening of Thursday, Oct. 3, at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, as the 74-year-old frontwoman of Blondie - perhaps the defining act at the intersection of American punk and New Wave music - took the stage to a standing ovation to discuss her new memoir, "Face It."

Cal Alumni Association
06/21/2019
At 50, People's Park Abides. But How Much Longer?

It's a quarter past three on a sunny spring Thursday in Berkeley. After weeks of rain, People's Park is bursting with life: a sea of yellow, purple, and red flowers pours from the gardens on the west side of the 2.8-acre park, while the occasional gust of wind carries the scent of jasmine.

KQED
05/01/2019
On 'How To Do Nothing'-And Who, Exactly, Gets to Do It

Near the end of the second week of Odell's book sitting on my shelf unopened, after a particularly unproductive day-the kind where the guilt over how little you've accomplished becomes an activity in and of itself-I went to a Mission District bar to see a friend's band play.

SFChronicle.com
05/01/2019
Why writer-dancer Brontez Purnell has toughed it out in the Bay Area for 17 years

The Bay Area in 2019 is often described as a playground for the wealthy. In this occasional Style series, we interview the artists, service people and nonprofit workers who hustle to make it work here despite the realities of rent and real estate. Does your love for the Bay Area outweigh the struggle?

San Francisco Chronicle
02/27/2019
Jolene's in S.F. is a new kind of queer bar

Jolene's on 16th and Harrison was never going to be just another bar. For that matter, it was never going to be just another gay bar. Instead, the owners envisioned an "evolved" queer bar that feels welcoming to all genders, with a special eye to marginalized groups - but without strict lines in the sand about target clientele.

SFChronicle.com
11/28/2018
Mill Valley's 2AM Club and the trope of the high-school reunion bar

The patrons are young, and they're descending from all angles. They traipse over from the 7-Eleven on Miller Avenue in Mill Valley, stopping to finish soda bottles with questionable contents. A group of three spills out of an idling Mercedes, thanking someone's older sister for the ride.

San Francisco Chronicle
02/13/2019
SF's Lone Palm bar is where time stands still, in the best possible way

When Jane Seabrook's daughter was 4 days old, in 1999, Seabrook and her then-husband, Mark Green, decided it was time for their infant's first outing. So they did what any other young Mission District family would do: They headed to the neighborhood bar.

KQED
09/12/2018
'Love, Gilda': A New Documentary Remembers SNL's Not-So-Secret Weapon

I wish we got even 10 more minutes of Gilda in general. "There's truly a timeless, universal quality to what she did. Amy Poehler said she thinks of Gilda as a red-blue state: loved by all," says Lisa D'Apolito, the director of Love, Gilda, a new documentary about the late comedian that hits theaters Sept.

Datebook | San Francisco Arts & Entertainment Guide
11/22/2018
Rapper Lyrics Born holds onto joy while confronting life's unpredictability

One year ago, Tom Shimura was camped out at a table in the back room of Au Coquelet, an unassuming Berkeley coffee shop. In front of the rapper, known as Lyrics Born, were drafts of the hardest three verses he'd ever had to write: a song about how, after more than a decade in remission, his wife Joyo Velarde's cancer had returned.

San Francisco Chronicle
06/27/2018
Jaxson, the Marina's country-western bar, is so bad it's good

Have you ever found yourself reading a page of such astoundingly negative Yelp reviews that it actually makes you want to visit the establishment in question? I'm talking "pushy crowds," " asshole bartenders," descriptors like "douchey" and "sweaty." (I do not pretend to understand my own penchant for masochism.)

KQED
11/15/2018
Reevaluating the 'Romantic' Hit Songs of Pop Music's Patriarchy

"Here's this historic moment we're having, and I think we're seeing that there's a gravity to what we consume culturally-it affects our lives, it affects the decisions of people in power ... when we've all been listening to music and watching movies and working in institutions that reinforce that [things like sexual assault] are normal," says the songwriter.

KQED
08/29/2018
When is a Movie Theater More Than Just a Movie Theater?

Six months later, the Parkway closed for good. When is a movie theater more than just a movie theater? This question was on my mind this week, with the welcome news that Oakland's Grand Lake Theatre, the 1926 movie house near Lake Merritt, has been sold outright to its longtime leaseholder, Allen Michaan.

San Francisco Chronicle
05/16/2018
The story of the Albany pub where time stands still

Editor's note: Drink Up, The Chronicle's guide to where you should be drinking in the Bay Area, is evolving into a column with multiple voices. Chronicle wine, beer and spirits writer Esther Mobley, who has written the column for the last three years, will continue to contribute reviews.

San Francisco Chronicle
05/23/2018
Liz Phair revives 'Guyville' for 25th anniversary

Liz Phair is getting into character. She's practicing her moves. She's doing vocal exercises every night. "You make these sounds for a really long time, like a monk, to try to get that lower register open," she says, demonstrating a long, low hum. "Because my range has gotten way higher as I've gotten older."

Rolling Stone
Gary Clark Jr. on Hendrix Comparisons at Monterey Pop: I'll 'Soak It Up'

"Whether you know it or not, if you're part of this world, you were affected by what happened in Monterey 50 years ago," Gary Clark Jr. told Rolling Stone this past Sunday, just moments after stepping off the stage at the Monterey International Pop Festival's 50th anniversary.

San Francisco Chronicle
06/06/2018
Hotel Utah is not your average open mic night bar

Mike Deni still remembers his first open mic night at the Hotel Utah Saloon. It was 2006, and Deni - now better known by his musical moniker, Geographer - was a recent transplant from New Jersey, with little experience playing live.

San Francisco Chronicle
11/15/2017
Katy Perry strains for pop relevance

As pop stars go, Katy Perry has always been a mortal: She's not a great dancer and she doesn't have a phenomenal voice. This was clear as ever during the pop star's "Witness" tour stop Tuesday, Nov. 14, at San Jose's SAP Center.

KQED Arts
09/06/2017
During a Natural Disaster, Everything's a Performance

On Sept. 2, 2005, as the death toll from Hurricane Katrina climbed past 1,000, Mike Myers appeared next to a nervous-looking Kanye West on primetime network television. A few days prior, New Orleans native Harry Connick, Jr. had called NBC to propose a televised relief effort, and this was the result.

San Francisco Chronicle
02/15/2018
Erykah Badu takes music lovers on otherworldly trip during SF Armory show

The San Francisco Armory served as a set for BDSM pornography for about a decade. One week ago, it was reported that the historic Mission District building had sold for $65 million to a developer who plans to convert it into manufacturing and office space. But for two hours and 15 minutes on Wednesday, Feb.

KQED Arts
05/17/2017
Peace, Love, and Credit Where It's Due: Women of the Counterculture

Alexandra Jacopetti Hart remembers the moment she realized the '60s counterculture was bigger than just her and her friends. Alongside Ken Kesey, Bill Graham, and a handful of other hippie household names, Hart, then 25, had helped to organize the 1966 Trips Festival - the three-day music-and-LSD gathering that's widely regarded as the kickoff to the Haight-Ashbury's heyday.

KQED
01/11/2016
This Time It's Personal: Why Losing David Bowie Means Something Different to Everyone

It is 1997, I am 13 years old, and I have the house to myself. This is a situation people relish at any age - but when you are 13 years old and confused all the time and spend most of your days in seemingly vacuum-sealed rooms, occupying a series of plastic chairs lined up next to other plastic chairs containing other 13-year-olds who are seething with tumultuous home lives and hormones and unfortunate harbingers of facial hair, a house to yourself is a kingdom.

KQED Pop
07/10/2015
Eye of the Sluricane: A Dispatch from an E-40 Bottle Signing

Earl Stevens, better known as E-40, the Vallejo-born rap ambassador, really needs no introduction. His inimitable flow set him apart from his contemporaries in the '90s; in the mid-aughts, he heralded the hyphy movement's arrival on the Billboard Hot 100, the Bay's all-too-short moment in the mainstream sun.

KQED
04/14/2015
Live Review: The Replacements Still Beautifully Ramshackle at the Masonic

First off: There's really no such a thing as a casual Replacements fan. People either don't get what the big deal is or worship the Minneapolis rock forefathers, with that particular brand of emotional reverence reserved for music that has some kind of rarity, a precariousness to it.

SFGate
11/20/2015
Punk stalwarts X carry on

With an audible sneer, the band whose bootprint outlined the sound of first-wave West Coast punk (for a nation that still thought of the genre as New York's, or D.C.'s) mapped out Los Angeles in disillusionment and defiance, cracked facades and gas tanks on empty.

KQED
02/17/2016
How Not to Write About a Serial Rapist

There's no way around this: Media companies, in the year 2016, are rushed. If you're gonna get paid, you've gotta get clicks, and if you're gonna get clicks, you've gotta churn out content - quickly.

KQED Arts
01/05/2016
The Gold Standard: Jeff Goldblum Talks Fatherhood, Jazz and Aliens (Of Course)

How do we love Jeff Goldblum? Let us count the ways. There was the time he stole our hearts as Dr. Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park, of course, and his equally charming scientist in Independence Day. The nervy, fast-talking journalist of The Big Chill; the physical comedy of Earth Girls Are Easy; the unsettling, animalistic energy at the center of The Fly.

KQED Pop
04/11/2016
Sex, Drugs, and Equal Pay: Wimmen's Comix Get Their Due

Underground comics enjoyed a golden age in the late '60s and early '70s, and the heady, weed-scented thrum of San Francisco was its heartbeat. R. Crumb's gleefully filthy Zap Comix premiered in 1968 with a sensibility that worshiped free love, satire and irreverence, and cartoonists like The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers ' Gilbert Shelton decided to move west to join in on the fun.

KQED Pop
06/08/2016
Sarah Hepola on Sex, Blackouts, and Alternative Routes to Freedom

I'm nearly a year behind on this, but I finally got around to watching I Am Chris Farley, the 2015 documentary about the late, insanely talented comedian whose appetites for food, booze and cocaine ended his life far too soon, at the age of 33. It was sweet, but it wasn't terribly illuminating.

KQED Pop
10/22/2015
I Would Sincerely Like To Meet a Person Who Enjoys Maroon 5

Yesterday, several sources reported that the wildly commercially successful American band/coven of pop-rock vampires Maroon 5 has been in talks to play the 50th Annual Pepsi Nike Verizon Subway Viagra™ Super Bowl Halftime Show. That's the loud music and dancing and flashy-lights part of the big game with the padded men and the odd-shaped leather ball, as my lady brain understands it!

SF Bay Guardian
07/02/2014
The resurrection of Ronnie Spector

[email protected] LEFT OF THE DIAL How do you address a woman who toured with the Rolling Stones as an opening act, while being chased after by a baby-faced John Lennon? Who had five singles in the Top 40 by the age of 21? Who perfected the beehive hairdo two decades before Amy Winehouse was even born?

SF Weekly
11/19/2014
Breaking: "Do They Know It's Christmas" Is Still a Misguided, Patronizing, Terrible Song

Hey guys! Have you heard about Ebola? Did you know that Ebola is really, really bad? Did you know that the part of the world in which Ebola is a major crisis right now is one that doesn't have nearly enough treatment facilities, access to top-of-the-line medical equipment, or other resources that would help stop the spread of this deadly disease?

SF Weekly
06/20/2016
Rihanna Burns Out Retinas at Oracle Arena

click to enlarge Rihanna J.Cole June 30, 2011 @ Oracle Arena [ Check out more photos from the show here.] Better than: Having an actual seizure. I think. There was very little doubt -- after watching a gaggle of high school girls in sequined tube tops and six-inch stilettos almost throw down in broad daylight inside the Oakland Coliseum BART station -- that the night would be an entertaining one.

San Francisco Chronicle
Oakland arts education nonprofit hatches new plans as Black Swan

Literally half a mile away, there was another Oakland public school with twice the number of kids and no arts program at all. [...] Stoltzfus and her husband, writer-composer Albert Greenberg, who had recently left their positions with A Traveling Jewish Theatre, decided on a new labor of love: a nonprofit seeking to bridge the gap between "the haves and the have-nots" by bringing professional artists - actors, musicians, dancers and storytellers - into low-income schools.

SF Weekly
07/11/2012
Aesop Rock Climbs Back into the Spotlight with "Skelethon"

Aesop Rock has had a lot of coffee today. At 5 p.m., he's halfway through another cup and has just launched into a description of the Rubik's cube championship he got stuck watching on YouTube last night when an old friend ambles over to say what's up.

SF Bay Guardian
09/09/2014
The Breeders barrel on

[email protected] LEFT OF THE DIAL The first rule of interviewing former Pixies bassist Kim Deal is that you do not say the word "Pixies" while speaking to Kim Deal.

SF Bay Guardian
08/26/2014
Infinite loop

[email protected] FALL ARTS If you are a fan of hip-hop, you likely already know that 1993 was a very special year. Call it coincidence, call it fate, call it a combination of social, economic, and political factors projected through the kaleidoscopic lens of American pop culture and write your thesis about it (you wouldn't be the first).

SF Bay Guardian
03/25/2014
Wigging out with Stephen Malkmus

[email protected] LEFT OF THE DIAL Stephen Malkmus' 17-year-old cat, Juanita, has been peeing outside the catbox lately. He's been assuming it's just stress from the new additions to the household - two kittens recently joined the Portland home Malkmus shares with his wife, artist Jessica Jackson Hutchins, and their two young daughters.

Mother Jones
03/25/2011
What's Got John Darnielle's Goat?

When news of the forthcoming Mountain Goats record hit the internet this past December, obsessive fans-which is to say, most Mountain Goats fans-flew into a re-tweeting frenzy. All Eternals Deck, out March 29 on Merge, is the North Carolina-based indie group's 13th studio album, yet front man John Darnielle-immortalized in 2005 by New Yorker pop critic Sasha Frere-Jones as "America's best non-hip-hop lyricist"-still enjoys cult-favorite status.

SF Weekly
12/11/2013
Mission Venue Viracocha Wagers Its Survival on Going Legit

It's Saturday afternoon in the Mission, and on Valencia, the strollers are out in full force. Young families linger in front of shiny store-window displays; manicured couples fill the tables outside every bustling cafe. On the corner of 21st and Valencia, through an unmarked wooden door, a black cat named Asha is ignoring it all from inside an antique clawfoot tub.

KQED Arts
06/24/2015
Bowling for NPR: Amy Tan and Michael Pollan Trade Pens for Pins

It's 7:30 pm on a mild evening in San Francisco's Mission District, and so far the soundtrack at Mission Bowling Club has been a steady stream of classic '60s soul tunes. But all of a sudden the opening drumbeats to Pharrell's "Happy" kick out over the speakers, and Amy Tan is feelin' it.

SF Weekly
9/09/2011
An Albany Kid Reflects on Hometown Punks Rancid: "That's My America"

click to enlarge It's probably no coincidence that it began two years ago, when I was living in New York and constantly homesick for the West Coast. Someone would put a Rancid song, generally "Roots Radicals" or "Time Bomb," on the odd punk-heavy bar jukebox, and a wave of pure, adolescent nostalgia would smack me upside the head.

SF Weekly
11/11/2014
Tale As Old As Time: Castro Theatre Sing-Alongs Fulfill Ancient Princess Wishes, and Reveal the...

If you want a good seat, or a prime spot in the costume contest, it's advisable to show up at the Castro Theatre a good hour before your cinematic sing-along experience. And by the Castro Theatre, I mean the four blocks of Market Street surrounding the Castro Theatre, onto which the line of Ariels, or Belles, or Elsas, depending on the Disney darling of the evening, will be waiting.

SF Bay Guardian
08/15/2014
Paul McCartney bids Candlestick a fiery goodbye

My earliest memories of Candlestick are formative ones. Like any Bay Area kid who cut her baseball teeth on Giants games at the notoriously frigid stadium, I thought every family prepared for sporting events by piling on 17 strategic layers and stuffing their car full of sleeping bags and other accoutrements that could double as equipment for scaling Mount Kilimanjaro.

The Rumpus
12/29/2011
SPOTLIGHT SERIES: Adrian Tomine

SPOTLIGHT SERIES: Adrian Tomine Like most things I liked when I was 16, I first got into Adrian Tomine's comics because of my older sister, who let me borrow her early issues of Optic Nerve. The series began as a set of self-published mini-comics, Xeroxed and distributed by Tomine when he was a teenager in Sacramento.

SF Bay Guardian
04/22/2014
California, from scratch

[email protected] I was 12 years old in 1996, which is the year Jawbreaker , the punk band that's been (somewhat controversially) called "the sound of the Mission," disbanded for good.

SF Bay Guardian
03/04/2014
Freedom of Choice

It's 2:30 on a Thursday afternoon in East Oakland, and on stage in the amphitheater at Castlemont High School, Kev Choice is trying to keep a straight face.

San Diego Citybeat
1/24/2007
Alone in San Diego

When Eileen Myles first came to UC San Diego in the fall of 2002 to teach writing, she couldn't sit still. Gesticulating wildly as she paced back and forth in front of a packed lecture hall, wearing a men's dress shirt, tie, jeans and boots, it was clear the New York-based author-poet was new to the quiet, tame campus.

Jweekly
Home on the ranch: Jewish roots run deep at Straus Family Creamery

For someone who grew up dreaming of the day she could live on a street with sidewalks - a place where she could wear pretty shoes meant for girls, instead of thick boots for tromping around in hay and manure - Vivien Straus sure seems happy here on her farm.

San Diego Citybeat
11/20/2007
Putting dissent in its place

Halfway through a sleep-deprived week of final exams last June, UC San Diego students received what appeared to be a fairly uninteresting campus-wide e-mail from the university administration.

Salon
07/03/2010
Competitive eating: Bigger than the Olympics?

Each Fourth of July, as revelers celebrate liberation from colonial rule by firing up the barbecue, drinking light beer, and yelling at their kids to stop pointing the firecrackers directly at each other, 40,000 people descend on New York's Coney Island to witness the kind of patriotic feat our forefathers surely had in mind when they signed the Declaration of Independence: a long table of adults attempting to eat as many hot dogs as possible in 10 minutes.