San Francisco’s iconic City Lights traces its freethinking culture back to the Beats. Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin founded the bookstore and publishing house in 1953, and it quickly gained notoriety for releasing then-little-known Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, in 1957, and supporting him through the backlash and obscenity trial that followed. To this day, City Lights remains a beacon of progressive politics, literary conversation and the place to discover the most promising emerging writers.

Editor and events programmer Peter Maravelis is responsible for ensuring City Lights continues to buzz with interesting debate, on and off the shelves. “It’s impossible to be bored,” Peter enthuses. “One moment you’re arranging with a New York publicist to have authors like Naomi Klein, Salman Rushdie, or some young, fiction writer just getting their start, booked into the calendar. The next moment you’re on the phone with a secret service agent wanting to bring in some foreign dignitary to the store.”

Peter draws on his background in the arts to present writers’ work in new and engaging ways. Recent collaborations include helping Matt Bell incorporate a puppet show into a reading of his debut novel, In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, and adapting Joshua Mohr’s Fight Song into a four-person stage show at punk artist Winston Smith’s studio.