Litquake 2024 - Locker Room Talk: A Woman's Struggle to Get Inside
with journalist Melissa Ludtke and San Francisco Chronicle sports columnist Ann Killion

For Litquake Festival 2024, join journalist Melissa Ludtke in conversation with San Francisco Chronicle sports columnist Ann Killion on Ludtke’s debut memoir, Locker Room Talk: A Woman's Struggle to Get Inside.

Locker Room Talk: A Woman's Struggle to Get Inside documents Ludtke’s time as a Sports Illustrated reporter who was kicked out of the Yankee's locker room and the subsequent Supreme Court case Ludtke v. Kuhn that affirmed her equal rights. The judge’s order in her case opened the doors for several generations of women to be hired in sports media. Locker Room Talk is Ludtke’s gripping account of being at the core of this globally covered case that churned up ugly prejudices about the place of women in sports.

Praise for Locker Room Talk:

“Locker Room Talk gives us a front-row seat at Melissa Ludtke's celebrated courtroom battle when she went up against Major League Baseball and emerged with an enduring win for women's equal rights. I also admire her gutsy decision to share reflective insights on how the plentiful societal backlash against her buffeted her personal life as a 26-year old woman. Hers wasn't an easy struggle, but she persevered, and we are the better for it.”

~Hillary Rodham Clinton, former U.S. Secretary of State

Litquake’s diverse live programs are created with the aim of inspiring critical engagement with the key issues of the day, bringing people together around the common humanity encapsulated in literature, and perpetuating a sense of literary community, as well as a vibrant forum for Bay Area writing. We believe in literature as a public good, so we work to produce events that are accessible to all.

About the Authors

In Locker Room Talk, Melissa Ludtke provides a first-hand account of what it was like to be at the center of a case that set off a media firestorm, with comedy sketches and newspaper cartoons depicting her as a leering intruder seeking to leer at athletes’ naked bodies. She takes us inside the ballparks where her presence as the lone female reporter covering the MLB threatened the sport’s sexist gatekeepers. She recreates the courtroom drama, describing the legal strategy her lawyer, F.A.O. Schwarz Jr. used to persuade Constance Baker Motley, the first black woman to serve as a federal judge, to invoke the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause in ruling to allow female journalists the same access their male counterparts took for granted. Photo credit Stan Grossfeld.

Ann Killion has covered Bay Area sports for more than a quarter of a century. An award-winning columnist and a veteran of 11 Olympics, several World Cups and the Tour de France, Ann joined The San Francisco Chronicle in 2012. Ann has worked for the San Jose Mercury News, the Los Angeles Times and Sports Illustrated. She is a New York Times best-selling author, having co-written Solo: A Memoir of Hope with soccer star Hope Solo, Throw Like A Girl with softball player Jennie Finch and two middle-grade books on soccer, Champions of Women’s Soccer and Champions of Men’s Soccer. She was named California Sportswriter of the Year in 2014, 2017 and 2018.