Tonight I am sitting here in Oakland, the city that raised me, watching something happen that I never expected at seventy-one years old. My brand-new audiobook, OpenAI: Oakland’s Seat at the Table, has landed on the Amazon Best Sellers: Media and the Law list, standing shoulder to shoulder with traditional publishers and even rising in front of a Big Five title. This is not Kindle Unlimited. This is the main stage, and I am humbled.

I wrote this book from the heart. I wrote it as a woman who came to Oakland at twenty-two, sprinting across these streets with a reporter’s hunger, and who now moves more slowly, taking in a city that has changed as much as I have. I wrote it as someone who has always admired Elon Musk, and who said so plainly in my Author’s Note. And I wrote it as someone who believes in telling the truth, not flattery, not attacks, just the truth as I witnessed it in that courthouse.

I didn’t go easy on anyone. I didn’t write gossip. I didn’t chase drama. I wrote about Oakland, about the press pool, about the surreal moment when the world’s eyes turned to a courthouse that now sits in silence. I wrote about a city fighting for its future, and about my own journey as a writer nearing the twilight of her career.

To see this book charting tonight, in a serious nonfiction category among legal scholars and journalists, is one of the greatest surprises of my life. I am grateful to every reader who has taken a chance on my work. I am grateful to Oakland for giving me a story worth telling. And I am grateful to still be here, still writing, still sharing my voice with the world.

If this book is a gift, it is a gift to the next generation who will inherit this city. May they know what Oakland was, what it is, and what it might still become.

— Carol Denise Mitchell Oakland, California