Highlights
Pre-2009
In a C-SPAN interview, festival co-founders Narda Zacchino explained that she and her colleague Lisa Cleri Reale were discussing other book festivals around the country one day, to which Zacchino stated that the Los Angeles Times, where they both worked at the time, might have enough publicity to pull one off so long as there was enough effort put into it. With a small allocation of funding from each of their departments—as well as the departments of other staff members who committed to their initiative—Zacchino and Reale moved forward with their plans, leading to the first book festival happening in 1996. [3]
The festival was hosted at the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles until 2010. Around that time, University of California officials and event organizers began to disagree on budgetary matters for subsequent iterations of the festival. Event organizers wanted to lower expenditures and thus increase profit through various initiatives which University of California officials did not believe they could accommodate. Since then, the festival has been indefinitely relocated to the University of Southern California. [4] The event was typically held during the last week of April, though it has been moved to the first week to avoid a scheduling conflict with the Fiesta Broadway festival.
2009
The 2009 Festival of Books was held on Saturday and Sunday, April 25 and 26, 2009. More than 100 panel discussions and readings, with nearly 450 authors participating, were scheduled in the various classrooms on both days. Topics included "Mystery: A Dark and Stormy Night," "Young Adult Fiction: Problem Child," "Rock & A Hard Place: Security and American Ideals," "Poof! Our Evaporating Economy," "Fiction: Intimate Strangers," "Mystery: Cold Cases," "History: The Underbelly of California," and "The Soloist from Page to Screen."
Some of the authors and panelists scheduled for panel discussions were James Ellroy, T.C. Boyle, Kevin J. Anderson, Michael J. Fox, S.E. Hinton, Clive Barker, Diahann Carroll, Ray Bradbury, and Gore Vidal. There were a number of areas set up for authors and moderators to sign their books. Additionally, there were many events planned at the various outdoor stages. Hip-hop Harry and Bullseye (the mascot) entertained the children at the Target stage. [5]
Robert Alter, "author of many acclaimed works on the Bible, literary modernism, and contemporary Hebrew literature," received the 29th annual Los Angeles Times Book Prize's Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement. He was in a conversation with Jonathan Kirsch at the festival.
2010
The festival was held on April 24 and 25, with 450 announced authors, including Father Gregory Boyle, Lisa "Hungry Girl" Lillien, Meg Cabot, Mary Higgins Clark, Dave Eggers, James Ellroy, Daisy Fuentes, Louis Gossett Jr., Terry McMillan, Bernadette Peters, Jane Smiley, and Alice Waters.
2020-21
Those festivals were held virtually caused by the COVID-19 pandemic before it returned to USC in 2022.
Lee Earle "James" Ellroy is an American crime fiction writer and essayist. Ellroy has become known for a telegrammatic prose style in his most recent work, wherein he frequently omits connecting words and uses only short, staccato sentences, and in particular for the novels The Black Dahlia (1987) and L.A. Confidential (1990).
Robert Scheer is an American left-wing journalist who has written for Ramparts, the Los Angeles Times, Playboy, Hustler Magazine, Truthdig, ScheerPost and other publications as well as having written many books. His column for Truthdig was nationally syndicated by Creators Syndicate in publications such as The Huffington Post and The Nation. He is a clinical professor of communications at the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California. Scheer is the former editor in-chief for the Webby Award-winning online magazine Truthdig. For many years, he co-hosted the nationally syndicated political analysis radio program Left, Right & Center on National Public Radio (NPR), produced at public radio station KCRW in Santa Monica. The Society of Professional Journalists awarded Scheer the 2011 Sigma Delta Chi Award for his column.
Jane Smiley is an American novelist. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992 for her novel A Thousand Acres (1991).
Kenneth Turan is an American retired film critic, author, and lecturer in the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California. He was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 1991 until 2020 and was described by The Hollywood Reporter as "arguably the most widely read film critic in the town most associated with the making of movies".
Kevin Owen Starr was an American historian and California's state librarian, best known for his multi-volume series on the history of California, collectively called "Americans and the California Dream."
LA Freewaves, also known as Freewaves, is a Los Angeles–based nonprofit organization that exhibits multicultural, independent media and produces free public art projects to engage artists and audiences on current social issues. It was founded in 1989 by Anne Bray, the organization's executive director. With the support of others in the arts community, Freewaves presented its first exhibition of independent, multicultural video art at the November 1989 American Film Institute's (AFI) National Video Festival.
Since 1980, the Los Angeles Times has awarded a set of annual book prizes. The Los Angeles Times Book Prize currently has nine categories: biography, current interest, fiction, first fiction, history, mystery/thriller, poetry, science and technology, and young adult fiction. In addition, the Robert Kirsch Award is presented annually to a living author with a substantial connection to the American West. It is named in honor of Robert Kirsch, the Los Angeles Times book critic from 1952 until his death in 1980 whose idea it was to establish the book prizes.
Sonya Sones is an American poet and author. She has written seven young adult novels in verse and one novel in verse for adults. The American Library Association (ALA) has named her one of the most frequently challenged authors of the 21st century.
Litquake is San Francisco's annual literary festival. Originally named Litstock, the festival events took place in a single day in Golden Gate Park in the spring of 1999. It now has a two-week run in mid-October, as well as year-round programs and workshops.
The Fracas! Improv Festival is a three-day annual improvisational theatre festival held at The University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California. The festival is hosted by Second Nature Improv, one of USC's improv troupes. In addition to performances, the festival hosts discussion panels with professional improvisers currently working in television, film, and/or theatre, as well as improv workshops. While the performances and panels are open to the public, workshops are available only to registered festival participants.
Carolyn See was a professor emerita of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of ten books, including the memoir, Dreaming: Hard Luck and Good Times in America, an advice book on writing, Making a Literary Life, and the novels There Will Never Be Another You, Golden Days, and The Handyman. See was also a book critic for The Washington Post for 27 years.
Ronald Lewis Steel was an American writer, historian, and professor. He is the author of the definitive biography of Walter Lippmann.
Dorothy Wright Nelson is a senior United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Paul Pringle is an American investigative journalist for the Los Angeles Times and author of the 2022 book Bad City: Peril and Power in the City of Angels.
The Los Angeles Review of Books is a literary review magazine covering the national and international book scenes. A preview version launched on Tumblr in April 2011, and the official website followed one year later in April 2012. A print edition premiered in May 2013.
David Kipen is an author, critic, broadcaster, arts administrator, full-time UCLA writing faculty member and nonprofit bilingual lending librarian. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Alta Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, OZY.com and elsewhere. Former literature director of the National Endowment for the Arts, he lives in his native Southern California.
Connie Spenuzza is an American author who lives in Dana Point, California also known under her pen name Cecilia Velástegui, she has been collected by libraries.
The Future of Freedom Conference is regarded as the first explicitly libertarian conference series ever held in the United States. Debuting in 1969, the conference's keynote speaker was Austrian economist Prof. Ludwig von Mises.
Robert R. Kirsch was an American literary critic and author. He was the literary editor of The Los Angeles Times for more than two decades.
Samantha Gorman is an American game developer known for her combination of narrative, theatricality and gaming in VR environments, and for introducing gestural interactions in touchscreen narratives. She has won multiple awards for her work, both in the field of games and in electronic literature and new media writing. Gorman co-founded the computer art and games studio Tender Claws in 2014 and has been an assistant professor at Northeastern University since 2020.
