Highlights
2020-21
Those festivals were held virtually caused by the COVID-19 pandemic before it returned to USC in 2022.
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.
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. [4]
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.
The Los Angeles Times is a regional American daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles, California in 1881. Based in the Greater Los Angeles area city of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the United States, as well as the largest newspaper in the western United States. Owned by Patrick Soon-Shiong and published by California Times, the paper has won more than 40 Pulitzer Prizes.
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.
The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum is a multi-purpose stadium in the Exposition Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, United States. Conceived as a hallmark of civic pride, the Coliseum was commissioned in 1921 as a memorial to Los Angeles veterans of World War I. Completed in 1923, it will become the first stadium to have hosted the Summer Olympics three times when it hosts the 2028 Summer Olympics; the stadium previously hosted the Summer Olympics in 1932 and 1984. It was designated a National Historic Landmark on July 27, 1984, a day before the opening ceremony of the 1984 Summer Olympics.
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 new, uncensored, independent media, and produces free public art projects to engage artists and audiences on current social issues. Anne Bray, with representatives of other communities, founded LA Freewaves in 1989 and has worked to administer the non-profit since it was launched as an exhibition of multicultural video art at the American Film Institute's National Video Festival. Bray serves as director of the organization and has been working in the field of media arts since the mid-1970s as an artist and teacher.
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.
The Acid Tests were a series of parties held by author Ken Kesey primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area during the mid-1960s, centered on the use of and advocacy for the psychedelic drug LSD, commonly known as "acid". LSD was not made illegal in California until October 6, 1966.
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.
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.
Eastside Spirit and Pride (ESSP) is a club at East Los Angeles College, founded by Dennis Sanchez.
Perfidia is a historical romance and crime fiction novel by American author James Ellroy. Published in 2014, it is the first novel in the second L.A. Quartet, referring to his four prior novels from the first L.A. Quartet. Perfidia was released September 9, 2014. A Waterstones exclusive limited edition of Perfidia was released September 11, 2014, and includes an essay by Ellroy himself titled "Ellroy's History – Then and Now." The title, Perfidia, is Italian for the word perfidy, and is also the name of the big band song, Perfidia.
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.
Robin Coste Lewis is an American poet, artist, and scholar. She is known primarily for her debut poetry collection, Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2015––the first time a poetry debut by an African-American had ever won the prize in the National Book Foundation's history, and the first time any debut had won the award since 1974. Critics called the collection "A masterpiece", "Surpassing imagination, maturity, and aesthetic dazzle", "remarkable hopefulness ... in the face of what would make most rage and/or collapse", "formally polished, emotionally raw, and wholly exquisite". Voyage of the Sable Venus was also a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, the Hurston-Wright Award, and the California Book Award. The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Buzz Feed, and Entropy Magazine all named Voyage one of the best poetry collections of the year. Flavorwire named the collection one of the 10 must-read books about art. And Literary Hub named Voyage one of the "Most Important Books of the Last Twenty Years". In 2018, MoMA commissioned both Lewis and Kevin Young to write a series of poems to accompany Robert Rauschenberg's drawings in the book Thirty-Four Illustrations of Dante's Inferno. Lewis is also the author of Inhabitants and Visitors, a chapbook published by Clockshop and the Huntington Library and Museum. Her next book, To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness, was published by Knopf in 2022.
WORDTheatre is a non-profit organization founded in 2003 that champions literature by staging live readings of contemporary short stories and curating original themed productions in Los Angeles, New York, and London.
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.
