By Brian Dunlap

2021’s Los Angeles Times Festival of Books features a week of virtual literary events. The events range from one-on-one conversations to exciting panels, virtual readings and more.

The Festival runs from April 17th through the 23rd, with events beginning on the weekend at 10am PST and weekday events beginning at 5pm on Monday, 12pm Tuesday, 5pm Thursday and 11am on Friday. There are no events on Wednesday.

The scheduled lineup features a variety of writers, poets, artists and storytellers discussing a wide range of topics, including race, identity, immigrant experiences, historical romances and the human body.

The Festival of Books is traditionally the nation’s largest annual literary event, but with it being virtual this year, The Festival is better able to bring authors from around the world, along with the community in Los Ángeles, together, for a week of engaging discussions and readings to help make sense of this unprecedented year and the world around them.

The list of events can be found here: https://events.latimes.com/festivalofbooks/2021-calendar/

Highlighted events are:

Young Adult Fiction: The Poetry of the Black Experience

About: These powerful coming-of-age novels, all written in lyrical verse, are fierce, profound, and beautiful explorations of identity, race, wrongful incarceration, the power of drag, and much more. Hannah Gómez, a judge in Young Adult Literature for the L.A. Times Book Prizes, guides the conversation with Dean Atta, Morgan Parker, Dr. Yusef Salaam and Ibi Zoboi.

Dean Atta’s poems deal with themes of race, gender, and identity. The Black Flamingo, his debut YA novel, is a finalist for the L.A. Times Young Adult Literature Book Prize.

Morgan Parker is the author of Magical Negro, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, and Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night, and the Y/A novel Who Put This Song On? Parker is the recipient of a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a 2016 Pushcart Prize, and a Cave Canem graduate fellow.

Dr. Yusef Salaam was just fifteen years old when his life was upended after being wrongly convicted with four other boys in the “Central Park jogger” case. He is the author, with Ibi Zoboi, of  Punching the Air, which is a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize in Young Adult Literature.

Ibi Zoboi holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her novel American Street was a National Book Award finalist and a New York Times Notable Book. She is also the author of Pride and My Life as an Ice Cream Sandwich, a New York Times bestseller. Her latest novel is Punching the Air, co-authored with Dr. Yusef Salaam; it is a finalist for the L.A. Times Young Adult Literature Book Prize.

Where: RSVP at the following link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ya-the-poetry-of-the-black-experience-la-times-festival-of-books-2021-tickets-147008944711

Date: Saturday the 17th

Time: 12pm

Fiction Makes the World Go Round

About: These storytellers will transport you to China, Africa, India and through America, too. Join us for the conversation that traverses the globe while exploring the immigrant experience, environmental degradation, cultural emersion, globalism and achieving the American Dream. Moderated by L.A. Times books editor Boris Kachka.

Chang-rae Lee is the author of Native Speaker, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for first fiction, as well as On Such a Full Sea, A Gesture Life, Aloft, and The Surrendered, winner of the Dayton Peace Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His newest novel is My Year Abroad.

Meng Jin was born in Shanghai and lives in San Francisco. A Kundiman Fellow, she is a graduate of Harvard and Hunter College. Little Gods is her debut novel and is a finalist for the L.A. Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.

Imbolo Mbue is the author of the New York Times bestseller Behold the Dreamers, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Blue Metropolis Words to Change Prize and was an Oprah’s Book Club selection and a notable book of the year by The New York Times and The Washington Post. Her just-released new novel is How Beautiful We Were.

A Paul and Daisy Soros fellow, Sanjena Sathian is a 2019 graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has worked as a reporter in Mumbai and San Francisco, with nonfiction bylines for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Food & Wine, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, and more.

Where: RSVP at the following link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/fiction-makes-the-world-go-round-la-times-festival-of-books-2021-tickets-147010738075

Date: Sunday the 18th

Time: 5pm

Native American Literature: A Panel Paying Homage to Leslie Marmon Silko, 2020 Robert Kirsch Award Winner

About: Acclaimed novelist, poet, and essayist Leslie Marmon Silko is known for her lyric treatment of Native American subjects. In recognition of her lifetime achievement in writing and the 2020 Robert Kirsch Award honor, we have assembled the next generation of writers to discuss their works and 21st Century Native literature.

Brandon Hobson is the author of the novel Where the Dead Sit Talking (Soho Press, 2018), which was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction and winner of the Reading the West Book Award. His other books include Desolation of Avenues Untold and the novella Deep Ellum.

David Heska Wanbli Weiden is an enrolled citizen of the Sicangu Lakota Nation and received his MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts. He is an alumnus of VONA, the Tin House Summer Workshop, and was a 2018 MacDowell Colony Fellow. Currently, he is a PEN/America Writing for Justice Fellow.

Where: RSVP at the following link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/native-american-literature-la-times-festival-of-books-2021-tickets-147013991807

Date: Tuesday the 20th

Time: 5pm