It’s been a while since Los Angeles Literature has published a Community News article. Since, a lot has happened, especially in the first half of 2026.
Two new bookstores have opened: Watermelon Books in the West Adams district, the nation’s first Palestinian bookstore, founded by Lisa Schultz, and Good Girl Books, a woman-owned bookstore founded by Alex Duggan and Sarah Loughman. According to its website, they aim “tocreate a community space that serves as a destination beyond transaction” and their café features “coffee, tea, and pastries alongside tables and couches for reading, writing, and catching up with friends.”
Also, The Fleuria, a romance book truck that travels to bookish events, night markets and pops up at South Bay coffee shops and breweries, etc., to build community through romance literature in Los Ángeles County, opened its first brick-and-mortar shop in Costa Mesa on June 13. Located at the LAB Anti-Mall at 2930 Bristol St., A113, it’s an Airstream bookshop for the romantically inclined that sells romance, fantasy and a curated section of fiction.
The entire endeavor launched in the spring of 2025, when the store’s owner, Stephanie Pao, debuted her bookshop on wheels, a classic Volkswagen truck featuring a cargo bed with drop-down sides, at the Romance Author Roundtable discussion hosted by the Hermosa Beach Friends of the Library.
However, Pao opened the bookstore in Orange County in order to reach a broader community of romance readers beyond The Fleuria’s Los Angeles-area presence.
This spring has seen an explosion of book festivals, sometimes with more than one occurring in a given week.
This explosion has been building for the past several years, notably in the spring.
They appear on the calendar soon after the spring equinox and occur more frequently as spring moves closer to summer. Some festivals occur over multiple days, while others take place on the same day or weekend as other festivals. Some festivals occur for several years before ending, while others occur once or have continued to this day and will continue into the foreseeable future.
This proliferation of literary festivals across Greater Los Ángeles reflects the roles these events play within the local literary community and the broader community at large. It’s seen in how the region’s massive geographic footprint and dense traffic patterns facilitate the need for local communities to have their own literary festivals.
One example is Underdog Bookstore in Monrovia with their first annual Monrovia Pride Book Festival this past June 20th. They demonstrated their need for “queer joy, storytelling and community,” as they remarked in an email sent to me. Their town sits 45 minutes and 18.7 miles away from Downtown Los Ángeles, where the LA Poet Society’s 6th annual Queer Writers Festival happened to be taking place that same day at Olvera Street.
Or how the Hermosa y Libros Book Festival was founded in 2025 to give voice and visibility to local Latinx writers, publishers and literary organizations that other local book festivals, such as the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books and LitFest in the Dena, tokenize or don’t prioritize.
Also, this spring saw the introduction of The Last Bookstore’s inaugural Spring Arts Tower Takeover that took place on June 13th, an event they branded as “LA’s first vertical community market.” The multi-floor event activated the historic building’s upper levels, packing the maze of studios and the bookstore itself with local artists, independent zine-makers, and writers who might otherwise struggle to find affordable vending space at massive, traditional outdoor book fairs. And for artists and writers to cross-pollinate as they couldn’t otherwise at events specifically dedicated to a single artistic medium.
The Spring Arts Tower Takeover took place the day before the Hermosa y Libros Book Fair that featured local writers such as Dani Trujillo, Racquel Marie, Annette Macias Chavez and Margo Candela, who write contemporary romance, YA romance, horror and literary fiction.
But spring kicked off with the 5th annual Culver City Book Festival on March 29th. Founded in 2019 by poet and publisher Mark Lipman, for the 5th time, the one-day festival was held at the Wende Museum in Culver City, providing the Westside with a book festival.
A partnership between Culver City’s own Village Well Books & Café, the Culver City Arts Foundation, Beyond Baroque, El Martillo Press and the Wende Museum, the festival featured local independent presses and organizations tabling, such as El Martillo Press, Angel City Press, WriteGirl, Los Angeles Literature and performance poet Christian Purfas, who crafted poems on demand using a typewriter. He’d engage each subject in conversation, getting to know them well enough to craft a poem uniquely tailored to them.
Plus, there were author panels such as “LA Women VS the Void” moderated by YA author and Culver City resident, Francesca Lia Block and featured Anna Dorn, Ruth Madievsky, Kim Samek, Allie Rowbottom and Nada Alic, highlighting women authors in celebration of Women’s History Month.
Then, on April 12, was the 5th annual Viet Book Festival 2026, that took place at the Bowers Museum, in Santa Ana, a short 10 minute drive from the heart of Vietnamese America, Westminster and Garden Grove in Orange County. Presented by the Vietnamese American Arts and Letters Association (VAALA), the festival is an all-day celebration of Vietnamese diasporic voices in literature, culture, and storytelling. The festival provided attendees the opportunity, as it says on VAALA’s website, to “participate in five panel discussions, enjoy interactive activities for children, and experience youth performances that showcase Vietnamese traditions and creativity.”
There were other festivals, such as the 31st annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which took place April 17 and 18 at USC; the 14th annual LitFest in the Dena, which took place the first weekend in May in the Pasadena-Altadena area; the 49th annual UCR Writers Week Festival from May 5 to 8 on the campus of the University of California, Riverside; the Pomona Valley Book Fair at the LA County Fair, which took place each weekend of the LA County Fair in May; the first Riverside City College Literary Festival, called LitChella, which took place May 12 to 14 on the college’s quad; the first Caution! Writers at Play, a literary festival organized by Sunday Jump that took place on May 24 in Historic Filipinotown; the Inlandia Institute’s Indie Author Fair on June 4 as part of the Riverside Art Walk; the 5th annual LITLIT: The Little Literary Fair, presented by the Los Angeles Review of Books, which took place on June 6 and 7 at SCI-Arc’s campus in the Arts District; and Book Lovers Weeknd, which took place June 6th and 7th at the Port of L.Á.
With 15 literary festivals and book fairs, etc., taking place in 3 plus short months, this dizzying spring calendar proves that Greater Los Angeles doesn’t have just one monolithic literary scene. Instead, it’s made up of distinct yet interwoven local communities, with a plethora of authors too numerous and diverse for any one festival to feature. And with a book loving public ready to connect, but hampered by the shear physical expanse of Southern California’s geography, festivals will continue to be founded to fill in each literary desert.
Los Ángeles finally announced its new Poet Laureate, Brian Sonia-Wallace, and Whittier announced its first Poet Laureate, Alejandra Roggero. Sonia-Wallace is a gay poet known for composing spontaneous poems on request at literary and other events, even setting up on sidewalks, using his vintage 1938 Remington typewriter. He published an essay collection in 2020 titled The Poetry of Strangers: What I Learned Traveling America with a Typewriter – Insightful Essays on Isolation and Community, about his experiences writing poems for others. It all began when Sonia-Wallace set up his typewriter on the street next to a sign that read “Poetry Store” and asked passers by “What do you need a poem about?”
As reported by the Culver City Observer, Mayor Karen Bass said about Sonia-Wallace’s appointment, “Poetry belongs to every Angeleno, and Brian Sonia-Wallace has a remarkable gift for bringing people together through its power,”
Previously, Brian Sonia-Wallace served a West Hollywood’s Poet Laureate from 2020-2023.
Whittier also joins the growing number of cities in Greater Los Ángeles that have a Poet Laureate, such as Pomona, Glendale, Santa Monica, Malibu, Long Beach (a Youth Poet Laureate) and West Hollywood, along with Orange County. Selected by the Whittier Public Library, Roggero is a Mexican and Cuban writer and TV developer who graduated from Whittier College. Not only is she a poet, Roggero is also a performer and community advocate who is one founder of Poetry for the Masses, a monthly workshop and collective in South Pasadena. This past March, Poetry for the Masses turned 2.
Roggero’s love of poetry began in high school when she noticed “poetry felt different—challenging, exploratory and beautiful in a way I hadn’t experienced before. Poetry gives us permission to play in ways we don’t get to in the routine and mundanity of everyday life.” And since she first fell in love, she’s found “so many places throughout Whittier that have served as safe spaces for me to write and find inspiration—from the Whittier Central Library, to the tables outside Mimo’s Café in Uptown, to the steps leading up to Wardman Hall at Whittier College.” That’s why “a number of poems from my last collection, La Matriarca, were written across the city.”
On April 30, Beyond Baroque’s Interim Executive Director, jimmy vega, was appointed as the organization’s new Executive Director. Having previously served as the organization’s Associate Director, Beyond Baroque said in their press release, “vega has been integral to the organization’s recent growth. His work includes developing an expanded workshop program, launching the inaugural Manuscript Lab, directing the Linda J. Albertano Poetry Fellowship, collaborating with the City of Los Angeles’ Department of Cultural Affairs on the 2024 Paris to L.A. International Cultural Olympiad reading at the Los Angeles Central Library, and continuing Beyond Baroque’s important work as a founding member of the Poetry Coalition, a nationwide alliance of literary leaders coordinated by the Academy of American Poets.”
Jimmy vega is also a child of Mexican immigrants and a Chicano Los Ángeles poet, who published his first full-length poetry collection zirconium ash last year from local independent press What Books. It’s a collection exploring loss and death in relation to individuals, relationships, and communication, while also tracing the physical and psychological landscape of Los Ángeles.
Los Angeles Literature 