New L.A. Book Festival LitLit Announces Talks by Poets Yesika Salgado, Vickie Vertiz and More
By Michael Schaub
FROM: L.A. Times
The Los Angeles Review of Books and Hauser & Wirth Publishers announced the panelists who will discuss literature, art and activism at LitLit, the Little Literary Fair, which will debut this weekend in L.A.’s Downtown Arts District. The city’s newest book festival, to be held at the Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles arts complex, will host four panels on July 20 and 21 as part of its programming, which will also include more than 20 exhibitors from L.A. and other cities on the West Coast.
Nineteen years ago, a small independent press based in Pennsylvania—sadly now defunct—published my first book, a novella titled The Courtship of María Rivera Peña(Silver Lake Publishing). The story is loosely based on the migration of my paternal grandparents from Mexico to Los Angeles in the 1920s and follows the courtship, marriage, and family life of the cook Beto and the beautiful waitress María. Three years later, a longer, second edition was published under the same name but with a slightly different cover design. I am now exploring with a publisher whether we can publish a 20th anniversary edition that would include a scholarly introduction.
Yesterday, L.A.’s Not A Cult Press announced on its Facebook page that Stories Books & Cafe has teamed up with them to sponsor their annual poetry submissions award. The award will now be called the Stories Award for Poetry. The winner gets a cash prize of $1,000 and a publishing deal with Not A Cult.
Arkay Artists will be publishing Salvadorian L.A. poet Ingrid M. Calderon-Collins’ memoir in the Winter of 2019. Let the Buzzards Eat Me Whole is a memoir summoned in poetic prose and poems.
On April 28, My Lit Box celebrated its third birthday at Hilltop Coffee & Kitchen in View Park-Windsor Hills. I arrived early, before the tables and chairs had been arranged and the microphone plugged in. The space was lively, black friends in conversation, white friends in conversation, hipsters sitting at the back counter completing work on their laptops.
Listen to the rhythm of the stacks. Ghosts. Witches. Vampires. Come this way. Mummies. Mysteries. Mythologies. The words lift like music. True crime is down that aisle. Chaucer and Chesterton are over there. To the left wait Fitzgerald, Hemingway and a smiling Langston Hughes. And calling no attention to himself is Dostoevsky, so dark, yet so pure in the way he understood the things that menace the soul.
Alma Rosa Rivera is a bespeckled, Mexican American poet, mom, and wife who says she doesn’t like to “water down” her brownness. From the hot deserts in Santa Clarita to heavy smog and neon signs in Koreatown, Alma is representing brownness in all its glory.
A new bookstore is turning the page on Fourth Street’s Retro Row.
Sideshow Bookstore has a lot to offer, little nooks and shelves of great reads and highly recommended staff picks, it’s the place you find instant comfort in. Tony, the owner, has undeniably created a meaningful respite for all Angelenos.
Los Angeles Literature 