It’s already the last post of the first month of the new year. Man. Time is one swift motherfucker.
Today we faxed (faxed?) over our tax form to Grand Park so they can draw up our contract for the Grand Park BookFest. We are incredibly excited about it our book festival!
Here are some of the highlights in the schedule we have put together:
Read/Beats
This comes from the mind of Peter Woods. He’s put on this program before and we have been itching to do it at a Writ Large Press produced event. It consists of a writer reading a piece of writing, whether her own or an excerpt or passage from a book that the writer loves, all backed up by a beatmaker making live beats inspired by the written work.
One of the writers we have confirmed is Jessica Ceballos (who will be doing double duty since she’ll be bringing Poesia Para La Gente to the festival!). And the musicians we have scheduled is Healing Mystical Science.
Lament in the Night
After I read the incredible Lament in the Night, published by our friends at Kaya Press, one of the first people I thought of was Naomi Hirahara, the Edgar Award-winning author of the Mas Arai mysteries. Basically, our conversation went like, “Naomi, let’s do stuff!” with her answering, “Ok!”
What I ended up suggesting is creating a noir/pulp/mystery reading series named after the Nagahara Shoson story written and originally published in Little Tokyo in 1925. Naomi would curate the quarterly event with some of her favorite contemporary writers in the genre.
Well, we are here. This is the first Lament in the Night event. It’s the beginning of a great new series.
YA Authors & young adult writers
I love Cecil Castellucci. I mean, I don’t know anybody who doesn’t love her. Because she’s awesome. Talented. Kind. Generous. So what if she kicked my ass at Literary Death Match?
It took her only a couple of days to put a lineup of YA authors together, she being among the readers (Tin Star!).
What we will be adding to this lineup is a group of young adult writers from some of the best youth arts organizations around the city, such as 826LA.
There are a lot more things filling out our complete schedule, but I wanted to give you all a glimpse of what’s ahead.
One month down. Eleven months to go. It’s practically 2015!
But there’s plenty of fun to be had before that!