This August, Read Local SoCal is reading The Killing Spell, the debut fantasy from Shay Kauwe. Two centuries after a catastrophic flood drowned the Hawaiian islands, the surviving clans have built a new homeland on the edge of Los Angeles. When LA’s most prominent Filipino activist is killed by a death spell that can only exist in Hawaiian, young clan leader Kea Petrova becomes the prime suspect. It’s a murder mystery built from ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi. Read along with us all month.
“I tore through this book and loved every second. Shay Kauwe is a talent to watch.” — Rebecca Roanhorse, New York Times bestselling and Hugo Award-winning author
The Los Feliz Writers Festival returns for its second year on Wednesday, Aug. 19 through Sunday, Aug. 23, 2026, with 14 events staged across bars, diners, taco stands, a park, and a street corner in Los Feliz. Every single one is free.
A neighborhood celebrates
“The mission of this festival is to celebrate, empower, and engage writers that live, work, and play in Los Feliz!”
Co-directors Sammy Ginsberg and D.W. Socha met at Skylight Books’ Coyotes Book Club and through Los Feliz Neighborhood Council committees, and started the festival in 2025 with a specific idea of what they were representing. In their own words from last year’s press release, they “wanted to organize a festival that represented what they think of as Los Feliz- fun, creative, and a little weird.”
Why we’re highlighting it
BookSwell exists to amplify Black, Indigenous, and writers of color alongside LGBTQ+, female, nonbinary, and indie writers, so we look closely at whether a festival’s inclusion is structural or decorative. Los Feliz built theirs into the schedule.
Two of the 14 events are explicitly about who gets heard. Local POC Voices (Sun., Aug. 23) gathers four writers of color, Laura Sermeño, Joshua-John Judah Ivory, Ten-Headed Skeleton, and Jacqueline Vitela, for performances and a conversation the organizers describe this way:
“Together, the panel will explore the ways in which POC writers are currently silenced, historical context, and how to make change.”
And the Anti-Racist Workshop, A Fishbowl Demo (Sun., Aug. 23) is a live teaching demonstration led by Shannon Cain, an O. Henry Prize, Pushcart, and Drue Heinz winner and NEA fellow, informed by Felicia Rose Chavez’s The Anti-Racist Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom. The festival’s description:
“Set up fishbowl style with four writers and their facilitator at the center, this session will demonstrate an updated creative writing pedagogy that rejects the traditional model for one that nurtures and champions a diversity of voices.”
We’re excited about inclusion at the festival, including these featured writers:
CD Eskilson, a trans nonbinary poet and translator whose debut Scream / Queen is out from Acre Books
Karla Lamb (she/ella), “a Queer Xicana poet born in Mexico City” who hosts Verse4Verse, a monthly Sapphic and Queer-expansive poetry night in East Hollywood
lenny love, Jr., an African American filmmaker, actor, and poet who “explores the complexities of Black identity.”
Isabella Bellezza, who describes herself as “a bicyclist and a trans woman and a scientist.”
The presses in the mix are independent and fierce: Write Bloody, Acre Books, Sunflower Station Press, Pelekinesis, FlowerSong Press, and Riot of Roses, alongside a stack of self-published zines.
Los Feliz also now has a poet laureate. The Los Feliz Neighborhood Council, in partnership with the festival, appointed Derrick C. Brown, president of Write Bloody Publishing, the indie poetry press behind Andrea Gibson, Sarah Kay, and Clint Smith, as the neighborhood’s first. His case for why any of this matters:
“Poetry is more essential now than ever. We are in a deepening valley of loneliness. In an age of information overload and superficial connections, poetry teaches us to slow down, to truly listen, and to feel deeply. It’s resistance against a culture that values speed and cash over substance. Poetry builds empathy, and hot damn, do we need more of that.”
Schedule
When
Event
Where
Wed., Aug. 19, 6:45–9 p.m.
Opening Party: Shut Up and Write in Los Feliz, with a welcome from LA Poet Laureate Brian Sonia-Wallace
Big Bar Alcove
Thu., Aug. 20, 7–8:30 p.m.
Personal Essay Writing Workshop with Tracy Chabala
Fred 62
Fri., Aug. 21, 8–10 p.m.
Poets Are the New Pop Stars
TBA
Sat., Aug. 22, 10–11:30 a.m.
Fall in Love With Your Own Voice with Aubrey Mayne
TBA
Sat., Aug. 22, 12–1:30 p.m.
Sensory Portal: Writing Through Taste & Scent with Tayi Sanusi
The Story of You: Journaling Stroll & Integration with Laura Fuller
Barnsdall Art Park
Six venues were still TBA at the time of writing. Check the festival’s RSVP pages for updates.
The centerpiece is arguably Saturday night. Voices of Los Feliz launches Radically Human, a zine featuring over 30 writers and artists, being printed and distributed around the neighborhood, with a reading under the stars at Barnsdall Art Park:
“Bring a picnic, a blanket, and friends, and come meet under the stars at the beautiful Barnsdall Art Park and meet the local writers who live in Los Feliz as they read from our zine.”
And the festival closes the way it should, with an open mic at Vermont Triangle:
“This is an open mic, feel free to bring your first drafts, your free writes, your work-in-progresses! This is about sharing your voice and is not a polished performance.”
Need to know
Everything is free. RSVPs are handled through Partiful, event by event: partiful.com/e/3fXb8NoigxCSHMPsdvtD. Several workshops are capped, so RSVP early for anything that’s calling you.
The reason it’s free is that local businesses are donating their rooms. The organizers ask one thing:
“Please support the local business hosting us by purchasing something as that’s why our event is FREE <3”
Buy the coffee. Order the tacos. That’s the whole economic model.
The festival is run by volunteers with support from the Los Feliz Neighborhood Council and, last year, 23 local organizations. If you have questions, the co-directors read their own email: seeliterarypixie@gmail.com. Follow along at @losfelizwriters and losfelizlitfest.org.
The Sunset Strip’s beloved independent bookstore is open again after a nearby water-main rupture forced a temporary closure — and the best way to say welcome back is to walk in (or click through) and buy a book.
Book Soup has anchored West Hollywood’s literary life for decades, just up the street from where BookSwell and WeHo Reads gather readers all year long. A closure like this hits a small shop hard, so we’re marking the reopening the way that actually helps: by pointing you toward titles worth owning — books by authors in the BookSwell and WeHo Reads orbit — every one of them in stock or orderable at Book Soup right now.
Click any cover to buy it straight from Book Soup. Prefer to browse in person? They’re at 8818 W. Sunset Blvd., open daily.
These are the books we’ll be talking about over the next few months.
Every title above links to its page at Book Soup. Shopping your neighborhood bookstore keeps West Hollywood’s literary community strong — thank you for showing up for them.
BookSwell is proud to be a community sponsor of PUBLISHED! 2026, Women Who Submit’s summer celebration and fundraiser lifting up the writers in our community who got their work into the world this year.
Women Who Submit has spent years helping women and nonbinary writers submit their work, support one another, and push publishing toward real parity. Standing with them is an easy yes.
PUBLISHED! 2026 takes place Friday, July 10 at 7pm at The Democracy Center (alongside the Japanese American National Museum) in downtown Los Angeles, with ten readers, a dessert reception, cake, and music. Every ticket helps WWS pay these writers for their work and keep its programs free. Reserve your spot.
Supporting organizations like WWS is core to what BookSwell is about: connecting readers and writers in celebration of books, and making sure the writers doing the work are seen and paid. Subscribe to the BookSwell newsletter to keep celebrating the SoCal literary community with us.
This June, BookSwell was proud to be a sponsor of the 38th Annual Lambda Literary Awards. For more than three decades, the Lammys have celebrated and championed LGBTQ+ writers, and getting to stand with that community — our name up on the sponsor wall beside houses like Macmillan, Penguin Random House, and Hachette — was one of the proudest moments of our year.
We put our heart and soul into BookSwell, and giving back to the writers who have shaped so many of us is the best part of this work. Being in that room was a reminder of exactly why we do it.
Southern California showed up
Among this year’s honorees were writers close to home and close to our hearts:
Ben Kline won Gay Poetry for It Was Never Supposed To Be. We were lucky enough to host Ben for a reading, and you can still watch it here.
Gustavo Hernandez was a finalist for Gay Poetry with Bachelor (FlowerSong Press). Hernandez is the Orange County Poet Laureate, born in Jalisco and raised in Santa Ana.
José Enrique Medina, a Whittier poet and PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow, won the Samuel Prize for Emerging Writers Over 50 — a reminder that it is never too late to claim your place on the page.
heidi andrea restrepo rhodes was a finalist for Lesbian Poetry with Wayward Creatures. A queer, disabled poet of the Colombian diaspora, she lives in Southern California and teaches at Pomona College.
Mac Crane was a finalist for Lesbian Fiction with A Sharp Endless Need, a tender, propulsive novel about a queer teenage basketball prodigy. Crane writes from San Diego.
Milo Todd won Transgender Fiction for The Lilac People, a novel of trans survival and chosen family in the shadow of Nazi Germany that reads as urgently now as ever.
Keep celebrating with us
Our June Read Local SoCal pick, Before You Can Fly by Jase Peeples, was just named a finalist for the inaugural 2026 Kirkus Indie Awards in Romance. We’re celebrating queer SoCal lit all year long. Subscribe to the BookSwell newsletter to read our full Lammys feature and keep up with everything we’re reading.
