This past Saturday, April 26, when the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books opened its doors at the University of Southern California at 9:55 a.m, the campus was in the midst of being deluged by the cold hard rain that was falling on much of LA County that morning.
Those who were involved with what has become the nation’s largest literary festival, worried that many of the Angelenos who had plans to attend one or more of the 100 author panels scheduled for Saturday, would elect instead to stay home where it was warm and dry.
I was the moderator of a panel that was scheduled to start on Saturday at 10:30 a.m., when the rain was particularly energetic in its efforts to drench the clothes of those in attendance, umbrellas or no umbrellas, I was one of those who worried.
My concern was needless. The campus was already packed with damp but enthusiastic book lovers. And, every seat in the auditorium that hosted our three-author panel was full to the point of having to turn people away.
Gangs, smugglers, and anti-immigrant sheriffs
The panel I moderated, titled Undocumented: The Price of the Promised Land, featured three books by three award-winning authors whose years of extremely skilled and often dangerous reporting produced three important books that are also exceptionally well-written page-turners.
Furthermore, on the topic of good writing, the night before when the LA Times announced the winners of its 45th Annual Book Prizes, in the category of non-fiction/current Interest, panelist Jesse Katz, won first prize for his book, “The Rent Collectors: Exploitation, Murder, and Redemption in Immigrant LA” which you can see pictured below.
The audience appeared to be particularly interested by the fact that, in addition to answering questions about their books, the three authors on the panel had insights regarding issues filling the news, such as the matter of immigrants who supposedly had damning gang tattoos that theoretically justified their deportation to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison, without anything even vaguely resemble due process.
In fact, the only problem with Saturday’s hour-long panel was that no one seemed to want it to end. But when it did end, a sizable number of audience members rushed the nearest book-selling booth that carried the work of the three panelists, then got in line to get their new books signed.
WLA will have much more on the ongoing-immigrant deportation issue, in an upcoming story.
But in the meantime, we strongly recommend that you acquire one or all of the books pictured above. You won’t be sorry.