January 11, 2010
Title: Los Angeles Black Book Expo
Location: Sheraton Gateway LAX Hotel
Description:
The Los Angeles Black Book Expo returns in a new venue for its sixth year. The Sheraton Gateway LAX Hotel is the host for the 2010 LABBX taking place on Saturday, August 21 from 10:00 AM until 6:00 PM. “Empowering a New Generation Through Literature” is the LABBX’s theme for the year.
The annual literary celebration promises to feature lively panel discussions and workshops with topics such as publishing, urban lit, health, relationships, cultural issues, spirituality, creative writing and marketing tips for aspiring authors.
Spoken Worlds includes poetry readings with an open mic and featured artists. The Children’s Literary Zone presents storytellers, arts and crafts and fun for the entire family with established children’s book authors.
General event information including author and exhibitor applications will be made available on the Expo’s website, http://labbx.com in the following weeks. Interested participants may also call 323-718-5678 or email at blackbookexpo@gmail.com.
Detailed information on all upcoming activities will be posted on the LABBX website. Volunteers are invited to assist LABBX committee members. Potential sponsors are encouraged to contact the Expo at 323-718-5678 or info@labbx.com.
Future news involving the Expo and related programs will be posted on the LABBX website and blog.
The Sheraton Gateway LAX Hotel is located on 6101 West Century Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90045.
About the Los Angeles Black Book Expo
The Los Angeles Black Book Expo through its fiscal sponsor, Amen-Ra Community Assembly of California, Inc. (Amen-Ra Theological Seminary) is a 501(c) (3) organization. It began on June 2004 to celebrate the written word, promote literacy and to showcase new and established authors, storytellers, spoken word artists, children\’s book authors, emerging writers, publishers, booksellers, editors and book reviewers local and nationwide.
Date: 2010-08-21
Start Time: 10:00am
End Time: 6:00pm
January 4, 2010
By Cyndia Zwahlen
December 29, 2009
Step through the glass doors of Eso Won Bookstore, the landmark but struggling Leimert Park shop specializing in African American titles, and you’ll see shelves stacked with civil rights classics by Martin Luther King Jr., poetry by Maya Angelou and important fiction including James Baldwin’s “Another Country.”
Their ranks will be thinned substantially when co-owner James Fugate switches to more bargain-priced books when restocking his shelves next year in a bid to boost sales. Too much money is tied up in the slow-moving back-list tomes, which sell for $15 or more, he said.
“A lot of the history that we built our store on, that stuff has got to go,” said Fugate, who with co-owner Tom Hamilton opened the shop in 1989.
Los Angeles Times
October 28, 2009
Title: LosCon 36
Location: Los Angeles Airport Marriott
Website: http://www.loscon.org/36
Description:
LosCon 36, But Wait…There’s More! is the exploration of the diversity of Science Fiction. We are having a whole host of panels, workshops, and activities for you. The convention is organized into Theme Days and Programming Tracks in order for you to be able to easily find the special events and programs you will most enjoy.
Themes are: Friday – Horror, Saturday – Dress Like a Pirate Day, and Sunday – Honoring Writers and Artists
The Tracks are: Anime, Art, BEM’s & Aliens, Fantasy & Magic, Gaming, Heroes & Superheroes, Horror, Military & Historical, Myth & Legend, Proto-Science Fiction, Science & Technology, Speculative Fiction, and Writing.
We are very pleased to have authors Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes as our Writer Guests of Honor.
Start Date: November 27, 2009
End Date: November 29, 2009
April 18, 2009
Title: Speaker Event: It’s Murder, They Wrote
Location: Palms-Rancho Park Library, Los Angeles 90064
Description: What — the butler didn’t do it? Then who did, and why should we care? How does an author create a suspenseful novel in a genre where every twist and turn in the road can pull the reader along, or send them into the ditch of “been there, seen that”? How do you keep your story and characters fresh? A great event for all fiction writers.
Featuring Penny Mickelbury (”A Murder Too Close: A Phil Rodriquez Novel”) and Gary Phillips (”The Jook”).
A special appearance by author David Cunningham, former president of the California Writers Club and original mentor of GLAWS, will continue our “Writing In Collaboration” topic by speaking on his work as a ghost writer and premier his new book, “The Travel Within”.
Start Time: 3:00 pm
Date: 2009-04-18
Greater Los Angeles Writer Society
April 18, 2009
Title: Black Writers on Tour
Location: Los Angeles Convention Center
Click here
Description: To give exposure to African-American authors and writers, increase their book sales, motivate, and develop aspiring new writers and authors.
Start Date: 2009-05-01
End Date: 2009-05-03
The Los Angeles Black Business Expo attracted over 40,000 attendees over its three-day event and Black Writers On Tour attendees numbered over 5,000 in its one-day event. Joining together is going to make this an awesome event.
.
Seminars and Workshops
Exhibit Booths
Poetry Jam Competition
Let the Elders Speak Forum
Children’s Writing Contest
Children Writers’ Competition Showcase
April 11, 2009
Title: The Spoken Word/Celebrating African American Poetry
Location: A C Bilbrew Library, Los Angeles
Click here
Description: In celebration of National Poetry Month, an eclectic and dynamic group of Los Angeles poets will read and perform some of their most treasured poems. Free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.
Start Time: 1:00 pm
Date: 2009-04-18
April 2, 2009
Title: Los Angeles Times Festival of Books
Location: UCLA
Click here for more information
Description: The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books was created in 1996 to promote literacy, celebrate the written word, and bring together those who create books with the people who love to read them. Between 130,000 and 140,000 people attend the event annually.
General event information is available online at latimesfestivalofbooks.com or by calling 1-800-LA TIMES, ext. 7BOOK. Detailed speaker and event information will be provided in the official festival program, which will be published in the April 19th edition of the Los Angeles Times.
Start Date: 2009-04-25
End Date: 2009-04-26
February 8, 2009
Title: 2009 Leimert Park Village Book Fair
Location: Los Angeles
Leimert Park Village Book Fair
Description: The Leimert Park Village Book Fair encourages reading, writing, and literacy in Los Angeles and greater Southern California area communities. Towards this goal, the Book Fair provides the community access to writers and their work and conversely, provide writers and spoken word artists a space to network with other artists/exhibitors and sponsors.
Date: June 6, 2009
October 7, 2008
The Right Mistake
The Further Philosophical Investigations of Socrates Fortlow
by Walter Mosley
Available Oct 6, 2008
Living in South Central L.A., Socrates Fortlow is a sixty-year-old ex-convict, still strong enough to kill men with his bare hands. Now freed after serving twenty-seven years in prison, he is filled with profound guilt about his own crimes and disheartened by the chaos of the streets. Along with his gambler friend Billy Psalms, Socrates calls together local people of all races from their different social stations-lawyers, gangsters, preachers, Buddhists, businessmen-to conduct meetings of a Thinkers’ Club, where all can discuss the unanswerable questions in life. The street philosopher enjoins his friends to explore-even in the knowledge that there’s nothing that they personally can do to change the ways of the world-what might be done anyway, what it would take to change themselves. Infiltrated by undercover cops, and threatened by strain from within, tensions rise as hot-blooded gangsters and respectable deacons fight over issues of personal and social responsibility. But simply by asking questions about racial authenticity, street justice, infidelity, poverty, and the possibility of mutual understanding, Socrates and his unlikely crew actually begin to make a difference. In turns outraged and affectionate, The Right Mistake offers a profoundly literary and ultimately redemptive exploration of the possibility of moral action in a violent and fallen world.
August 26, 2008
[/caption]
T.H.U.G. L.I.F.E.
by Sanyika Shakur
Available August 2008
The follow-up to his best-selling memoir Monster, Sanyika Shakur’s T.H.U.G. L.I.F.E. is a vicious, heartwrenching, and true-to-life novel about an L.A. gang member that masterfully captures the violence and depravity of gang life.
Published fourteen years ago, Sanyika Shakur’s classic memoir of gang life, Monster, was a best seller with nearly 400,000 copies in print in the United States alone. With T.H.U.G. L.I.F.E., his fiction debut, Shakur has delivered a novel that describes, in the same remarkable detail he employed in Monster, the life of an L.A. gang member, and the violent, consuming, and lavish life of the gangster world.
Shakur’s protagonist is Lapeace, the leader of the Eight Tray Crips gang in South Central Los Angeles. He holds no prisoners on the Compton streets riddled with rivalrous gangs looking for blood. In a deadly gunfight with Anyhow, a Blood and Lapeace’s rival since childhood, eight innocent civilians are killed. Anyhow is captured. Lapeace becomes a fugitive and he must hide out in the home of his girlfriend, Tashima, a hip-hop mogul, as a pair of crooked Los Angeles detectives, John Sweeney and Jesse Mendoza, attempt to track him down. The novel explores Sweeney and Mendoza’s maneuvering of the intricate gang network, the detectives employing informants on both sides of the fight to get at the secluded Lapeace, but even more successfully it explores the psychology of the gang member—and in particular Lapeace’s attempts to uncover his roots and somehow disentangle himself from his violent past.
This novel, like the autobiography before it, was written from the confines of Shakur’s jail cell, and the authenticity of its street scenes—the relentlessness of violence, the do-or-die attitude of each side of the gang war, the sheer joy in the killing—is a testament to the hell that has been a majority of Shakur’s life. He was christened a gang member at the age of eleven and has spent most of his life either running from the law or in jail. With Monster, Shakur announced to the world a side of himself not seen before; with T.H.U.G. L.I.F.E., he follows up with an equally compelling story about the terror of gang life and one man’s attempt to free himself.
