The City of West Hollywood celebrated the 8th anniversary of the West Hollywood Library on Tuesday, October 1, at City of West Hollywood’s Council Chambers at the West Hollywood Library. The City held with a reception and book event with a discussion from a selection of authors featured in the Paperback LA anthology as part of The City’s WeHo Reads series. Paperback LA is a casual anthology devoted to a wide range of LA-specific topics and themes, created by Susan LaTempa.
On October 1, 2011, the West Hollywood Library first opened to the public. The 32,000-square-foot, LEED-certified library, owned by the City of West Hollywood and operated by the County of Los Angeles Public Library, showcases the City’s rich intellectual, literary, and cultural communities and provides a landmark facility for the community’s passionate commitment to lifelong learning. The library includes shelving for 150,000 books, movies, and music as well as wireless internet, reading lounges, group study rooms, a children’s theater, a teen area, an LGBT area, international language collections, assistive technology and large print collections, computer and technology areas, a career development center, the Friends of the Library Bookstore, and more.
Paperback LA authors in attendance at the event included:
Eric Gutierrez, author of Disciples of the Street: God & Rap in the Holy Land of Hip Hop, profiled on The Tavis Smiley Show, and co-editor of Suave: The Latin Male. His fiction appears in the Lambda Award-winning anthology The Man I Might Become, among many others, and his journalism and commentary in the Los Angeles Times, Jerusalem Post, The Times (UK), thedailybeast.com, and huffingtonpost.com;
Jason Jenn, interdisciplinary multimedia artist, performer, writer, visual artist, director, producer, designer, and video editor. He will be representing the late Stuart Timmons, whose work is featured in the anthology. In 2014, Jason teamed up with Stuart Timmons to help complete the Stuart Timmons’ City of West Hollywood LGBTQ History Tour as both a text and for three years as a live performance art event for the City of West Hollywood’s 30th Anniversary celebration / 2014-17 One City One Pride LGBTQ Arts Festival (www.weho.org/pride);
Gina Nahai, best-selling author, columnist, and emeritus professor of Creative Writing at USC. Her novels, which include Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith (excerpted in Paperback L.A. Book 2), have been translated into 18 languages and have been finalists for the Orange Award, the IMPAC Award, the Harold J. Ribalow Award, and the Jewish Book Council’s Fiction Award. She is the winner of the Los Angeles Arts Council Award, the Persian Heritage Foundation’s Award, The Simon Rockower Award, and the Phi Kappa Phi Award;
R.J. Smith, whose books include American Witness: The Art and Life of Robert Frank (2017), The One: The Life and Music of James Brown (2012), and The Great Black Way: L.A. in the 1940s and the Lost African-American Renaissance (2009), which was a Los Angeles Times bestseller and received a California Book Award. He has been a senior editor at Los Angeles magazine, a columnist for The Village Voice, and a staff writer for Spin magazine; and
Susan LaTempa, series editor of Paperback LA, the three-volume “Casual Anthology” series from Prospect Park Books. With Colleen Dunn Bates, she’s co-author of Storybook Travels: Visiting the Landmarks of Children’s Literature (Random House). She edited the anthology New Plays by Women from the pioneering feminist press, Shameless Hussy Press. She was deputy Food editor at the Los Angeles Times, editor-in-chief of Westways, and special features editor of L.A. Style. At Liberty Hill Foundation, the social justice foundation, she was Director of Communications.
This event was hosted by the City of West Hollywood and the Friends of the West Hollywood Library.
For more information, please contact Mike Che, Arts Coordinator, City of West Hollywood at (323) 848-6377 or [email protected].
