2023 L.A. Times e-book competition: Meghan Trainor, Laura Dern, extra

Singer Meghan Trainor, Oscar-winning actor Laura Dern, California consultant Katie Porter and former Georgia lawmaker Stacey Abrams are among the many authors set to look at this 12 months’s Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.

On Wednesday, The Times unveiled its lineup for the annual literary celebration, scheduled for April 22 and 23, which can function greater than 500 writers, musicians and artists unfold out throughout USC’s 226-acre campus.

Following final 12 months’s return to a totally in-person competition after the pandemic compelled such occasions to go digital in 2020, organizer Ann Binney, affiliate director of occasions at The Times, stated this 12 months’s competition shall be “striving to bring it even further back into normalcy and making it even better than it was last year.”

To that impact, the competition will function its typical programming, with various high-profile public figures and celebrated authors headlining occasions, but in addition new choices, resembling a partnership with Apple TV+, which can current a screening of an episode of its new thriller thriller collection “The Last Thing He Told Me,” starring Jennifer Garner and primarily based on the novel by Laura Dave.

Both Garner and Dave shall be readily available to debate the collection and e-book on the competition’s major stage.

As a part of The Times’ “Ideas Exchange” collection, Dern and her mom, actor Diane Ladd, will speak about their upcoming e-book, “Honey, Baby, Mine: A Mother and Daughter Talk Life, Death, Love (and Banana Pudding),” a set of their conversations collectively.

In addition, Grammy-winner Trainor, who’s anticipating her second baby this summer time, will current her debut e-book, “Dear Future Mama: A TMI Guide to Pregnancy, Birth, and Motherhood from Your Bestie.” After a panel dialogue, the “Made You Look” performer shall be readily available to signal copies of the e-book.

Other notable figures set to take part embody folks music icon Joan Baez, Broadway royals Leslie Odom Jr. and Idina Menzel, singer-songwriter Margo Price and actor Judy Greer. Porter, who’s working for a California U.S. Senate seat, will focus on her memoir, “I Swear: Politics Is Messier Than My Minivan.” Abrams will share her new semi-autobiographical youngsters’s e-book, “Stacey’s Remarkable Books,” a followup to her New York Times bestseller “Stacey’s Extraordinary Words.”

“She was a writer before a politician — a romance novelist,” Binney stated, referring to the romantic suspense fiction Abrams wrote beneath her pen identify, Selena Montgomery. (More not too long ago she wrote a authorized thriller, “While Justice Sleeps,” beneath her personal identify.) “She’s been in this world for a long time.”

Headlining the competition’s L.A. Times Book Club occasion is Gabrielle Zevin, who will focus on her hit novel, “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.”

Other celebrated authors on the schedule embody Roxane Gay, Adriana Trigiani, Walter Mosley, Jane Smiley, Anna Todd, Lois Lowry and Kate DiCamillo. Dozens of panels may even host Rebecca Makkai, Dave Eggers, Jess Row, Andrew Sean Greer, TC Boyle, Susan Straight, Tess Gunty, Pico Iyer and Fatima Asghar, amongst many different literary authors.

Another stage will function the continuing Times collection Ask a Reporter, through which reporters, editors, photographers and podcasters speak about their work and reply reader questions. Staff set to look embody Times Executive Editor Kevin Merida in addition to Laurie Ochoa, Samantha Melbourneweaver and Gustavo Arellano, who shall be internet hosting a stay taping of The Times podcast collection “Masters of Disasters.”

To kick off the competition, the Times will maintain a ceremony handy out Book Prizes for a dozen literary works. The Times may even current the Robert Kirsch Award, for a physique of labor targeted on the American West, to James Ellroy, who’s finest identified for his L.A.-based crime novels resembling “L.A. Confidential” and “The Black Dahlia” — each a part of his bestselling L.A. Quartet.

Ellroy additionally has written an investigative memoir, “My Dark Places,” in addition to dozens of novels, lots of them tailored into movies, graphic novels and podcasts. He will be a part of fellow crime novelist Michael Connelly throughout the competition for a dialog about their work.

The Freedom to Read Foundation, recipients of the Times’ Innovator’s Award, may even participate within the competition. The nonprofit’s work consists of defending the general public’s proper to entry data in libraries and serving to present authorized counsel to librarians preventing to protect their 1st Amendment rights.

A consultant from the nonprofit shall be in dialog with PEN America and a number of other younger grownup authors whose books have been banned in a number of states. Bans on books in class districts throughout the U.S. noticed an unprecedented surge in 2022, in line with a current PEN America report.

Their work has “always been important,” Binney stated, “but is increasingly important when we’re talking about books and education.”

An extra sampling of the 550 individuals is listed beneath:

Aamina Ahmad
Andrew Porter
Angie Cruz
Anna Todd
Annette Chavez Macias
Chelsea Bieker
Chrissy Metz
Dahlia Lithwick
Dan Pfeiffer
Danny Pellegrino
David Corn
Father Greg Boyle
Holly Goldberg Sloan
J. Ryan Stradal
Jasmine Guillory
Jeffrey Yang
Jessica Kim
Jonathan Lemire
Karen Fine
Katherine Schwarzenegger Pratt
Kristin Hannah
Lan Samantha Chang
Lauren Graham
Lynn Steger Strong
Maayan Eitan
Mary Otis
María Amparo Escandón
Mauricio Umansky
Max Greenfield
Omar Epps
Ottessa Moshfegh
Patricia Smith
Rabbi Naomi Levy
Rachel Lindsay
Rasheed Newson
Robin Coste Lewis
Sadeqa Johnson
Saeed Jones
Sarah Kendzior
Sarah Priscus
Shelley Read
Sona Movsesian
Stephen Markley
Steve Lopez
Steven Madden
Susanna Hoffs
Tamera Mowry-Housley
The Lady Gang
Tracey Rose Peyton
V.E. Schwab
Victoria Chang