It wasn’t just the garden at the Wende Museum, and the Glorya Kaufman Community Center – most of the parking lot was also filled with literate fun for the the Annual Culver City Book Festival on Sunday, March 29, 2026. The event, presented by Village Well Books and Coffee, grows every year. This spring it expanded with more publishers and authors, more discussion panels and activities for readers of every age. Spilling out of the grounds and onto the asphalt, there were food trucks, non-profit booths, and information and literature of every flavor and kind.
The first panel discussion of the day on “Finding Hope & Ways to Cope” heard Dr. Barry Goldstein interview Claire Bidwell Smith, Christiane Wolf, Mandy Kahn, and Alessandra Olanow, all of whom have written about loss and grief. Participants crowded the community center’s A-frame theater, and listened closely to clinicians and poets discuss how creativity can help to navigate loss, the non-linear aspects of grief, and how being physically present for each other can offer the most simple and essential support. Wolf, who leads the Wende’s popular mindfulness meditation class, also spoke about generational trauma and the ability of culture to be an active part of healing. “We can only heal our historical wounds if we can admit they exist.”
The Kids Zone was created at the tiny house behind the community center, with hands-on artwork and stories being read out loud through the day. Village Well Children’s Book manager Shira Sergant had dozens of youngsters coloring with markers while local author Barney Saltzberg read from his work to a rapt audience of preschoolers.
The garden area was filled with booths where authors and publishers promoted their titles and their catalogues. Martillo Press was on hand, one of the original participants of the book fest, with Touch the Sky, poems by Donato Martinez, and The Enemy Sleeps, a novel by press founder David A. Romero. Angel City Press, WriterGirl, and the Museum of Tolerance were also on hand to represent.
Another panel that filled the theater, “LA Women VS the Void” was moderated by Francesca Lia Block, who runs the Lit Angeles Writers Workshops at the Village Well. She interviewed LA authors Anna Dorn, Ruth Madievsky, Allie Rowbottom, Nada Alic, and Kim Samek. Taking about topics from existential LA angst, body horror, erotic fanfic, and the strengths of surrealism, the writers were candid about technique, and process. Madievsky leaned into her ‘day job’ as a pharmacist to write her novel All Night Pharmacy. “There is nothing more inspirationally weird than real life.”
The day ended with a ‘river of poetry,’ a stylized reading where poets read one piece and then handed it on to the next poet, in honor of Women’s History Month. The poets who read offered their crafted and cultivated words on women’s rights, the divine feminine, history, contemporary politics, and culture at large. Lorna Dee Cervantes, Alyesha Wise, Tanzila “Taz” Ahmed, Eve Wood, Margaret Elysia Garcia, Jasmine Williams, Teresa Mei Chuc (Tuệ Mỹ Chúc), Briana Muñoz, Jennifer Espinoza, Kathleen Florence, Janet Gonzalez and Consuelo all offered their eloquence, flowing like water.
The metaphor of the river ran through the day, with Goldstein noting at the morning panel discussion that grief could be an “underground river; we know it’s there, it influences everything, but we don’t see it.” The fountain in the garden kept a blissfully burbling soundtrack in the warm afternoon. The poetry river was another moment to recognize how language shapes our understanding, and literature can take us to places we didn’t even know were there.
The staffs of both the Wende Museum and the Village Well coordinated seamlessly to make the event a real pleasure to attend, and many left with bags filled with books.
Judith Martin-Straw
Photo courtesy City of Culver City
