LA Times Festival weekend
The L.A. Times Festival of Books is set for April 18–19 at USC with a celebrity‑heavy program that includes names like Amy Tan, Stacey Abrams and Lionel Richie on the schedule (latimes.com) (goweho.com). The festival runs the same weekend as BookCon in New York, a pairing that outlets are framing as a potential West Coast–East Coast literary moment (latimes.com).
The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books returns to the University of Southern California on April 18 and 19, turning the campus into a two-day, mostly free book fair. (latimes.com) The 2026 event is the festival’s 31st edition, and the Los Angeles Times says it draws about 150,000 attendees, with more than 500 authors and celebrities and more than 200 author events. (latimes.com) General admission reservations are free, but the festival is also selling tickets for indoor panels and special events, with online reservations available through the start time of each panel while supplies last. (latimes.com) (tixr.com) The celebrity draw is unusually broad even by festival standards. Official listings include Amy Tan, Sarah Jessica Parker, Larry David and Lionel Richie, alongside political figures and journalists such as Stacey Abrams and Los Angeles Times staff moderators. (latimes.com) (discoverlosangeles.com) (goweho.com) This year’s program also adds an Audiobook and Podcast Stage, while the University of Southern California is running its own panels, music programming and family activities across the campus. (discoverlosangeles.com) (festivalofbooks.usc.edu) The weekend is lining up as a rare bicoastal book-industry split screen. BookCon is also scheduled for April 18 and 19 at the Javits Center in New York City, its first return since 2019, and the event’s website says 2026 tickets are already sold out. (bookcon.com) (theliteraryreporter.com) That overlap gives publishers, authors and readers two very different versions of a spring book event at the same time: Los Angeles offers a sprawling outdoor campus festival, while BookCon is pitching a convention-style show floor, workshops and late-night fan programming inside Javits North. (latimes.com) (bookcon.com) The Los Angeles weekend starts a night earlier for prize-watchers. The Los Angeles Times Book Prizes ceremony is set for Friday, April 17, at 7 p.m., with limited public tickets listed on the festival site. (latimes.com) By Sunday evening, the country’s biggest literary festival and New York’s revived BookCon will have run on the same dates, giving April 18 and 19, 2026, an unusually crowded place on the publishing calendar. (latimes.com) (bookcon.com)
