Since 2013, the City of West Hollywood has presented WeHo Reads, a celebrated literary series featuring new, diverse, or noteworthy authors of interest to the West Hollywood community. The current WeHo Reads season is produced by BookSwell and is presented both in person and online.
All online events can be watched live on the WeHo Arts YouTube channel. Please note that some events past and future may contain mature language or themes.
See the about section below for more information on WeHo Reads.
For questions regarding WeHo Reads, contact Mike Che, City of West Hollywood Arts Coordinator, at mche@weho.org. If you are a published writer interested in being a future WeHo Reads participant, please fill out a WeHo Reads interest form.
Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2026, 6:30pm - WeHo Reads: Reimagining History
WeHo Reads: Reimagining History
Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2026 · 6:30–8:00 p.m. PT
In person, West Hollywood Library Community Room, 625 N San Vicente Blvd, West Hollywood, CA 90069
Four Los Angeles writers return to the past, through fiction and poetry, to understand where we came from.
Why do we keep returning to history? And what changes when we recover what was buried, silenced, or forgotten?
WeHo Reads returns in September with four acclaimed Los Angeles writers whose work reaches back into personal, political, and civic histories and reshapes how we see it. Through historical fiction and poetry, they explore why the past still shapes the present, and what we can learn from seeing it through new lenses. In an evening of reading and discussion, they ask how memory, imagination, and the craft of writing become tools for reimagining where we've been, where we are, and where we're going.
Featuring:
Kate Maruyama is a professor of writing and an author of realist and fabulist novels, short stories and essays set in and about Los Angeles.
Steven Reigns, a poet and educator who was the inaugural City Poet Laureate of West Hollywood and author A Quilt for David, which explores the life of David Acer, a Florida dentist wrongfully vilified during the height of the HIV/AIDS panic and Outliving Michael which received the 'Best in Literature' 2025 Poz Award
Mike Sonksen, aka Mike the PoeT, is a poet, professor, journalist, historian & tour guide with work in publications like the Academy of American Poets, Alta, PBS, Poetry Foundation & Westways.
Désirée Zamorano, author of the historical fiction novel Dispossessed and the collection of short stories, Amarisa's Cooking Pot, delights in writing about the ordinary and the extraordinary.
West Hollywood City Poet Laureate Jen Cheng will open the event with the reading of a poem.
WeHo Reads is a literary series presented by the City of West Hollywood. The 2026 program is produced by BookSwell, a literary media company amplifying historically excluded voices. Additional support is provided by media partnerships with Book Soup and Los Angeles Review of Books. Free; RSVP requested. Free parking is available in the 5-story Public/Park Parking Structure at 625 N. San Vicente Blvd. Attendees are advised that the program may include mature language and themes.
Five queer authors open portals to spectacular new worlds—and dare us to get lost in them.
What can we discover in worlds that have never existed? And how does queer imagination remake the rules of magic, adventure, and belonging?
This fall, five queer fantasy and YA authors venture past the edges of the map—into realms cozy and macabre, sweeping and strange. Their books conjure witches and spellwork, alternate universes, and heroes who have rarely seen themselves at the center of the story. In an evening of reading and discussion, they'll talk about building the fantastical, the freedom of the undiscovered, and why imagined worlds can tell the truest stories about our own.
Featuring:
Georgia K. Boone is the author of the critically acclaimed YA novel And Other Mistakes and When We Almost Came Undone, both of which are Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selections.
Kiri Callaghan is a best-selling author of sapphic fantasy fiction that's both cozy and a little macabre, including The Hemlock Saga and its latest installment, The Hearth Witch’s Guide to Spite & Spellwork.
Lizzy Ives is the author of Fat Witch Summer and Thick Witch Travels and co-designer of the upcoming cozy fantasy board game, Bookwyrm.
C.B. Lee is a New York Times bestselling author of young adult and middle grade fiction, including the Lodestone Award for Best Young Adult Book winning Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe, A Clash of Steel, and the acclaimed Sidekick Squad series.
Shelly Page, the author of Brewed with Love and Charmed and Dangerous, writes young adult fantasy romance and horror, and practices immigration law in Los Angeles.
WeHo Reads is a literary series presented by the City of West Hollywood. The 2026 series is produced by BookSwell, a literary media company amplifying historically excluded voices. Additional support is provided by media partnerships with Book Soup and Los Angeles Review of Books. Attendees are advised that the program may include mature language and themes.
In this event, four local writers confront subjects many books shy away from: race, desire, class, the messy moments when life stops making sense. They decline to sand off the rough edges. Their work runs from punk-inflected inter-genre prose to memoir, from poetry to historical fiction, but the nerve is the same: they write without asking permission and without apology. In an evening of reading and discussion, they talk about writing hard truths, the pressure to make difficult material palatable, and what a writer stands to gain by holding the line.
The event will feature:
Marcus Clayton, a multigenre Afrolatino writer from South Gate, who has a collection of inter-genre prose, ¡PÓNK!, with Nightboat Books;
Joshua Escobar, a poet, novelist, and screenwriter from Southern California's Inland Empire and author of the Bo Huston Award-winning novel Demons of Eminence;
Rasheed Newson, author of the national bestseller My Government Means to Kill Me which was named one of The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2022 and the critically-acclaimed There's Only One Sin in Hollywood which explores Black LGBTQ+ life during Hollywood's Golden Age; and
Kaila Yu, an Los Angeles-based author and journalist whose debut memoir, Fetishized: A Reckoning with Yellow Fever, Feminism, and Beauty, was published by Crown, with bylines in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, the Los Angeles Times and Condé Nast Traveler. T
WeHo Reads is a literary series presented by the City of West Hollywood. The 2026 series is produced by BookSwell, a literary media company amplifying historically excluded voices. Additional support is provided by media partnerships with Book Soup and Los Angeles Review of Books. Attendees are advised that the program may include mature language and themes.
Wednesday, April 15, 2026, 6:30 p.m. (PT) - Poets Laureate Lee Herrick & Jen Cheng
WeHo Reads: Poets Laureate Lee Herrick & Jen Cheng
Poetry helps us explore who we are and how we connect to the world around us.
Join us this National Poetry Month for a conversation between California Poet Laureate Lee Herrick & West Hollywood City Poet Laureate Jen Cheng as they reflect on how language shapes identity, sparks imagination, and can build bridges between cultures and communities.
Featuring:
Lee Herrick is the 10th California Poet Laureate and the first Asian American to serve in the role. He is the author of four poetry collections, including In Praise of Late Wonder: New and Selected Poems (2024), and his work appears widely in major literary publications and anthologies. A former Fresno Poet Laureate, co-founder of LitHop, and longtime educator, Herrick teaches at Fresno City College and has been reappointed to a second term as California Poet Laureate.
Jen Cheng is the 5th West Hollywood City Poet Laureate and the author of Braided Spaces. A Poet Laureate Fellow with the Academy of American Poets and a California Arts Council Fellow, she merges multilingual and multicultural influences through her multidisciplinary practice known as Feng Shui Poetry. Cheng teaches with organizations including The Poetry Society of New York, The Loft Literary Center, and UCLA Extension.
WeHo Reads is a literary series presented by the City of West Hollywood. For more information and events, visit www.weho.org/wehoreads. The 2026 season is produced by BookSwell, a literary media company amplifying historically excluded voices. Additional support is provided by media partnerships with Book Soup and Los Angeles Review of Books. Attendees are advised that the program may include mature language and themes.
Wednesday, March 11, 2026, 6:30 p.m. (PT) - Writing Together—Pomodoros, Marinara, and Friendship
WeHo Reads: Writing Together—Pomodoros, Marinara, and Friendship will take place on Wednesday, March 11, 2026, 6:30 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., online, free, RSVP Requested here
Writing a book is often imagined as a solitary act: thousands of quiet hours alone with a blinking cursor. But for five friends—Jade Chang, Angela Flournoy, Aja Gabel, Jean Chen Ho, and Xuan Juliana Wang—that myth unraveled in a corner booth at Little Dom’s, an Italian American restaurant in Los Feliz where they gathered week after week to write together.
Using an adapted Pomodoro method—40-minute stretches of focused work followed by breaks over meatballs, marinara, potatoes, and salad—the group wasn’t there to workshop pages or critique drafts. All of them were working on second books. While productivity and accountability were factors, the main point was companionship.
This moderated literary conversation brings these five women of color together to reflect on what it meant to build a creative practice rooted in friendship. They’ll talk about skepticism and structure, motherhood and momentum, finishing hard books, and how showing up—at the same restaurant, at the same time, with the same people—changed their relationship to writing itself. With several new novels published this fall, the group looks back on the communal labor and friendships that made these books possible.
At its core, this is a conversation about art, discipline, and the sustaining power of community—and a reminder that sometimes the most radical thing a writer can do is not write alone.
This event will feature: Jade Chang, author of two critically acclaimed novels,What a Time to Be Alive and The Wangs vs. the World, which won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award; Angela Flournoy, author of The Wilderness, a national bestseller that was long-listed for the National Book Award; Aja Gabel, author of the novels LightbreakersandThe Ensembleand a screenwriter; Jean Chen Ho, author of Fiona and Jane; and Xuan Juliana Wang, author of the short story collection Home Remedies, winner of the California Book Award for First Fiction.
WeHo Reads is a literary series presented by the City of West Hollywood. For more information and events, visit www.weho.org/wehoreads. The 2026 season is produced by BookSwell, a literary media company amplifying historically excluded voices. Additional support is provided by media partnerships with Book Soup and Los Angeles Review of Books. Attendees are advised that the program may include mature language and themes.
Wednesday, February 18, 2026, 6:30 p.m. (PT) - Telling Family Secrets
WeHo Reads: Telling Family Secrets
Wednesday, Feb. 18, 2026 | 6:30–8 p.m. (PT)
What happens when writers dare to expose their family secrets through stories and memoir?
To write is an act of exploration, revelation, and reckoning with the consequences of silence and speaking up. The first event in the WeHo Reads 2026 series brings together four acclaimed writers whose work dares to share what is often kept in the dark. Through fiction, memoir, and hybrid forms, these authors explore how telling family secrets can be a powerful and vulnerable creative act.
Featuring:
Toni Ann Johnson, author of the Arrington family saga, which includes her novella Homegoing, the Flannery O’Connor Award-winning Light Skin Gone to Waste, and her newest linked collection, winner of the Screen Door Press Prize, But Where’s Home?;
Aimee Liu, bestselling author of the novels Glorious Boy, Flash House, Cloud Mountain, and Face, as well as the memoirs Solitaire and Gaining;
Juanita E. Mantz (JEM), author of the memoir Tales of an Inland Empire Girl, who is also a lawyer/deputy public defender, a performer, and the host of the Life of JEM podcast; and
Hannah Sward, award-winning author of Strip: A Memoir whose work has appeared in publications such as the LA Times, HuffPost, and NY Times (Tiny Love Stories).
WeHo Reads is a literary series presented by the City of West Hollywood. For more information and events, visit www.weho.org/wehoreads. The 2026 season is produced by BookSwell, a literary media company amplifying historically excluded voices. Additional support is provided by media partnerships with Book Soup and Los Angeles Review of Books. Attendees are advised that the program may include mature language and themes.
The WeHo Reads series, established in 2013, is a celebrated literary series featuring new, diverse, and noteworthy authors of interest to the West Hollywood community.
Just a few of our notable past participants include:
