Long Beach Celebrates Literary Women Saturday

This Saturday, March 10, readers and writers will gather in the Long Beach Convention Center for a day dedicated to books and the women who make them -- Literary Women: The Long Beach Festival of Authors. For 30 years, this Festival has provided an opportunity for aspiring writers and enthusiastic readers to meet and celebrate successful contemporary women writers.

In 1982, the founders of the Committee of Literary Women, Harriet Williams and Virginia Laddey, were dismayed to discover only a handful of women writers on the reading list of Long Beach’s Wilson High School. They created the Festival of Authors in order to make the work of women writers more accessible to the reading public. In addition to organizing this popular annual Festival, the Committee donates books and funds to Long Beach Public Library and many local school libraries; they also fund scholarships for aspiring writers. This profile of the 2007 Festival in the Los Angeles Times is a warm, funny look at the day and the founders.

In the spirit of International Women’s Day, I wish I could tell you to clear your calendar to head down to the Convention Center Saturday morning, but the Festival has been sold out for months. To receive an application for tickets, you needed to get on their mailing list last Fall, and if you were lucky enough to get an application, you needed to send it back to them very quickly.

Alas, I was not quick enough, and I will not be attending, but there is no reason why we can’t celebrate the seven honorees on our own.

Lan Samantha Chang is the director of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop; she is the recipient of the Wallace Stegner and Truman Capote fellowships at Stanford University, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship.  I’ve not (yet) read her latest novel, the critically acclaimed All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost, but I have read Hunger, a collection of a novella and five stories. In these stories, Chinese immigrants are learning to survive in America, each struggling with physical, emotional, and spiritual hunger. The homes of these immigrant families are at once fully Chinese and fully universal, because the delicate balance of success and failure, love and loss, disappointment and joy is known in every family.

Zoe Ferraris has a fascinating biography: born in Oklahoma into a military family, she married a Saudi Arabian man and moved with him to Jidda shortly after the first Gulf War. In 2006, her marriage over, back in the United States with her daughter, Zoe completed her MFA in Fiction at Columbia University. Her two novels, Finding Nouf and City of Veils, both murder mysteries set in Saudi Arabia, are as beautifully written as they are exciting.

I can’t wait to read Gillian Gill’s biography of Victoria and Albert, We Two. Gill, who also wrote successful biographies of Florence Nightingale, Mary Baker Eddy, and Agatha Christie, has been highly praised for her accessible, well-researched, and surprising portrayal of one of history’s greatest marriages.

Secret Daughter, Shilpi Somaya Gowda’s first novel, is alive with contrasts. Two children, a girl and a boy, are born in the slums of Mumbai. The girl is adopted by an American family and grows up in California, the boy remains in Mumbai. Their stories, told largely by four very different parents, challenge traditional definitions of motherhood and family. Gowda grew up in Toronto and Mumbai; her touching novel dramatizes the very different worlds she traveled between as a young woman.

If you only have time to pick up one book from this list, make it Haley Tanner’s debut novel, Vaclav & Lena. Set in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, Vaclav & Lena is a rich love story, full of magic and magical wordplay, about the children of Russian immigrants. Vaclav and Lena are inseparably close as kids, but then they are separated – and Vaclav never gives up hope that he will find Lena again. This novel is sweet and funny and charming, and it’s such a quick read that you will have plenty of time to pick up another book from this list.

Canadian novelist Miriam Toews has written six critically acclaimed and award-winning books, five novels and a memoir. All of her smart, wry novels are a pleasure to read, but my favorite is her latest, Irma Voth, which is a coming-of-age story about a Mennonite woman estranged from her family because of her choice to marry a feckless Mexican. As in her other novels, Toews treats her characters with tenderness when the rest of the world hurts them, but there is an intensity to Irma Voth that is, I think, new to Toews’ writing.

Isabel Wilkerson, as a national correspondent and bureau chief at the New York Times, was the first black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in Journalism (Feature Writing), and was the first black American to win for individual reporting. Her award-winning bestseller, The Warmth of Other Suns, is the story of the Great Migration, the movement of over six million black Americans from the rural South to the urban North and West. Isabel Wilkerson spent 15 years writing and researching this incredible book. With both precision and affection, Wilkerson humanizes a half-century of American history by telling the most intimate stories of the people who lived it.

I don't know about you, but I went ahead and cleared my calendar to read more by these Literary Women, tickets or no tickets.