Independent and local businesses, publishers, authors and nonprofits gathered in Old Town Tustin for the OC Book Fair to promote local literary talent on July 13.
From 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., the event featured speaker panels, community roundtables, poetry recitations, interactive activities for attendees, books and merchandise from over 40 vendors. At booths, groups conversed with attendees and displayed their work. In the middle of El Camino Real, visitors wrote the title of their favorite book on a large whiteboard. Panels and Q&A sessions at the fair included writers such as W. Bruce Cameron, author of “A Dog’s Purpose,” and T. Jefferson Parker, novelist and UCI alumni.
Former president of the Tustin Area Council for Fine Arts (TACFA) Tony Wang said the event’s concept originated from Sam Robertson, co-owner of independent bookstore Arvida Book Co. The organizations’ partnership prompted TACFA to “fill this huge vacuum” in their mission of promoting and providing access to the arts.
To Wong, the event displayed a breadth of literary arts beyond the medium of books and the term “book fair.”
“We get too hung up on the word ‘book,’” Wong told New University. “Literary arts is more than a book, right? It’s scripts. It’s, you know, screenplays. It’s lyrics to a song. It’s not just poems, right? So I think we tend to forget [that].”
The fair had multiple sponsors and featured local organizations, such as the nonprofit Ethan and Choco’s Book Club (ECBC).
Alison Posner founded ECBC with her son, Ethan Posner, to increase patient access to books at the Children’s Hospital of Orange County (CHOC), where Ethan was treated for leukemia as a child. The nonprofit gifts curated books to children at the hospital and holds bedside reading programs to support patients’ academic progress during treatment.
“Reading provides social benefits and emotional benefits, but really the mission was about cognitive benefits,” Posner toldwith New University. “There are more survivors these days than there used to be — the treatment has improved a lot. But kids do struggle academically afterwards, and you don’t really hear about sort of the cognitive health aspect of survivorship.”
While events like the OC Book Fair enable small nonprofits to spread the word about their causes, media publicity and donor support are also important, according to Posner.
“It’s a tough world to be a tiny nonprofit,” Posner said. “We get much more successful in getting books when we post on social media.”
Independent author Jeannie Choe, who spoke at a panel of female romance authors, described the event as an opportunity for the literary community — publishers, authors and readers — to connect. According to Choe, this link can become a way to prevent the censorship of books.
“If we have … an outlet for all these [banned] books to be available to the public, I think people will realize how bad the banning of books is, [and] how important it is to eliminate that kind of censorship to their readers,” Choe said in an interview with New University. “This kind of event is really important.”
Mariam Farag is a News Intern for the summer 2024 quarter. She can be reached at msfarag@uci.edu.
Edited by Kaelyn Kwon.