Friday, May 1, 2026

LitFest in the Dena Opens Tonight With 200 Authors and an Immigration Discussion Panel

The free Pasadena festival, born in Altadena and displaced by fire, returns for its 14th year

An immigration enforcement discussion panel will open LitFest in the Dena tonight at Pasadena Presbyterian Church, launching two days of readings, panels, and workshops built around the question of how books reshape the way a society thinks.

The free literary festival, now in its 14th year, brings approximately 200 authors to 585 E. Colorado Blvd. for programming themed “Books That Changed the Public Narrative,” according to a press release from the organizers. Founded in Altadena in 2012 and historically held at the Mountain View Mausoleum, the festival relocated to the Pasadena church after the January 2025 Eaton Fire led to the mausoleum site being used for Army Corps of Engineers recovery operations.

The opening panel, “Speaking Truth to Power: Humanizing Immigrant Communities in the Time of ICE,” features Daniel Olivas, a California Department of Justice attorney and speculative fiction author who lives in Pasadena; Adolfo Guzman-Lopez, an arts and general assignment reporter at LAist; fiction writer and essayist Lisa Alvarez; and speculative fiction writer Pedro Iniguez. Thomas E. Backer will moderate.

Latine literary voices run through the schedule. Red Hen Press and Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies, are presenting a reading that includes Francisco Aragón, the founding director of Letras Latinas. A separate panel, “Brilliant Bilinguals,” will feature Spanish-language diaspora poets, according to the press release. Gloria Arjona will blend music and cultural history in a session titled “La Lotería Against Time.”

Local ties are woven into the program. Pasadena Unified School District students will present in two sessions — “Pieces of Us” with the PUSD ThinkTank and “Diasporan Witness and Wonder: 8th Graders Respond.” Altadena Poets Laureate past and present, including Sehba Sarwar and Thelma Reyna, will read in a session titled “Celebrating Altadena.” Poet Carla Sameth, the 2022-2024 co-poet laureate for Altadena, is also on the program. Glendale Poet Laureate Raffi Wartanian will host a community poetry table tied to Eaton Fire recovery.

“There is this wonderful reflexive relationship between people and literature — we shape the character of the written word and then literature shapes us in kind,” Natalie Lydick, project developer at Light Bringer Project, said in a 2025 interview with Pasadena Now.

Light Bringer Project, a Pasadena-based nonprofit arts organization founded in 1990, produces the festival with the literary journal Locavore Lit LA. The festival was co-founded by novelist Jervey Tervalon and the late food critic Jonathan Gold.

Additional panels address crime fiction, fantasy writing, queer spirituality in speculative fiction, and young adult literature. Marcus Renner joins a session on community organizing called “Organizing for Good,” and Valentina Gomez of Light Bringer Project’s Omega Sci-Fi Project leads a workshop on science fiction for social change. A pop-up bookstore from Flintridge Bookstore, a taco stand from El Jarocho, and typewriter poetry from Jeanelle Fu round out the offerings.

The festival runs Friday from 6 to 9:30 p.m. and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Admission is free and no registration is required. The church is accessible by Metro bus lines 180, 181, 256, and 686. The full schedule is at litfestinthedena.org.