The 2025 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books (LATFOB), held on April 26–27 at the University of Southern California (USC), was a significant cultural event that brought together a diverse array of participants and marked its 30th anniversary with a vibrant celebration of literature, culture, and community. The festival is known for attracting a large crowd each year. For instance, the 2024 festival drew over 150,000 attendees, and the 2025 event featured more than 550 writers, experts, and storytellers, along with hundreds of exhibitors.
The festival featured over 100 ticketed author events, children’s storytelling sessions, poetry readings, book signings, and more than 400 exhibitor booths. Notable participants in the 2025 festival included authors such as Stacey Abrams, Jon M. Chu, Amanda Gorman, Chelsea Handler, Ibram X. Kendi, and Rebecca Yarros, among many others. The festival’s success was also attributed to the generous involvement of volunteers who assisted with various aspects of the event, including welcoming attendees, staffing author events, and supervising book signings.
LATFOB 2025 emphasized accessibility and community involvement. General admission was free, with select programming requiring tickets. The festival’s partnership with the Department of Cultural Affairs ensured that a wide range of activities were available to attendees of all ages and backgrounds, fostering a welcoming environment for literary enthusiasts and families alike.
As LATFOB celebrates three decades of literary celebration, the 2025 festival underscores the importance of storytelling in shaping culture and community. With its diverse programming and commitment to accessibility, the festival continues to be a premier event for book lovers and cultural aficionados. The success of this year’s event sets a promising precedent for future festivals, ensuring that the tradition of literary celebration will continue to thrive in Los Angeles.
LATFOB 2025 provides a unique opportunity to explore new voices, groundbreaking ideas, and thought-provoking works of art. This year, one of the most anticipated entries is “Bill Hoatson Presents “Professor Johnson’s” Life Lessons” by Bill Hoatson, which is being showcased in the Book Gallery.
Bill Hoatson earned two degrees from Florida State University, one in early childhood education and one in exceptional education. He then spent the next 40+ years teaching both regular education and children with learning disabilities from all age groups—from 3-year-olds in preschool to elementary, middle, and high school—and trained exceptional education students for jobs at a vocational school. He is the author of six books about teaching, including “Life Lessons,” “Lessons Learned the Hard Way, 15 Things Every Teacher Should Know,” and “Mr. Harrison’s Classroom, “which is a play that was a runner-up finalist for the Robert J. Pickering award for Playwriting Excellence. He is also the creator of his “Professor Johnson’s Success Image Career Posters” for children.
Bill Hoatson has taught generations of students in the same families—the children of the children of the children—as each has grown into adulthood. So, when he is teaching, his concern is not just for the child in front of him but for that child’s future children as well. He knows that how well he does for this child will be passed down as he or she parents his or her own children.
His deeper purpose is to break the generational cycle in households that aren’t doing so well. How in the world, he asks, can a child raised in a dysfunctional home be expected to know how to be a good parent to his or her own children? He has seen families where academic failure, emotional instability, or even incarceration seem to be generational, handed down like a bad habit. But he also knows that these families aren’t saddled with a “failure gene” or “crime gene.” What they need is a map of a path out of the woods.
“Bill Hoatson Presents “Professor Johnson’s” Life Lessons” is about parenting. Over the decades, the author has seen firsthand not only the profound importance of the role of parents in child development but also how early childhood experiences from birth to four will impact a child for the rest of his or her life.
Though society often looks to the classroom as if it were the first training place of little minds and characters, we know that what happens to a child before the school years directly affects how that child will do in school, shaping for better or worse what their adult lives will be like. And he realized with increasing dismay that most people don’t begin to understand how critically important the years from birth to four are for everything that will happen in a child’s life.
The beauty of the book is that it will be readily absorbed and retained, especially by young readers, because it is entertaining and funny. One of his students, in an admiring letter, said, ‘Mr. Hoatson is uplifting and funny and likes joking around. He takes our problems to heart and is there to help in any way he can with our work, etc. He makes us laugh, and learning is fun.” That perfectly sums up both Bill and his book.
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