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 underscored 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 offers a unique opportunity to explore new voices, groundbreaking ideas, and thought-provoking works of art. One of this year’s most anticipated entries is The Spare: Part 3 by Marsha May Fairchild Sumpter, showcased in the Book Gallery.
Author Marsha May Fairchild Sumpter was born and raised on a working ranch twenty-eight miles north of Philip, South Dakota. As a young person, she worked hard and played hard, and events that occurred caused considerable pain both mentally and physically. Her choices were not always the best, and at seventeen, she was very much on her own. The saying “I was the only hell my mother ever raised” was probably very accurate. She writes to tell you what it was like growing up and to let others know that their choices are important to their future.
She has had many life experiences, both good and bad, over the years. Growing up in the 1940s, every farmer and rancher in South Dakota was dirt poor, trying to produce a crop when there was no rain, when the grasshoppers took over, or when hail came and wiped out everything. The hard work left its mark on this young person. It was always about the next year’s crop. Did she want to live and work like that for the rest of her life? That wasn’t a question she asked herself, but she distanced herself from that lifestyle at an early age.
After marrying at a young age, it was a case of “you made your bed, now lie in it.” She was destined to finish high school and care for a baby, despite knowing little about babies—other than lambs, calves, and pigs. Poverty was a way of life for the young couple, scrimping to make ends meet. Her work included being a bus driver at age eighteen, a short-order cook, and eventually pursuing more education to work in offices.
Part 1 and Part 2 of this book are just to give a glimpse into life on the farm when the author was growing up and carry you through the trials and tribulations encountered along the way. In many ways, her story is very insignificant because she realized there are many people out there who encountered way more difficulties and survived them. Each and every person has a story to tell, and it is unfortunate they don’t write about it and let others know what it is like to be a survivor.
The Spare: Part 3 presents the major move of the family back to the family farm in 1975, which was like a marriage—years of compromise and commitment but sticking with it through the good and the bad. After all, they had made a decision to save the family farm. After the death of the dad, the brothers created a very hostile environment, and Bill and the author were evicted as they took over with their majority ownership and sold the farm.
This book was among the books displayed by Author Reputation Press during the 2024 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books (LATFOB) at the University of Southern California on April 20–21, 2024. LATFOB is considered to be one of the world’s most significant literary gatherings. It has been held annually since 1996 with the goal of bringing together the people who create books and the people who love to read them. It was attended by more than 550 authors, celebrities, storytellers, and hundreds of exhibitors. The Los Angeles Times is the country’s largest metropolitan daily newspaper, with more than 40 million unique visitors to latimes.com each month, a Sunday print readership of 1.6 million, and a combined print and online local weekly viewership of 4.4 million. The Pulitzer Prize-winning Times has been covering Southern California for more than 140 years.
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