The Los Angeles Kids Book Festival (LAKBF) is commencing its fourth year on Sunday, August 23rd at the West Hollywood Park.
The annual affair is a family event dedicated to celebrating literacy in all languages and exposing children to diverse stories. Thus, tickets are free online. This year promises a full day of fun, with over one hundred vendors, cultural performances, live book readings and author meet-and-greets. There will be a feature from Blippi and Meekah of the popular kids’ entertainment program Meekah, which has over 27 million subscribers on YouTube.
Bonnie Yi Hyde is the founder and CEO of the LAKBF as well as the founder and executive director of the American Born Chinese (ABC) Foundation, which presents the book festival.
“Our goal is to have an event that celebrates literacy and the love of books, as well as giving a space for cultural and language diversity in children’s books,” Hyde said.
The ABC Foundation is a public nonprofit organization that aims to promote inclusivity and a love of learning in today’s youth. The foundation provides free bilingual books to children across the country, ensuring that the country’s bookstores reflect its diverse society. This mission led to the establishment of the book festival.
“Our main goal is to bring exposure and understanding of inclusion to different communities,” Hyde said. “We realized that we didn’t know of any diverse book festivals that included big, published writers as well as independent writers and books in different languages. We wanted the book content to reflect the population that we see these days.”
The festival celebrates books in many different languages, such as Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, Chinese, and Korean. Providing a space for children to access literature in many languages, not just English, was a big motivator in Hyde’s work.
“I’m a mom of two young children, and I was inspired because I started looking for multicultural books to read to my children, and I realized there was a lack of celebration for this literature, and even a lack of books in general,” Hyde explained. “I thought it would be great to have a space to bring out diverse authors and readers, building a community for everybody to come together in a physical sense. We want to have that platform for everybody to feel welcome.”
The journey of putting together this event wasn’t easy—Hyde and her team ran into various unexpected troubles and put in countless hours of work to accomplish the feat. At one point, it looked as though the festival wouldn’t be able to move forward, but Hyde was determined to see things through, even with only half of their team.
“I said we’re going to do this no matter what, even if it’s on a smaller scale,” Hyde shared. “Whatever it takes, I’m going to make it happen.” The efforts were not made in vain—in its first year, the festival was a huge hit with its visitors, and the city of West Hollywood began giving the nonprofit more support in its second year.
“We have pretty much doubled the size of the festival every year that we’ve done it,” Hyde said proudly. “This is our fourth year, so we’re expecting a great turnout and a lot of fun and learning as a community that celebrates diversity and the love of books.”
Aside from the above schedule, Hyde mentioned that the festival naturally leads to inspiring interactions and opportunities to learn from other people.
“In our second festival, some attendees were talking to the Boys and Girls Club, and they wound up hitting it off,” Hyde shared. “They wound up writing a book together. There’s a lot of cool, real-life, in-person inspirations and connections.”
There is no shortage of interactive opportunities available at the festival, including a new project that will eventually be presented to the city of West Hollywood.
“One of our vendors, who is an illustrator, drew a special picture of the West Hollywood Park with four diverse children reading books,” Hyde explained. “All around the photo, we had a lot of our book authors give us a short phrase in different languages. We have these on t-shirts, and we are also going to have the artwork on a big canvas so attendees can go and write down their own words around the actual illustration.”
Starting the conversation on a diverse society begins early when it comes to children, and literature provides a unique opportunity to teach this to today’s youth.
“When you’re an infant, one of the first chances for you to understand the world is when you’re sitting on the lap of your mom or dad or caretaker to read a book,” she said. “You start to imagine the world from one of the first books you read, and you understand language from one of the first languages you read in that book. So it is important for us to expose them to different things on that first page. Cultural inclusion and understanding of diversity start from the very beginning.”
In the future, Hyde hopes that opportunities such as the LAKBF will continue to create a space and an educational platform for all youth.
“Books are one of the first places for children to be exposed to the world,” Hyde said. “Our main goal is to keep on building a positive and inclusive world for our future generation.”
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