2009 Guadalajara book festival to spotlight L.A. artists, authors -- but who will go?

The Summer Olympics are over, but L.A. arts organizations could be in a sprinter’s stance Sept. 23, when the starter’s gun sounds in a competition for $935,000 in federal arts-grant money. The winners will stamp an Angeleno imprint on next year’s annual International Book Fair in Guadalajara. The fair, billed as the world’s largest event for Spanish-language publishers, annually invites a country, state or region to create and program a special pavilion as guest of honor. L.A. is the first municipality ever chosen. The National Endowment for the Arts is footing the $1.6-million bill — with $800,000 budgeted for visual- and performing-arts grants, $135,000 for authors’ honorariums and $300,000 to design and build an L.A. pavilion that will be open throughout the event, from Nov. 28 to Dec. 6, 2009.
Joe Smoke, grants director for L.A.’s Cultural Affairs Department, says the money will fund a smorgasbord of arts and literature (and not just in Spanish), indicating the quality and diversity of L.A.’s regional scene. Applications for visual- and performing-arts organizations will be posted on the Cultural Affairs website; the NEA will make a list of writers to be considered, and a literary jury will pick 40 to 60 to give readings and serve on discussion panels at the book festival. For the purposes of these picks, Smoke says, the definition of that hard-to-define entity, the Los Angeles artist or writer, is “people with a history of presenting work in Los Angeles or on the topic of Los Angeles, not just headquartered in Los Angeles.”

-- Mike Boehm