Fire Relief Reading

Join LARB at Zebulon on February 24 at 7 p.m. for a Fire Relief Benefit in support of the Pasadena Community Job Center.

Los Angeles is a different city than it was six weeks ago. In early January 2025, wildfires swept across our beloved city, displacing many members of our community and destroying homes, businesses, schools, parks, libraries, and so much more. Rebuilding is going to take a collective effort, and it will require sustained attention and resource direction towards those most affected.

In that spirit, on Monday, February 24 at 7 p.m., LARB is hosting a Fire Relief Reading in support of the Pasadena Community Job Center, an organization whose immediate response made them a community hub during the fires and whose consistent, continued support keeps them on frontlines of the wildfire response.

The event will feature readings from Rosecrans Baldwin, Joshuah Bearman, Maya Binyam, Sesshu Foster, Brittany Menjivar, Christina Catherine Martinez, and more. Inspired in part by Sesshu Foster's experience volunteering at the Pasadena Community Job Center in the immediate wake of the fires for LARB, written about here for LARB, all proceeds will benefit the work they do. Learn more about the Pasadena Community Job Center’s work here.

Finally, access LARB’s abbreviated resource list for artists and literary workers, including writers, here. The page also features pieces from LARB’s archive about our inimitable city.

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Rosecrans Baldwin is the bestselling author of Everything Now, winner of the California Book Award. Other books include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. His debut novel, You Lost Me There, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.

Joshuah Bearman is a non-fiction writer and film and TV producer in Los Angeles. He has written for Harper’s, Rolling Stone, Wired, GQ, McSweeney’s, The Believer, and is a contributor to This American Life. Several of his stories have been adapted for film and TV, including Argo, Little America, and The Big Cigar. He co-founded Epic Magazine, a narrative non-fiction publisher and production company. He has owed a book to Farrar, Strauss & Giroux for a very long time. It is partly about growing up in Altadena. 

Maya Binyam is the author of Hangman, which was named a 2024 National Book Foundation “5 under 35” honoree, received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize, the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, and the Dublin Literary Award. She is the recipient of the 2025 Bard Fiction Prize. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere.

Sesshu Foster's most recent books include City of the Future (Kaya Press), and ELADATL: The History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines (City Lights Books), a novel co-authored with Arturo Ernesto Romo. He is winner of the 2024 George Drury Smith Award from Beyond Baroque Literary Center.

Brittany Menjivar is an arts and culture journalist based in LA. In addition to contributing to the Los Angeles Review of Books, she has written for Coveteur, V Magazine, Document Journal, Artillery, and the Contemporary Art Review of Los Angeles, among other outlets. She is the author of poetry and prose collection Parasocialite and the co-founder of late-night literary reading series Car Crash Collective. She also works as a screenwriter and is currently developing two features about fringe ideologies. 

Christina Catherine Martinez is the author of the essay collection Aesthetical Relations from Hesse Presse. She is the recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and has been named a Comedian You Should Know by Vulture and TimeOutLA. She co-starred in FX/Hulu's late-night sketch series "Two Pink Doors,” served as a creative consultant for "The Eric Andre Show" and is a staff writer for the forthcoming animated series "Women Wearing Shoulder Pads," the first ever Spanish-language program on Adult Swim. She can be seen on Tim Heidecker's Office Hours Live, and starring in episode 4 of the PBS docu-series "United States of Comedy.” She has performed commissions for REDCAT, The Museum of Contemporary Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and is a regular fixture of the SXSW Comedy Festival in Austin, Texas. Her 2024 comedy special How to Bake a Cake in the Digital Age was named “A Special You Should Definitely Watch” by New York Magazine.