The Las Vegas Book Festival Turns 25 Today — and Downtown Is the Venue

LAS VEGAS

There is a version of Las Vegas Saturday that starts with a tailgate and ends under stadium lights, and you can read about that elsewhere on this site. Then there is the other Las Vegas Saturday, the one happening right now in a 90-year-old schoolhouse downtown, where the biggest crowd of readers in Nevada is spending the day with the people who write the books. The Las Vegas Book Festival turns 25 today, and if you have never been, this is the year to fix that — it is free, it runs until 5 p.m., and it is about a ten-minute walk from Fremont Street.

The basics first, because this is a today story: the festival runs Saturday, October 17, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Historic Fifth Street School, 401 S. Fourth St. Admission is free, it is open to the public, and it is genuinely all-ages — there is a full children's program alongside the grown-up panels. Nevada Humanities founded the festival in 2002 and produces it every year with the City of Las Vegas. Twenty-five years in, it is Nevada's largest literary event, and it is not particularly close.

The headliners

This year's featured authors cover the full shelf. Tony Weaver Jr. brings the graphic-novel and young-readers energy. Natalie Baszile, whose "Queen Sugar" became a cultural landmark, anchors the literary fiction side. Ayana Gray, Clarence A. Haynes, Kimberly Lemming, Meghan Le Fay, Vanessa L. Torres and Yasmin Angoe carry the speculative banner — fantasy, science fiction and the supernatural are not a side room at this festival, they are a main stage. And for the hometown crowd, there is Jon Ralston, who has covered Nevada politics longer and closer than almost anyone, arriving with a biography of the man who defined it.

The conversation everybody will be talking about Monday

The marquee session for Nevada readers pairs Ralston with local reporter and political analyst Steve Sebelius, who interviews him about "The Game Changer: How Harry Reid Remade the Rules and Showed Democrats How to Fight." Reid's shadow still covers Nevada politics — the machine he built, the fights he picked, the rules he rewrote — and Ralston spent decades watching it happen from the front row. Sebelius knows the same territory from the columnist's chair. Expect a room full of people who either worked for Reid, covered Reid, or ran against Reid's operation, listening to two insiders compare notes. Get there early; this is the panel most likely to run out of chairs.

Legends, myths and aliens, too

The panel with the best title of the day is "Legends, Myths and Aliens Too!," which puts Gray, Haynes, Lemming, Le Fay, Torres and Angoe on one stage to talk supernatural, fantasy and science-fiction storytelling. It is a smart piece of programming: six writers whose books pull from folklore, myth and the uncanny, comparing how they build worlds that readers believe in. If your reading life runs more toward dragons and hauntings than campaign memoirs, this is your headline act — and the signing line afterward, where headline authors' books are on sale and authors sign following their panels, is where the festival turns into a meet-and-greet.

The Hispanic Heritage programming is equally strong this year. "Identidad Literaria y Comunidad Hispana" brings together Mapy Durán, Augusto Lemus Martinez, Ere González and Rosa Iñigo for a conversation about literary identity and community. "Homelands: Discourses on Parenthood, Indigeneity, and Belonging," moderated by Dr. Fátima Suárez, takes on family and belonging from the other direction. Both panels reflect what the festival has become over 25 years: not a generic book fair that happens to sit in Las Vegas, but a program that sounds like the city actually sounds.

How to do the day

The festival rewards wandering. Between the marquee panels there are readings, workshops and poetry sessions running across the school's classrooms and courtyard, exhibitors and vendors selling books and literary goods, and food trucks handling lunch. The Spark! Youth Poetry Competition is the day's emotional peak for a lot of regulars — young poets performing their own work with a confidence that tends to upstage the professionals. The children's activities run throughout, which makes this one of the rare downtown events where bringing kids is the plan rather than the compromise.

And spare a look for the building itself. The Fifth Street School is Spanish Revival, built in 1936, all arches and tile and courtyard shade — the kind of architecture Las Vegas mostly demolished and this one survived. A book festival in a rescued 1936 schoolhouse a few blocks from the Fremont Street canopy is the most un-Vegas Vegas thing downtown does all year, right up until you realize a city that reinvents itself this often probably needs a day devoted to the written word more than most.

Twenty-five years is a long run for any festival, and an unlikely one for a literary festival in a town whose brand is everything except quiet reading. It works because it was never a costume the city put on — Nevada Humanities built it in 2002, the city partnered in, and generations of local readers, teachers, librarians and kids with library cards made it theirs. Doors are open now. It ends at 5. Bring a tote bag; you will fill it. For more of what's on in town this weekend, see the Previously news front — and if football is your Saturday, our Bills Mafia weekend story has Sunday covered.