Pasadena Students Write the Fire, Write the Fear

The students know what happened. Some of them watched it from their windows. Others came back to find their neighborhoods altered beyond recognition. Now, four of them are writing about it — and this weekend they’ll read that writing aloud.

Adhalia Rivera, Lesley Chee, Mariah Tillman, and Julia Martinez — members of the Pasadena Unified School District’s student-run ThinkTank program — will present original literary work about the Eaton Fire, ICE enforcement, and community life, at LitFest in the Dena 2026, the free two-day literary festival returning to Pasadena Presbyterian Church on Friday, May 1, and Saturday, May 2. Their session, titled “Pieces of Us: PUSD Students on Fire, ICE, and Life,” is one of two student programs anchoring a broader lineup organized by the Pasadena nonprofit Light Bringer Project. Copies of the ThinkTank’s fifth annual anthology, “The Learning Curve: A Five Year Anthology,” will be available at the festival’s pop-up bookstore, according to the event press release.

The festival returns for the second year to Pasadena Presbyterian Church, 585 E. Colorado Blvd. Its traditional home — the Mountain View Mausoleum in Altadena — has been occupied by Army Corps of Engineers fire recovery operations since the January 2025 Eaton Fire. The theme for 2026 is “Books That Changed the Public Narrative,” and the student session fits that frame: these are teenagers putting local events into literary form before they’ve fully receded into history.

A second student program, “Diasporan Witness and Wonder: 8th Graders Respond,” will feature students from St. Gregory Hovsepian School in Pasadena offering poetic recitations that honor minority poets and diasporan writers. The session is curated by Shahé Mankerian, the school’s principal and an award-winning poet, and will include Armenian musical interludes performed by Vatché Mankerian, according to the press release.

Elsewhere on the program, Glendale Poet Laureate Raffi Wartanian — whose San Gabriel Valley Phoenix Poets project, funded by a 2025 Academy of American Poets fellowship, uses poetry to support Eaton Fire recovery — will host a community poetics table where attendees can contribute to an ongoing project of remembrance and expression. Past and present Altadena Poets Laureate, including Sehba Sarwar, Thelma Reyna, and Carla Sameth, will read together in a session titled “Celebrating Altadena with Altadena Poets Laureate.”

The broader two-day program includes panels on Latine literature (with a reading from Red Hen Press and the University of Notre Dame’s Letras Latinas initiative), immigration and literature, crime fiction, fantasy writing, queer spirituality in speculative fiction, and young adult literature. A panel titled “Speaking Truth to Power” will feature writers Daniel Olivas, Lisa Alvarez, Adolfo Guzman-Lopez, and Pedro Iniguez examining anti-immigrant sentiment through the written word, moderated by Thomas E. Backer, PhD. Olivas lives in Pasadena and works as a California Department of Justice attorney, according to Altadena Now.

Light Bringer Project, founded in Pasadena in 1990, produces the festival alongside the literary journal Locavore Lit LA. The festival is free, open to the public, and requires no advance registration.

IF YOU GO

LitFest in the Dena 2026 returns to Pasadena Presbyterian Church, 585 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, for two days of free literary programming. The festival runs Friday, May 1 from 6 to 9 p.m. and Saturday, May 2 from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Admission is free and no registration is required. Food, tea samples, coffee, and a pop-up bookstore will be on site. The full schedule of events is available at www.litfestinthedena.org/schedule2026. For more information, contact Natalie Lydick at (626) 228-4220 or litfestinthedena@gmail.com.