Booknotes: TCN staffer to read at book festival

Cindy Frazier, city editor of the Laguna Beach Coastline Pilot, the Daily Pilot’s sister paper, will read a sample of her writing during the Saturday morning portion of the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at USC.

In an email to colleagues this week, Frazier announced that she has been invited to take part in “Dimestories,” a three-minute prose reading event, scheduled for 11 a.m. at the festival’s Etc. Stage.

“The piece, ‘Bleeding Hearts,’ was voted number one of all the pieces presented during the run up to the festival, so I’m pretty stoked about it,” she said in her email.

Cindy’s colleagues and the staff at the Times Community News group in Orange County wish her the best of luck Saturday.

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Festival-bound authors

In related news, at least three other writers with Orange County ties — T. Jefferson Parker, Mary Castillo and Barbara DeMarco-Barrett — will appear during the two-day LAT Festival of Books.

Parker, a former Daily Pilot reporter who has authored crime novels, including “Laguna Heat,” will take part in a panel on crime fiction at 2 p.m. Saturday at the Seeley G. Mudd venue at USC (SGM 124).

Castillo — a women’s fiction writer, Newport Beach resident, and class of 1996 graduate at USC who formerly reported for the TCN papers in Orange County — will sign copies of her book “Switchcraft,” from 3 to 4 p.m. Saturday, at the USC Alumni Assn. Booth in Alumni Park.

On Sunday afternoon, DeMarco-Barrett will moderate a fiction panel at the festival, “Destinations and Detours.” The 12:30 p.m. event at Taper Hall (THH 101) will feature writers Karl Taro Greenfield, Pam Houston and Tara Ison.

DeMarco-Barrett hosts the series of “Pen on Fire” writers salons at Scape Gallery in Corona del Mar. She also produces and hosts the “Writers on Writing” program on KUCI radio, which is broadcast out of UC Irvine.

Apart from their upcoming appearance at the Festival of Books, Parker, Castillo and DeMarco-Barrett are connected to one another through “Orange County Noir,” a 2010 collection of short stories in the crime writing genre. Castillo and DeMarco-Barrett each penned stories for the book, and Parker wrote its foreword.

For more information about the festival, visit events.latimes.com/festivalofbooks.

—Imran Vittachi