The Kern County Public Library wraps up its 2007 Adult Summer Reading Program, "Summer Sleuthing," with a panel of three SoCal women mystery novelists who all set their books in the greater LA area.  You can check out their websites for more about their backgrounds, books, and samples of their writing: Denise Hamilton, Patricia Smiley, and Naomi Hirahara.  All three are members of Sisters in Crime LA.

An interview with Naomi Hirahara, a 2007 Edgar Award winner, was published in TBC's Eye Street yesterday, and you can find audio of the full interview on Bakersfield.com.  The interview, and her coming to read in Bakersfield, has gotten me all nostalgic, because, many moons ago, she took a chance on a teenaged wannabe writer and gave him a shot and an audience.  Naomi was the editor of the English-language section of the Rafu Shimpo, Los Angeles' oldest Japanese American newspaper, and I was a high school student entering her youth short story contest.  She liked what she read, I guess, because she asked me to become a columnist.  Over the next two years, spanning the end of high school and the beginning of college, I wrote a column from the perspective of the biracial young adult that I was, a couple demographics that the paper, with its aging audience, desperately wanted to tap into.  I don't know if I helped at all on that count, but I do know that Naomi gave me valuable experience as a published writer that I couldn't have gotten elsewhere, back in the pre-blog/self-publishing era.

My daughter's naptime permitting, I can't wait to go hear her read.  The panel, by the way, is at Beale Memorial Library tomorrow, Saturday July 28, from 2 to 4 p.m.

--Jason Sperber