On the morning of January 8, as wildfires raged throughout Southern California, killing thirty, Joyce Cooper, director of branch library services for the Los Angeles Public Library, awoke to discover that the branch in Pacific Palisades had been destroyed. Cooper says the Palisades Branch Library will be rebuilt, though she estimates it will take up to five years. About twenty slate tiles were recovered from the exterior, and she hopes they will be incorporated into the new design. Otherwise nothing except a patio, a few trees, and a hardy wisteria vine remain on the site.
A chimney stands above the remains of a building in Altadena, behind a Little Free Library. (Credit: Lester Graves Lennon)
The loss, Cooper says, extends well beyond the 11,500 square feet of materials, including thousands of books, and the building that housed them. The library, one of seventy-two branches in the system, was an anchor in the community, a place to see friendly faces while accessing Wi-Fi, databases, and other resources. It was also a place for locals to gather with friends or hold meetings—a precious resource in the months after the fires. “All their civic gathering places are gone,” she says.
More than half a year following the fires, the extent of the devastation is still being measured. Innumerable individual archives were likely lost too. The personal library of the author and critic Gary Indiana, who died last October, had been sent from his home in New York City to a house in Altadena, where it would become the core library of a new residency. The books arrived at the house on January 7; within hours, the house burned.
The Residency Project, an artists and writers residency in Pasadena that facilitates work by underrepresented creatives at the nexus of art, environmentalism, and intersectional justice, was spared from the fire but sustained damage from the high winds, smoke, and ash, so its Winter/Spring 2025 residency was canceled. Founder and director Sarah Umles is working on a cultural preservation project called Other People’s Artworks (and Everything Else They Owned), archiving stories and artworks of those displaced by the Eaton Fire.
The literary community, both local and national, stepped up to help with relief efforts following the fires. Some focused on restoring burned and damaged school and home libraries. L.A. authors Veronica Bane and Julia Fierro, as well as thirteen-year-old Rohan Mukhopadhyay, organized book drives and donations. Bane, a high school English teacher and author of the YA thriller Difficult Girls (Delacorte Press, 2025), put out a call on social media and received donations from authors, publishers, influencers, bookstores, and others as far away as Australia. She has facilitated the donation of more than fifteen thousand books to schools in Altadena and Pacific Palisades. Fierro, founder of Sackett Street Writers, also organized the donation of about fifteen thousand books, with a focus on adult readers.
Fierro acknowledges that not everyone would see books as essential when so many lost homes, “but for the right people, it was so important,” she says. “Your home library is like a treasure, a museum of your reading life.”
Others worked to provide basic supplies to displaced residents and help them feel a sense of normalcy in a catastrophic situation. The Book Industry Charitable Foundation, which supports bookstore and comic store owners in times of need, secured $45,000 in matching donations to aid booksellers impacted by the fire. Independent comics publisher Mad Cave Studios of Miami, Florida, created a comics anthology, LA Strong, with all proceeds supporting creators affected by the fires.
Octavia’s Bookshelf, a bookstore in Pasadena, provided supplies to those in need and held a weekly support meeting, led by a psychologist from the L.A. County Department of Mental Health, to help survivors cope in the aftermath. It also cohosted a fund-raiser in February with Clockshop, a Los Angeles arts and culture nonprofit. The event raised money for the Altadena Library Foundation and L.A. County Library Foundation’s partnership campaign, L.A. Wildfires: Connected Wellness, which offers books, school supplies, mobile hotspots, and other necessities to those in need.
Sehba Sarwar, poet laureate for community events for the Altadena libraries, had a group reading already planned at Octavia’s Bookshelf for February 25; after the fires it became a fund-raiser for the Altadena Library Foundation’s fire relief efforts. Sarwar leads high school programs for the Pasadena Educational Foundation, and she asked students who lost their homes to share a list of five books they missed. Using funds from the foundation, she purchased those books for the students.
She is also planning to run poetry workshops to help the local population process the enormity of the loss. But in a traumatized community, and with so much work to be done, she has struggled to focus her energies.
“When COVID happened, everybody could relate because the same experience was happening globally, but this is such a small space where there has been so much loss,” she says. “It’s been hard to get grounded to figure out what to do.”
Lester Graves Lennon, Altadena’s other 2024–2026 poet laureate who is also editor in chief of the Altadena Poetry Review, reopened the submission period for the 2025 anthology to welcome poems by Californians in response to the wildfires, along with photos of the fires and the devastation. The publication will be available for free online beginning in August.
“One thing that gives me hope is the quality of the poetry you see coming out of this,” Lennon says. “Dealing with loss in a creative way is a positive way, and there’s certainly hope in that.”
Jonathan Vatner is the author of The Bridesmaids Union (St. Martin’s Press, 2022) and Carnegie Hill (Thomas Dunne Books, 2019).
