Photos from the 2026 L.A. Times Festival of Books at USC

Sophia Kercher is a senior editor for the entertainment and features sections at the Los Angeles Times. She oversees books and wellness. She has been writing and editing stories about L.A. for over a decade. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Variety, Vogue, Vulture, Elle, Women’s Health, Los Angeles Magazine and LAist, among other publications. Previously, she was the founding editor of Los Angeleno, a local digital arts and culture publication, and served as a senior editor at Pasadena Magazine. As a culture reporter, she’s covered opera in Tijuana, pawnshops that hawk Oscars, the high desert’s mother of dragon sounds, and performance art aerobics classes. She always reads two books at once.