By Brian Dunlap

It’s been five years since “Dryland: A Literary Journal Born in South Central Los Angeles,” published its first issue. Since Founding Editor-in-Chief, Viva Padilla, set out to publish “the best poetry, fiction, and nonfiction of the Los Angeles literary underground, and to prioritizing Black and POC artists, writers, and poets,” as it states on the journal’s website.

In the five years since, Padilla has published over 300 voices from all over the world. Some include Bell Gardens’ own Vikie Vértiz, South Central native Nikolai Garcia, Bay Area poet Tongo Eisen-Martin and Syrian born professor and poet Mohja Kahf. Dryland has become “a self-sustaining publication that regularly circulates a 500 print run between community spaces, universities, and cultural institutions alike and across cities including Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Havana, Cuba.”

And now, coinciding with Dryland’s fifth anniversary and the release of their 10th issue, they’ve launched the literary project “We Been Here.” With community support from PEN America, “We Been Here,” makes “great poetry, fiction and nonfiction books a little more accessible by way of affordability to our Black, Brown, and POC community,” Dryland stated in a recent Facebook post. New books that usually cost $15 or more, you can now buy in their shop for $5 with free shipping. They update their titles daily. Taking one look at the contents in Dryland’s store, find they curate an inventory of mostly powerful POC writers, including Sandra Cisneros, Claudia Rankine, and Alex Espinoza.

Dryland has only existed for five years, and has grown from a simple online journal publishing the marginalized voices of L.Á. to a print journal with a circulation well beyond the city, and its scope and mission is ever expanding.