By Brian Dunlap
2021 has come to an end. This means it’s time for Los Angeles Literature’s annual list: “Los Ángeles Writers Publish” 2021 edition.
In the last year, the world has reopened in many ways, thanks in large part to the Covid- 19 vaccine. Now that the public can again hang out with friends and were able to visit family for Thanksgiving, Los Ángeles’ literary community has slowly re-emerged to connect in person at open mics, readings, book releases and the first annual Sims Library of Poetry Bookfair, held in November. And L.Á. writers continue to publish.
Even though 2021 was better than 2020, with students back to in-person instruction and children and teens now able to be vaccinated, COVID continues to mutate into new, possibly deadly, strains that vaccines may not protect us against and are yet another cause for concern for the unvaxed. The pandemic seemingly won’t go away.
However, Los Ángeles writers continued to write, using literature as a lifeline, as selfcare, publishing short pieces in journals and magazines, anthologies and publishing or announcing the upcoming publication of a poetry collection, novel, story collection or memoir.
Some writers wrote directly about Los Ángeles, as Mike Sonksen does in his piece “Reflecting on the National Day on Writing,” published in Cultural Daily. In the essay, Sonksen retells how, each year, he’s commemorated the National Day on Writing by hosting readings throughout L.Á., building community in the process, while celebrating, as he says, “a constellation of [mostly local] poets, writers, students and professors who tirelessly give themselves to promote writing and fellowship around the spoken and written word.”
Other writers like Alex Petunia, a nurse, used writing as selfcare to survive the pandemic and heal. As Petunia penned poems for her manuscript, tending my wild, published earlier this year by World Stage Press, she wrote about her journey to, as the World Stage Press website says, a “vibrant self-worth and deepening purpose.” Also, Diosa Xochiquetzalcóatl, who self-published her poetry collection A Church of My Own this year, wrote similar types of poems that are meant to heal herself, her readers and chronical her healing journey. As she says in the book’s dedication, these poems are shaped by “each and every person who, through their stories and shared experiences, brought many-a-life lessons—lessons I hope to pass on to…my readers.”
Writers such as Jose Hernandez-Díaz, Long Beach poet Nancy Lyneé Woo, Maylin Tu, Donna Spruijt-Metz and Santana author and cultural activist Sarah Rafael Garcia, among many others, also published poems and prose on a wide range of topics, both similar and varied, in journals, magazines, cultural/literary websites and even news outlets, throughout the year. Such topics include: family, loss/death, political/current times and L.A. as subject, often through the lens of the under told stories of its communities and people of color.
And other local writers such as Natashia Deón, Cassandra Lane and Estella González, among others, published novels, story collections and memoirs about family/family history, generational trauma, community, working class Latinx and even speculative fiction, and more. Plus, local literary presses continued to publish local authors, such as: Moon Tide Press, World Stage Press, Los Nietos Press, Golden Foothills Press, Jamii Publishing, Not A Cult, the micro press HINCHES, Writ Large/The Accomplices, Unnamed and What Books.
Plus, a number of local writers were nominated/finalist for, or won awards, such as: Thelma T. Reyna won two Silver Medals at the International Latino Book Awards for her book When the Virus Came Calling in the categories, The Raul Yzaguirre Best Political/Current Affairs Book and Best Poetry Anthology Book; Pushcart Prize nominations for Jose Hernandez Diaz’s poem “The Skeleton and the City,” published in The AWL, Kate Maruyama’s short story “Café Drago” in The Cochella Review, Linda Reardon Neal’s poem “The New Amazon,” in Spectrum 25, Joshua Corwin’s “Effervescent Infinity,” in Spectrum 25, Corrine Marie Rodriguez-Ramirez’s poem “My Father Wanted A Son,” in Spectrum 26, Dean Okamura’s poem “Created,” in Spectrum 28, and Shonda Buchanan’s poem “Interview About the South and Me (for Nina Simone),” and was also a Mississippi Review Prize finalist in Poetry; Joshua Corwin also won the 2021 Spillwords Press Award For Poetry Collection; Victoria Chang won the PEN Voelcker Award For Poetry Collection for her book Obit; and Douglas Kearney, raised in Altadena and former Cal Arts professor, his poetry collection Sho was a Finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry.
With so many writers of color in L.Á. publishing, they continue to create a body of literature that captures their specific versions of these stories and themes of family, trauma, political/current times, etc., shaped in part from their life experiences living in Los Ángeles/SoCal. Seen more and more over the years in Los Ángeles literature and in the literary community, writers like Vickie Vértiz, Ryka Aoki, poet and owner of literary/arts space Re/Arte, Viva Padilla and Los Ángeles Poet Laureate Lynne Thompson, their work aids in creating a comprehensive understanding of who Los Ángeles/SoCal is and who makes up the region as individuals.
In the past year, literature continues to be used as a way to connect.
Below, is my comprehensive list of where Los Ángeles writers published in 2021, first with the list of journal, magazine and online publications, followed by the list of book publications and book announcements for 2022. If I’ve missed a publication, I apologize.
Published Short Pieces
Noel Alumit (Story Quarterly), Lisa Alvarez (Air/Light), Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo (Whisky Tit, Santa Fe Writers Project), Michelle Bitting (Air/Light), John Brantingham (Five South, Anti-Heroin Chic, Tears in the Face, Cultural Weekly/Daily, Talking River Review, The Westchester Review), Cynthia Alessandra Briano (Cultural Daily), Lynne Bronstein (Al-Khemia Poetica), F. Douglas Brown (Bozalta), Don Kingfisher Campbell (Life and Legends, Spectrum 29), Victoria Chang (Poem-a-Day, Cherry Tree), Jackie Chou (Spectrum online edition, Al-Khemia Poetica, Spectrum 29), Lisbeth Coiman (Women Who Submit), Beverly M. Collins (Al-Khemia Poetica, Spectrum 29), Joshua Corwin (Spectrum 25, Spillwords Press), Bill Cushing (Cultural Weekly, Spectrum 29), Jose Hernandez Diaz (Sycamore Review, Poem-a-Day, Crazyhorse, Bennington Review, Sundog Lit, Passengers, Pacifica Literary Review, Diode, Puerto del Sol, Indianapolis Review, Pithead Chapel, The Laurel Review, Barrio Panther, Poem-a-Day, The AWAL), Marvinlouis Dorsey (Spectrum online edition), Brian Dunlap (Tropics of Meta, Meta Art Gallery poem) Judith Freeman (Air/Light), Sara Rafael Garcia (Hyperallergic), GT Foster (Spectrum online edition, Spectrum 29), liz gonzález (Air/Light, Interlitq), Natalie J. Graham (Cultural Daily), Myriam Gurba (Alta, National Catholic Reporter Online, Luz Collective, Tasteful Rude) Raquel Gutiérrez (Air/Light), Naomi Hirahara (Air/Light), Tanya Ko Hong (AROHO), Gerda Govine Ituarte (Spectrum 29), Erin Aubrey Kaplan (Poltico, New York Times), Diane Lefer (Air/Light), Christian Lozada (Drunk Monkeys), Kate Maruyama (The Cochella Review, Cultural Daily), Linda Reardon Neal (Spectrum 25, Cultural Weekly/Daily), Dean Okamura (Spectrum 28), Marcus Omari (Cultural Daily), Angela Peñaredondo (Poem-a-Day), Matt Sedillo (Life in Quarantine: Witnessing Global Pandemic, Public Intellectuals), Mike Sonksen (KCET, Cultural Weekly/Daily, LA Parent, Anvil Tongue Books, LAist, Bozalta), Donna Spruijt-Metz (Tahoma Literary Review, EcoTheo Review), Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera (Emerge Literary Journal, The Cochella Review), Thelma T. Reyna (Spectrum 29), Corrine Marie Rodriguez-Ramirez (Spectrum 26, Spectrum 29), Steven Reigns (Cultural Daily), Mark Haskell Smith (Air/Light), Carl Stilwell (Spectrum online edition, Spectrum 29), Jervey Tervalon (LARB), Lynne Thompson (Rattle, Rust & Moth, Poem-a-Day), Maylin Tu (LAist, dot.LA, Let’s Eat Cake, Mother Untitled, Tasteful Rude), David L. Ulin (Alta Online, Los Angeles Times, Interlitq), Alexandria Umlas (Cultural Weekly/Daily), Amy Uyematsu (Rigorous, Nikkei Uncovered/Discover Nikkei), Vickie Vértiz (Vicious Ladies), Diana Wagman (Air/Light), Aruni Wijesinghe (Cultural Daily), Terry Wolverton (Cultural Weekly/Daily), Nancy Lyneé Woo (Oxford Magazine, Kosmos, Sweet Lit), Gail Wronsky (Air/Light), Désirée Zamarano (Air/Light)
Published and Forthcoming Books 2021-2022
History, Mystery, and Loving Memories (Los Nietos Press)—Yolanda Yudico Adele
In author Yolanda Adele’s story collection History, Mystery, and Loving Memories, Adele illuminates the world of a “latch-key kid” whose frequent companion after school was only her imagination in the stories “The House on New Jersey Street” and “Gypsies Stole My Heart.” These stories are set in East L.Á. and the arch of Adele’s life, tracks the cultural changes of American society. Her stories “An Inflatable Idea” and “Mi Tía Bruja” underscore her perspective of love, humor, and optimism. At the same time, she does not shy away from the painful memories of a sometimes-absent father and a hard-working mother who ate dinner separately in front of the TV. In a story of profound love, “The Santa in My Life,” she shares an underlying hurt, and decades later its resolution in, “Tick, Tick, Tick.”
Light From Uncommon Stars (Tor Books)—Ryka Aoki
Shizuka Satomi made a deal with the devil: to escape damnation, she must entice seven other violin prodigies to trade their souls for success. She has already delivered six.
When Katrina Nguyen, a young transgender runaway, catches Shizuka’s ear with her wild talent, Shizuka can almost feel the curse lifting. She’s found her final candidate.
But in a donut shop off a bustling highway in the San Gabriel Valley, Shizuka meets Lan Tran, retired starship captain, interstellar refugee, and mother of four. Shizuka doesn’t have time for crushes or coffee dates, what with her very soul on the line, but Lan’s kind smile and eyes like stars might just redefine a soul’s worth. And maybe something as small as a warm donut is powerful enough to break a curse as vast as the California coastline.
Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief (Milkweed Editions)—Victoria Chang
A collection of literary letters and mementos on the art of remembering across generations.
For poet Victoria Chang, memory “isn’t something that blooms, but something that bleeds internally.” It is willed, summoned, and dragged to the surface. The remembrances in this collection of letters are founded in the fragments of stories her mother shared reluctantly, and the silences of her father, who first would not and then could not share more. They are whittled and sculpted from an archive of family relics: a marriage license, a letter, a visa petition, a photograph. And, just as often, they are built on the questions that can no longer be answered.
In carefully crafted missives on trauma and loss, on being American and Chinese, Victoria Chang shows how grief can ignite a longing to know yourself.
Speaking Con Su Sombra(Alegria Publishing)–Adrian Ernesto Cepeda
Speaking con Su Sombra is a collection of poemas written for and inspired by mi Mami who passed away in 2017. The poems in this collection are about the universality of mourning. Speaking is an invitation to those who have lost loved ones during this past year. Sombra is a living ode as I honor Mi Mami’s life, her passing, her inspiration, her guidance, and the gift of her legacy within the poems in this collection. As I remember the memoria of mi Mami, I am hoping these poemas can also honor those who have lost loved ones in their familias.
Uprising/Alzamiento (Finishing Line Press)–Lisbeth Coiman
Weaving history, current events, and personal narrative, Lisbeth Coiman takes us on an exploration of what it means to rise up, as a Venezuelan both within the country and from afar, as an immigrant in new lands, and as a woman in patriarchal societies.
Inside Wildsam’s Joshua Tree: Where Two Deserts Meet, the reader finds park stories from respected writers such as desert native Ruth Noland, past and present; a detailed road trip plan and profiles to base camp towns; interviews with artists, historians, biologists and restaurant owners; delightful miscellany from the archives, selective recommendations about authentic Joshua Tree experiences and a deep-dive into how to best explore the national park.
The Dark Hours (Little Brown)—Michael Connelly
There’s chaos in Hollywood at the end of the New Year’s Eve countdown. Working her graveyard shift, LAPD detective Renée Ballard waits out the traditional rain of lead as hundreds of revelers shoot their guns into the air. Only minutes after midnight, Ballard is called to a scene where a hardworking auto shop owner has been fatally hit by a bullet in the middle of a crowded street party.
Ballard quickly concludes that the deadly bullet could not have fallen from the sky and that it is linked to another unsolved murder–a case at one time worked by Detective Harry Bosch. At the same time, Ballard hunts a fiendish pair of serial rapists, the Midnight Men, who have been terrorizing women and leaving no trace.
Determined to solve both cases, Ballard feels like she is constantly running uphill in a police department indelibly changed by the pandemic and recent social unrest. It is a department so hampered by inertia and low morale that Ballard must go outside to the one detective she can count on: Harry Bosch. But as the two inexorable detectives work together to find out where old and new cases intersect, they must constantly look over their shoulders. The brutal predators they are tracking are ready to kill to keep their secrets hidden.
And Haunt The World (Ghost City Press)—Flower Conroy & Dana Spruijt-Metz
This micro-chapbook is a part of the 2021 Ghost City Press Summer Micro-Chap Series. It’s in PDF form and consists of 18 pages of poetry.
Chasing Darkness (Pocket Books)—Robert Crais
It’s fire season, and the hills of Los Angeles are burning. When police and fire department personnel rush door to door in a frenzied evacuation effort, they discover a week-old corpse of an apparent suicide. But the gunshot victim is less gruesome than what they find in his lap: a photo album of seven brutally murdered young women–one per year, for seven years. And when the suicide victim is identified as a former suspect in one of the murders, the news turns Elvis Cole’s world upside down.
Three years earlier, Lionel Byrd was brought to trial for the murder of a female prostitute named Yvonne Bennett. A taped confession coerced by the police inspired a prominent defense attorney to take Byrd’s case, and Elvis Cole was hired to investigate. It was Cole’s eleventh-hour discovery of an exculpatory videotape that allowed Lionel Byrd to walk free. Elvis was hailed as a hero.
But the discovery of the death album in Byrd’s lap now brands Elvis an unwitting accomplice to murder. Captured in photographs that could have only been taken by the murderer, Yvonne Bennett was the fifth of seven victims–two more young women were killed when Byrd walked free. So Elvis can’t help but wonder–did he cause two more young women to lose their lives?
Shut out of the investigation by a special LAPD task force determined to close the case, Elvis Cole and Joe Pike desperately fight to uncover the truth about Byrd and his nightmare album of death.
Tlacuilix: Tongues In Quarantine! is the first book by Project 1521, a group of Southern California writers, scholars, and an artist. The book honors people who have endured family separations, colonialism, and institutional violence through cultural affirmation and various forms of resistance.
Project 1521 writers created new text in response to original artworks by Sandy Rodriguez and drew inspiration in the Florentine Codex; how its content echo the pain and resistance in today’s social justice movements. In 1576, the indigenous scribes and artists finishing the Florentine Codex sequestered to survive a raging plague. Project 1521 sequestered through the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. The writing in this book contains the writers’ lived experiences.
Roots of Redemption: You have No Right to Remain Silent (FlowerSong Press)—Iris De Anda
In this collection, Los Angeles poet Iris de Anda serves as witness to the range of travesties and tragedies resulting from the Trump Era and what came before and continues.
The Perishing (Counterpoint) by Natashia Deón
Natashia Deón’s The Perishing is part speculative fiction, part realism. Lou, a young Black woman, wakes up in an alley in 1930s Los Ángeles with no memory of how she got there or where she’s from. Taken in by a caring foster family, Lou dedicates herself to her education while trying to put her mysterious origins behind her. She’ll go on to become the first Black female journalist at the Los Angeles Times, but Lou’s extraordinary life is about to take an even more remarkable turn. When she befriends a firefighter at a downtown boxing gym, Lou is shocked to realize that though she has no memory of meeting him, she’s been drawing his face for years.
Forbidden Plums: Poems in Quarantine (Glass Lyre Press)—Peggy Dobreer
Lois P. Jones says of Peggy Dobreer’s new book: “When Dobreer comes to the poetry party, she brings her gypsy wagon with her, her vardo, lovingly carved from a life of élan. Dobreer wraps her lyric scarves around the reader’s psyche where one is drawn into the dance. And this dance is never stilted or predictable. It only asks the reader to meet its rhythms, the rock and sway, the tango-laced eroticism that threads Forbidden Plums. She works an almost cerebral mysticism into the lines as she tightropes our desires and reminds us that there is sustenance in longing. Like the ‘one bright flower in a crib of soft mud, like a solitary cloud wisping for miracles.’”
ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines (City Lights)—Sesshu Foster
In the early years of the twentieth-century, the use of airships known as dirigibles—some as large as one thousand feet long—was being promulgated in Southern California by a semi-clandestine lighter-than-air movement. Groups like the East LA Balloon Club and the Bessie Coleman Aero Club were hard at work to revolutionize travel, with an aim to literally lift oppressed people out of racism and poverty.
ELADATL tells the story of this little-known period of American air travel in a series of overlapping narratives told by key figures, accompanied by a number of historic photographs and recently discovered artifacts, with appendices provided to fill in the missing links. The story of the rise and fall of this ill-fated airship movement investigates its long-buried history, replete with heroes, villains, and moments of astonishing derring-do and terrifying disaster.
Written and presented as an “actual history of a fictional company,” this surrealist, experimental novel is a politicized fantastic fiction, a work of hybrid art-making distilled into an original literary form. Developed over a ten-year period of collaborations, community interventions, and staged performances, ELADATL is a furiously hilarious send-up of academic histories, mainstream narratives, and any traditional notions of the time-space continuum.
Trumpets In The Sky (Moon Tide Press)—Jerry Garcia (Forthcoming early 2022)
Trumpets In The Sky is Jerry Garcia’s second collection of poetry. Bland Spice said about the book on Facebook: “Back in the before times, Jerry Garcia and I sat across from each other (!) in a cafe (!) over the pages that would become this book. The publication date seemed so far away that it’s sort of hard to believe it’s almost here!”
Change Sings: A Children’s Anthem (Viking Books for Young Readers)—Amanda Gorman
In this stirring, much-anticipated picture book by presidential inaugural poet and activist Amanda Gorman, anything is possible when our voices join together. As a young girl leads a cast of characters on a musical journey, they learn that they have the power to make changes–big or small–in the world, in their communities, and in most importantly, in themselves.
Call Us What We Carry: Poems (Viking Books)—Amanda Gorman
In Call Us What We Carry, Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage. Harnessing the collective grief of a global pandemic, these poems shine a light on a moment of reckoning and reveal that Gorman has become our messenger from the past, our voice for the future.
In 2019, writers from Los Angeles’ Glass Table Collective, all over 60, gathered at AWP Portland to take up the idea of late-stage writing. What is it like to grow old as a writer, to face both the page and one’s final years in the same breath? Then the pandemic came. By turns searing, poignant, and downright funny, What Falls Away is Always brings together more than thirty writers of both prose and poetry to reflect on the experiences of aging and writing they share, along with the possibly more daunting question—what next?
These Toxic Things (Thomas & Mercer)—Rachel Howzell Hall
Mickie Lambert creates “digital scrapbooks” for clients, ensuring that precious souvenirs aren’t forgotten or lost. When her latest client, Nadia Denham, a curio shop owner, dies from an apparent suicide, Mickie honors the old woman’s last wish and begins curating her peculiar objets d’art. A music box, a hair clip, a key chain–twelve mementos in all that must have meant so much to Nadia, who collected them on her flea market scavenges across the country.
But these tokens mean a lot to someone else, too. Mickie has been receiving threatening messages to leave Nadia’s past alone.
It’s becoming a mystery Mickie is driven to solve. Who once owned these odd treasures? How did Nadia really come to possess them? Discovering the truth means crossing paths with a long-dormant serial killer and navigating the secrets of a sinister past. One that might, Mickie fears, be inescapably entwined with her own.
Speculative Los Angeles (Akashic Books)—Ed. Denise Hamilton
As an incubator of the future, Los Angeles has long mesmerized writers from Aldous Huxley to Octavia E. Butler. With its natural disasters, Hollywood artifice, staggering wealth and poverty, and urban sprawl, one can argue that Los Angeles is already so weird, surreal, irrational, and mythic that any fiction emerging from this place should be considered speculative. So, bestselling author Denise Hamilton commissioned fourteen stories (including one of her own) and did exactly that. In Speculative Los Angeles, some of the city’s most prophetic and diverse voices reimagine the metropolis in very different ways.
In these pages, you’ll encounter twenty-first-century changelings, dirigibles plying the suburban skies, black holes and jacaranda men lurking in deep suburbia, beachfront property in Century City, walled-off canyons and coastlines reserved for the wealthy, psychic death cults, robot nursemaids, and an alternate LA where Spanish land grants never gave way to urbanization.
Safe Arms: 20 Love & Erotic Poems (w/an Ooh Baby Baby moan) (FlowerSong Books)—Peter J. Harris
Nearing the century mark since 19 year-old Pablo Neruda penned his love poems, Harris honors the Chilean bard’s best-known work with twenty of his own poems of endearment and erotica that land safe in our arms at a time when love is needed more than ever. With Spanish translation by Chilean American poet and muralist Francisco Letelier.
Flower Grand First (Moon Tide Press)—Gustavo Hernandez
Gustavo Hernandez’s debut poetry collection, Flower Grand First, moves through the complex roads of immigration, sexuality, and loss. These poems are points plotted on maps both physical and emotional—the rural landscapes of Jalisco, the glimmering plains of memory, the busy cities of California, and the circular paths of grief. Hernandez’s stunning elegies float along a timeline spanning three decades, honoring family, recording a personal history, and revealing a vulnerable but resilient voice preoccupied with time, place, and what is left behind out of necessity.
Clark And Division (SOHO Crime)—Naomi Hirahara
Twenty-year-old Aki Ito and her parents have just been released from Manzanar, where they have been detained by the US government since the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, together with thousands of other Japanese Americans. The life in California the Itos were forced to leave behind is gone; instead, they are being resettled two thousand miles away in Chicago, where Aki’s older sister, Rose, was sent months earlier and moved to the new Japanese American neighborhood near Clark and Division streets. But on the eve of the Ito family’s reunion, Rose is killed by a subway train.
Aki, who worshipped her sister, is stunned. Officials are ruling Rose’s death a suicide. Aki cannot believe her perfect, polished, and optimistic sister would end her life. Her instinct tells her there is much more to the story, and she knows she is the only person who could ever learn the truth.
Smoke (Mulholland Books)—Joe Ide
Isaiah Quintabe is no longer IQ, the genius of East Long Beach; instead, he’s a man on the road and on the run, hiding in a small Northern California town when his room is broken into by a desperate young man on the trail of the state’s most prolific serial killer.
His old partner, Juanell Dodson, must go straight or lose his wife and child. His devil’s bargain? An internship at an LA advertising agency, where it turns out the rules of the street have simply been dressed in business casual, but where the aging company’s fortunes may well rest on their ability to attract a younger demographic. Dodson—”the hustler’s hustler”—just may be the right man for the job.
Ide is the crime writer’s crime writer, and he’s filled his best novel yet with desperate souls, courageous outcasts, an ex-stripper who’ll do anything to protect her son, and wild half-brothers who may be the very incarnation of evil.
Serpentine (Ballantine Books)—Jonathan Kellerman
LAPD homicide lieutenant Milo Sturgis is a master detective. He has a near-perfect solve rate and he’s written his own rule book. Some of those successes–the toughest ones–have involved his best friend, the brilliant psychologist Alex Delaware. But Milo doesn’t call Alex in unless cases are “different.”
This murder warrants an immediate call. Milo’s independence has been compromised as never before, as the department pressures him to cater to the demands of a mogul: a hard-to-fathom, megarich young woman who is obsessed with reopening the coldest of cases–the decades-old death of the mother she never knew.
The facts describe a likely loser: a mysterious woman found with a bullet in her head in a torched Cadillac that has overturned on infamously treacherous Mulholland Drive. No physical evidence, no witnesses, no apparent motive. And a slew of detectives have already worked the case and failed. But as Delaware and Sturgis begin digging, the mist begins to lift. Too many coincidences. Facts turn out to be anything but. And as they soon discover, very real threats lurking in the present.
City of the Dead (Ballantine Books)—Jonathan Kellerman (Forthcoming, February 2022)
Los Angeles is a city of sunlight, celebrity, and possibility. The L.A. often experienced by Homicide Lt. Detective Milo Sturgis and psychologist Alex Delaware, is a city of the dead.
Early one morning, the two of them find themselves in a neighborhood of pretty houses, pretty cars, and pretty people. The scene they encounter is anything but. A naked young man lies dead in the street, the apparent victim of a collision with a moving van hurtling through suburbia in the darkness. But any thoughts of accidental death vanish when a blood trail leads to a nearby home.
Inside, a young woman lies butchered. The identity of the male victim and his role in the horror remain elusive, but that of the woman creates additional questions. And adding to the shock, Alex has met her while working a convoluted child custody case. Cordelia Gannett was a self-styled internet influencer who’d gotten into legal troubles by palming herself off as a psychologist. Even after promising to desist, she’s found a loophole and has continued her online career, aiming to amass clicks and ads by cyber-coaching and cyber-counseling people plagued with relationship issues.
But upon closer examination, Alex and Milo discover that her own relationships are troublesome, including a tortured family history and a dubious personal past. Has that come back to haunt her in the worst way? Is the mystery man out in the street collateral damage or will he turn out to be the key to solving a grisly double homicide? As the psychologist and the detective explore L.A.’s meanest streets, they peel back layer after layer of secrets and encounter a savage, psychologically twisted, almost unthinkable motive for violence and bloodshed.
Library Poems (Self-Published/Four Feathers Press)—Don Kingfisher Campbell
Don Kingfisher Campbell put together a compilation of 20 of his poems that mention libraries, and thought, “I’d love for the proceeds from this e-book to go to the Hiram Sims Library of Poetry.” So, reminisce with him on those bygone days when people gathered together.
Navigating With(out) Instruments (Writ Large Press)—traci kato-kiriyama
With their second book, Navigating With(out) Instruments, first in 10 years, traci kato-kiriyama uses her present-political unrest, family love and loss, her own cancer diagnosis-to join the traumas of the past generations with the hope of the future ones. Often seamless, often with a loud bang, kato-kiriyama moves from genre to genre, from poetry to essays to plays and to letters, framed by the history of US colonialism and war mongering, to urge readers to protect and to share their legacies, both personal and communal, as a means of global survival.
We Are Bridges (The Feminist Press)—Casasandra Lane
When Cassandra Lane finds herself pregnant at thirty-five, the knowledge sends her on a poignant exploration of memory to prepare for her entry into motherhood. She moves between the twentieth-century rural South and present-day Los Angeles, reimagining the intimate life of her great-grandparents Mary Magdelene Magee and Burt Bridges, and Burt’s lynching at the hands of vengeful white men in his southern town.
We Are Bridges turns to creative nonfiction to reclaim a family history from violent erasure so that a mother can gift her child with an ancestral blueprint for their future. This debut traces the strange fruit borne from the roots of personal loss in one Black family—and considers how to take back one’s American story.
Dear Culver City (Vagabond Books)—Mark Lipman
Do you need to dream bigger; open your eyes wider; let your imagination soar and think outside the box? Then Dear City Council is for you. In a combination of public comments, selected poems and essays, Mark Lipman weaves the story and challenges facing a modern day Mayberry, Culver City, California, as it tries to come to grip with its racist past and looming corporate future, where the land speculator is king, and Jeff Bezos rules.
At the center of this modern day dystopian nightmare, reporting in real time, the poet, Mark Lipman, calls to account in words of powerful truth, the options and alternatives this community still has before it’s too late and Culver City has just become another column in some accountant’s book.
Will Culver City find its way to reimagining public safety that puts the well being of all ahead of the status quo of policing every social woe? Will they put justice in the budget and solve homelessness, as they easily could, or will they continue to kick the can down the road? Will they up-zone to the sky and become a mini-Manhattan, or will they follow the path of true social and racial equity with a Homes Guarantee and a Green New Deal? Will the Heart of Screenland finally find its heart, or will it be lost forever?
REIMAGINE AMERICA: an anthology for the future (Vagabond Books)—Ed. Mark Lipman (Forthcoming, January 2021)
America is at a crossroads. The people have spoken and have rejected overt fascism, yet there is no going back to normal, to a world of failed policies that has pushed us to the very brink, one that continues to struggle through a global pandemic, with widespread poverty and an ever looming climate emergency. There is no time to wait to reshape our future and reimagine what America and this world around us can be. Local writers included in the anthology are: Luis J. Rodríguez, Amanda Gorman, Jeffrey Martin, David A. Romero, Matt Sedillo, Rich Ferguson, Brian Dunlap, Coco, Carl Stilwell, Michael C. Ford, Thelma T. Reyna, Mike Sonksen, Alexis Rhone Fancher, S.A. Griffin, Briana Muñoz, Richard Modiano, Hiram Sims, and of course Mark Lipman.
Tales of an Inland Empire Girl (Los Nietos Press)—Juanita E. Mantz (Forthcoming, January 2022)
Jenny, her barely-younger twin Jackie, and their baby sister Annie try to navigate their parents’ troubles. The story zooms in on Jenny as she descends from stellar student to angry punk rock dropout, hiding in shame under the high school bleachers as her twin sister graduates from high school. It’s the story of Jenny hitting rock-bottom, and finally, slowly picking herself up and starting to put the pieces of her life back together.
Shaky Town (Tiger Van Books)—Lou Mathews
In Shaky Town, Lou Mathews has written a timeless novel of working-class Los Angeles. A former mechanic and street racer, he tells his story in cool and panoramic style, weaving together the tragedies and glories of one of L.A.’s eastside neighborhoods. From a teenage girl caught in the middle of a gang war to a priest who has lost his faith and hit bottom, the characters in Shaky Town live on a dangerous faultline but remain unshakable in their connections to one another.
Grocery List Poems (Not A Cult Press)—Rhiannon McGavin
If the word stanza means “room,” then this book is an orchard. Former Youth Poet Laureate of Los Angeles, Rhiannon McGavin crafts poems with scraps of the everyday, from dream diaries to postcards. She integrates the facts of daily life into lyric verse, switching out traditional forms easily as trying on new sweaters. Led by emotions “real as the mosaic air between screen and projector,” McGavin explores what it means to become your own calendar.
Bob Baker Marionette Theater has enchanted families in Los Angeles and beyond with delightful marionette performances since 1963. Enchanted Strings: Bob Baker Marionette Theater captures the visual history of this palace of puppetry from Bob Baker’s earliest days to the theater’s transformation into a thriving hub of creative culture.
You’ll meet the remarkable visual artists and craftspeople who worked alongside him, contributing their talents to build the theater, design the shows, and hand-craft more than two thousand incredible marionettes. Archival images and ephemera provide a behind-the-scenes look at Bob’s amazing work for his theater, Walt Disney, and iconic Hollywood films. With more than 300 vintage and contemporary photographs, Enchanted Strings will delight Bob Baker Marionette Theater fans around the world, and fascinate everyone who is a child at heart!
Zapote Tree (Golden Foothills Press)—Alejandro Morales
Dr. Alejandro Morales, author of numerous novels, short story collections, and nonfiction, presents his first book of poetry: Zapote Tree. Zapote Tree brings together 34 poems pulsing with insights, imagery, love of family and his culture, plus hard truths about socioeconomic and sociopolitical inequities in society. This book’s unforgettable characters–migrants, mothers, elders, mythological figures, alcoholics, heroes, villains, and spirits — expand the reader’s understanding of diverse cultures, such as those Dr. Morales straddles with wisdom and compassion.
Blood Grove (Mulholland Books)—Walter Mosley
It is 1969, and flames can be seen on the horizon, protest wafts like smoke though the thick air, and Easy Rawlins, the Black private detective whose small agency finally has its own office, gets a visit from a white Vietnam veteran. The young man comes to Easy with a story that makes little sense. He and his lover, a beautiful young woman, were attacked in a citrus grove at the city’s outskirts. He may have killed a man, and the woman and his dog are now missing. Inclined to turn down what sounds like nothing but trouble, Easy takes the case when he realizes how damaged the young vet is from his war experiences–the bond between veterans superseding all other considerations.
The veteran is not Easy’s only unlooked-for trouble. Easy’s adopted daughter Feather’s white uncle shows up uninvited, raising questions and unsettling the life Easy has long forged for the now young woman. Where Feather sees a family reunion, Easy suspects something else, something that will break his heart.
Blood Grove is a crackling, moody, and thrilling race through a California of hippies and tycoons, radicals and sociopaths, cops and grifters, both men and women. Easy will need the help of his friends–from the genius Jackson Blue to the dangerous Mouse Alexander, Fearless Jones, and Christmas Black–to make sense of a case that reveals the darkest impulses humans harbor.
Everything is Returned to the Soil/Todo vuelve a la tierra (FlowerSong Press)—Briana Muños
Everything is Returned to the Soil is a bilingual, full-length poetry collection of poems on the spiritual, political, and cultural realms. Reading Briana Muñoz’s poetry is like following her as she reclaims her Indigenous culture, recounts moments growing up wedged in-between two borders, all while breaking long existing patriarchal structures within her existence as a woman of color.
tending my wild (World Stage Press)—Alex Petunia
Tending My Wild is a collection of poetry that braves a trail unmarked running away on all fours back to a forgotten self. Alex Petunia invites you to witness her bruises, her unleashing, her shedding, her rooting. As a queer, multiracial child in a home of broken bottles, a fearful soul longing to belong roars into an unshackled lovebeast blooming with vibrant self-worth and deepening purpose. Tending My Wild stirs the howling heart to sit at future’s welcoming table where together we can honor the harsh rapids and cooing stillness of nature echoing in us all.
One-Shot Harry (SOHO Crime)—Gary Phillips (Forthcoming, April 2022)
Los Angeles, 1963. African American Korean War veteran Harry Ingram earns a living as a news photographer and occasional process server: chasing police radio calls and dodging baseball bats. With racial tensions running high on the eve of Martin Luther King’s Freedom Rally, Ingram risks becoming a victim at every crime scene he photographs.
When Ingram hears about a deadly automobile accident on his police scanner, he recognizes the vehicle described as belonging to his good friend and old army buddy, a white jazz trumpeter. The LAPD declares the car crash an accident, but when Ingram develops his photos, he sees signs of foul play. Ingram feels compelled to play detective, even if it means putting his own life on the line. Armed with his wits, his camera, and occasionally his Colt .45, “One-Shot” Harry plunges headfirst into the seamy underbelly of LA society, tangling with racists, leftists, gangsters, zealots, and lovers, all in the hope of finding something resembling justice for a friend.
X LA Poets (HINCHES de Poesia Press)—Ed. Linda Ravenswood
The anthology, X LA Poets, highlights the work of ten women poets defining what it means to call Los Angeles home, while at the same time, envisioning a futuristic, multitudinous Los Angeles. The panoply of poetic voices contained in this anthology will inspire and astound, celebrate and eviscerate the written word and the emotive breath.
Gathering: A Woman Who Submit Anthology (Jamii Publushing)—Ed. Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera
Gathering is a collection of poems, essays, stories, and plays by Women Who Submit (WWS) members from New York, New Jersey, Chicago, San Antonio, Bay Area, Long Beach, Westside, and Los Angeles chapters. It is a way for members in our literary community to acknowledge the traumas of the past year and offer hope in the face of unprecedented challenges. In spite of all that has plagued the world in 2020-2021, WWS members continued to gather across the country, share resources, encourage literary submissions, and support each other with claps and cheers. This gathering of literary voices celebrates WWS’s commitment to empowering women and nonbinary writers over the last 10 years.
A Quilt For David (City Lights)—Steven Reigns
In the early 1990s, eight people living in a small conservative Florida town alleged that Dr. David Acer, their dentist, infected them with HIV. David’s gayness, along with his sickly appearance from his own AIDS-related illness, made him the perfect scapegoat and victim of mob mentality. In these early years of the AIDS epidemic, when transmission was little understood, and homophobia rampant, people like David were villainized. Accuser Kimberly Bergalis landed a People magazine cover story, while others went on talk shows and made front page news.
Steven Reigns recovers the life and death of this man who also stands in for so many lives destroyed not only by HIV, but a diseased society that used stigma against the most vulnerable. It’s impossible not to make connections between this story and how the twenty-first century pandemic has also been defined by medical misinformation and cultural bias.
Inspired by years of investigative research into the lives of David and those who denounced him, Reigns has stitched together a narrative that retraces an American history, questioning the fervor of his accusers, and recuperating a gay life previously shrouded in secrecy and shame.
Living on Islands Not Found on Maps by Luivette Resto (Forthcoming, March 2022)
The Poems in Living on Islands Not Found on Maps are about love and heartbreak, memory and family, pain and loss. Resto writes about the whole range of being the woman she is: daughter, mother, lover, poet, dreamer, and Wonder Woman. She charts this journey of being a woman from Puerto Rico, to the Bronx, to LA.
The Feather Ladder (Picture Show Press)—Cindy Rinne
The Feather Ladder by Cindy Rinne is a myth in verse. The Feather Keeper discovers his destiny. Creatures help build a feather ladder connecting earth and sky.
Herencias (Alegria Publishing)—Jean-Pierre Rueda
Herencias is a collection of poetry mostly written in Spanish that focuses on themes of love, melancholy, history, politics and family. The author Jean-Pierre Rueda illustrates childhood memories in his native Costa Rica, landscapes of his immigrant life in California, the passion to what it means to be a father and the legacies of historical characters and events that inspired generations of Latinx in the United States. Jean-Pierre Rueda seeks with his romantic verses to pay homage to the beauty and sadness of being born and growing up in another country, the family values that become cardinal points in the journey of the years and the importance of telling the story to illuminate the courage in the face of the uncertainty.
Edgecliff (FlowerSong Press)—Angelina Sáenz
Written in the three years following a divorce from a twenty-two year marriage, these poems are about a middle-aged Chicana who is facing life on her own for the first time. These poems respond to the confusion and pain of a rebound love affair, the courage to pursue an MFA and be in a workshop as an older, first-gen student who never studied literature, the longing and hopes of a single-mother, life under a racist and violent political regime and the everlasting effects of intergenerational trauma in hers and her family’s life. These poems depict love and hope in the midst of uncertainty and longing.
Toxic Masculinity, poems (FlowerSong Press)—Fernando Albert Salinas
This book is a requiem. The original title of this book was The World Is a Barrio. The idea was to pay homage to the band, WAR. The song, “The World Is a Ghetto” inspired Salinas to see the world differently. It encouraged him to see the world beyond the one he lived in. And, the world he was raised in was one of gangs, sex, drugs, violence, poverty, systemic/structural racism, education inequity, health disparity, food insecurity, patriotism, and death. A ghetto. A barrio. For whatever reason, so many in the world want to forget this world existed and still does. Some cancel-culture cancels culture. Salinas used the title for his second novel instead.
Another title Salinas considered was The Pinche Piñata. The meaning was intended to describe how his life felt. Salinas has been a piñata. Life was the stick. That stick beat him again and again until he finally broke. And, that was when all the good stuff came pouring out—everyone ran up to take a piece. However, he felt uncomfortable cursing every time he told someone the title. It is not something he does very often. So, he called his daughter. She says, “Dad, your work is about the damage of being nurtured in an environment of toxic masculinity.” She says, “How about, Toxic Masculinity?” And the book’s title was born.
City on the Second Floor by Matt Sedillo (Forthcoming)
City on the Second Floor is a meditation on how the world we build and rebuild every day attacks us in so very many unexamined ways. As its pages reveal, “the city was built against us.”
The Death of My Father the Pope (MCD)—Obed Silva
Weaving between the preparations for his father’s funeral and memories of life on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, Obed Silva chronicles his father’s lifelong battle with alcoholism and the havoc it wreaked on his family. Silva and his mother had come north across the border to escape his father’s violent, drunken rages. His father had followed and danced dangerously in and out of the family’s life until he was arrested and deported back to Mexico, where he drank himself to death, one Carta Blanca at a time, at the age of forty-eight.
Rude Talk in Athens (The Unnamed Press)—Mark Haskell Smith
In ancient Athens, thousands would attend theatre festivals that turned writing into a fierce battle for fame, money, and laughably large trophies. While the tragedies earned artistic respect, it was the comedies―the raunchy jokes, vulgar innuendo, outrageous invention, and barbed political commentary―that captured the imagination of the city.
Through conversations with historians, politicians, and other writers, Smith embarks on a personal mission (bordering on obsession) exploring the life of one of these unknown writers, and how comedy challenged the patriarchy, the military, and the powers that be, both then and now. A comic writer himself and author of many books and screenplays, Smith also looks back at his own career, his love for the uniquely dynamic city of Athens, and what it means for a writer to leave a legacy.
Mecca (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)—Susan Straight (Forthcoming, March 2022)
Johnny Frias has California in his blood. A descendant of the state’s Indigenous people and Spanish settlers, he has Southern California’s forgotten towns and canyons in his soul. He spends his days working for the California Highway Patrol pulling over speeders, ignoring their racist insults, and pushing past the trauma of his rookie year, when he killed a man who was in the midst of assaulting a young woman named Bunny, who proceeded to run away. But like the Santa Ana winds, which every year bring risk of fire, Johnny’s moment of action twenty years ago sparks a slow-burning chain of connections that unites a vibrant, complex cast of characters in ways they never saw coming.
Yellow (World Stage Press)—Ravina Wadhwani
Yellow is a collection of poetry and prose on the blooming and the wilting. the healing and the growing, the rebirth of seeds in different soil, scattered but never lost. Yellow is a collection of pieces translated from the heart. It is a celebration of growth, shedding, healing, and ultimately, all things love. Yellow is, among many things, a survival story, a testament & an honoring of still breathing, & still thriving on the journey.
Between Good Men & No Man At All (World Stage Press)—Pam Ward (Forthcoming)
Los Ángeles Poet Laureate Lynne Thompson gives advance praise for Between Good Men & No Man At All: “Pam Ward shapes the distance of remembering with poignancy, a black eye, a knocked down Dinah, and blam blam. In her pen, language croons on ‘the corner of 43rd and pain.’ Summon your courage and plunge into Ward’s truths; you’ll be glad you did.”
The Distance Of Observation (World Stage Press)—Conney D. Williams
The poems in The Distance Of Observation, lean more towards lived experience and include many tribute poems. These poems express both anger at women and at Conney Williams himself creating poems that are not all praise or self-affirmation. Through William’s journey, these poems create the through lines of struggle, exhaustion and grace.
Under the Capsized Boat We Fly: New & Selected Poems (White Pine Press)—Gail Wronsky
This book collects over four decades of work by this unique and imaginative poet. Wronsky’s poems, informed by her reading of classical texts as well as contemporary poetics, explore feminism, environmentalism, and mortality in language that is both multi-layered and musical. At times dark and at times humorous, her poems speak to our strengths as well as our frailties.
A Church of My Own (Self-Published)—Diosa Xochiquetzalcóatl
Beginning with the first chapter, “The Word,” the author takes you on a chronological journey from the beginnings of time to the very ends, speaking of truths never told. In the second chapter, “The Holy Ones,” we witness the ascension of average humans into the realms of the sacred and observe how divine beings mingle on Earthly planes. “Confessions and Absolutions,” the third chapter, is where the writer performs a psychic, open-heart surgery, airing stagnant wounds, thus releasing all that no longer serves. In “Prayers and Invocations,” chapter four, we embark on a healing journey through the amalgamation of traditional and unconventional petitions. Lastly, in the final chapter, “The Miracles,” the author manages to find the miraculous in the mundane and gifts the 3D with a taste of divine dominion.
Los Angeles Literature 
Terrific, wide-ranging list that will make readers very very happy!
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