By Dorany Pineda, Poets & Writers
FROM: Los Angeles Times

While South Central Los Angeles has long had a vibrant poetry community, local writers lacked a dedicated venue to write, read, and listen to the work of poets—until this past summer, when poet and educator Hiram Sims opened the Sims Library of Poetry in the Crenshaw District. The new space represents the latest of Sims’s efforts to connect local poets to the broader publishing and writing communities. Though the library just opened its first permanent location, its origin story can be traced back several years.  

In 2013, Sims noticed a disconnect between the community of active poets he knew from open mics and the staff of small presses who told him they didn’t know of and weren’t receiving submissions from these poets. “I met all these fantastic poets, none of whom had books,” says Sims. That’s when he started the Community Literature Initiative (CLI), a nonprofit organization through which he offered classes supported by his alma mater, the University of Southern California, on the process of book production, completing a manuscript, and finding a publisher. In the fourth year of running the program, Sims asked students to read one book of poetry a week, but a roadblock emerged: They couldn’t find poetry books at the library. “I didn’t believe them, and then I went to the local library and there was no poetry section,” says Sims. To help his students, Sims gathered eighty poetry books of his own and put them into a rolling suitcase to take to class. Students borrowed books and returned them the next week. Sims recalls one of his students saying, “This is like a little Sims library of poetry,” and the name and concept stuck with him.  

A year later, in 2018, Sims built a bookshelf from scrap wood and cleared out his garage to make room for the beginnings of a library. Soon his CLI students weren’t the only frequent borrowers, as local poets began visiting his garage seeking books by Amiri Baraka, E. E. Cummings, and Nikki Giovanni, to name a few. With demand growing, Sims enlisted his brother to help him build a wraparound bookshelf to line his entire garage. He then ran into a new problem: “I had about three hundred books of poetry, and when I put my books on that huge shelf, it looked like I had six books.” There was room to grow. In 2019, Sims hosted his birthday party at the garage and turned to his poetry community for help, asking for book donations to the library. At the end of the day there were two thousand books filling the shelves. Read Rest of Article Here