FROM: Voyage LA

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jessica M. Wilson.

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I always wanted to be a Poet. When I was in college, I experienced so many poetry readings, Q&As, and author meet n greets…it was so much fun. It was a huge literary party. These were two things I enjoyed the most: hosting parties and talking about poetry. When I graduated from Graduate school, the whole party was over…and I had nowhere to share my poetry or no one to talk poetry with. I was a lonely Poet, a lonely artist, and I had a huge city to explore — Los Angeles. However, I still had no clue as to where the poetry scene was, so I started the Los Angeles Poet Society.

At first, I thought LA was massive; a huge metropololis, surely there was a Los Angeles Poet Society… but it did not exist. So in 2009, about a year after graduate school, I started the LA Poet Society.

I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
The Internet was a big deal and was a great tool to bring in LA Poets, Writers, Artists, and Creatives of all sorts together…I had the know-how and brought the people together. It was a lot of fun taking pictures and sharing our happenings online. However, the initial networking steps started with me merely talking about the “Los Angeles Poet Society” with the Poets I’d meet at open mics or any other events I was at. I handed them strips of paper with my email and told them to keep in touch. Oftentimes, I would have an email list sign-up sheet with me and just collect emails. The first network started over email.

It was a few years later when I fully utilized Facebook or Twitter to get the word out and keep folks in a collective page online. Read Rest of Interview Here