The Greenway Court Theatre is home to the largest open mic in the world. The spoken word shows of Da Poetry Lounge kick off at 9pm each Tuesday. They attract such a large audience that space on the stage is often set aside to allow everyone who attended a chance to watch the show. To watch the nation’s best spoken word poets, from Yesika Salgado to Alyesha Wise to Rudy Francisco, perform.

On Saturday, April 15th, I arrived at the Greenway Court Theatre for the first time, for a different reason. The Latinx Poets of the World Stage Press was the reading filling the theatre with verse. In the audience were numerous poets I know, at one place at one time. James Coats, Brenda Vaca, Mauricio Moreno, Anastasia Helena Fenald and Juan Amador, among others. A rarity in spread out L.Á. with its congested freeways, where distance is measured in time.

These Latinx poets—Poet Astrid, Cynthia Guardado, Carolina Rivera Escamilla, Carlos Ornelas, Alex Petunia and Andy Sanchez—were reading as part of the 7th Annual L.A. Get Down Festival, a festival that showcases poetry, spoken word and hip-hop, co-directed by spoken word artists and arts activists Shihan Van Clief and Ariana “Lady” Bosco. A place for poets to share an intimate part of themselves and truly be heard by an audience who wants to slow down, lean in and connect with them on a human level.

The 99-seat theatre was packed, but not full. 80% by my guess. And during the performance, a chorus of snaps would ring out when a truth from a poet hit deep with the audience.

As poets of color, these truths were in critique of White America, directly or not, the systemic racism that has traumatized them, helped them to not be seen as fully human. For example, when Andy Sanchez says in their poem “I Am My Roots:”

          Tustin became my fourth and fifth home.
          Here, I quickly learned the differences when
          a White Boy used a rock to split my head open.
          What are you? Where are you from?
          Became questions I could not answer
          even when I felt drips of blood from my wound.

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Once the performance was over, I overheard an audience member comment on how the evening felt like a family reunion. So many poets/people they knew, they had to make sure to say hi to each, performers and audience alike, or else they’d get in trouble for ignoring them. I couldn’t have agreed more and felt events that stitch the vast neighborhoods we live in, closer together, like the L.A. Get Down, need to occur more often. It brought together Brenda Vaca who traveled to the Fairfax District from Whitter, James Coats from out near San Bernardino, Cynthia Guardado from Inglewood, and others from elsewhere in SoCal.

Such literary events like the L.A. Get Down, whose perspectives begin with people of color, organized by writers of color, to better reflect the community’s demographics, and move out from there to the rest of the community, insures everyone is heard amongst a society intent on keeping everyone distracted and alone. To get the writer from the San Fernando Valley to connect with the writer from San Bernardino, with the writer from Santa Ana. And for the literary-loving public of SoCal to engage in voices and stories that reflect and are relevant to their lives.

To a degree, LitFest Pasadena, the Southern California Poetry Festival, Boca De Oro, LibroMobile Literary Arts Festival and LitLit are most of the big events that already bring the literary community and literary-loving SoCal public together. But these events still only add up to a handful of days a year.

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The connections that were made and strengthened on this second weekend of the 7th Annual L.A. Get Down Festival, pointed to how in a city of 469.49 sq. miles and a region of 2,281 sq miles, serious career advice can pass from a seasoned academic, Cynthia Guardado, to a budding one; knowledge about who and what the community is and how its evolved can be shared between a long time member of the community and relatively new member; how a large portion of attendees and several features agree and head out for a late-night snack, illustrates there is, in fact, a there, there, in Southern California. That events like this can never happen often enough.