Editor’s Note: Community News is an occasional article series highlighting some of the community’s news from the previous several months, that does not fit into their own full length article.
In April writer, Journalist and Santa Ana native Sandra De Anda won the inaugural Linda Purdy Memorial Prize for poetry for her poem “Cruisin.” Awarded by The Ear, Irvine Valley College’s literary journal, she received $200 and publication in issue 26.
The award is named after Linda Purdy who, according to Jonathan Cohen in Citric Acid, “was one of the most prolific poets in Orange County. She submitted often, with faith,” publishing poems and stories in local journals such as UCI’s Faultline and The Ear. She even took fiction and poetry classes at Irvine Valley College and in her poetry, according to The Ear, “Linda often zeroed in on tiny details—dust, a plant twining up a carport, a goldfish—…helped us [to] see them with fresh eyes.”
To honor Purdy’s legacy, The Ear created the Linda Purdy Memorial Prize for poetry and prose to honor two local Orange County writers each year for their ability to explore the tiny details that often go over-looked in everyday life.
However, the poetry winner Sandra De Anda is a person who had to leave Santa Ana to survive. She would have fallen victim to its streets if she hadn’t been sent to boarding school in the South. She noticed guys in her neighborhood begin to eye her and hit on her as she grew into a woman in middle school. Upon graduation she attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
It was after graduation, when De Anda still lived in Portland, that, one day, her white roommate’s white boyfriend pulled a gun on her after spewing racist shit directly to her about Latinx people and directly about her being Latinx. It wasn’t the first time she’d had a gun pulled on her. Immediately De Anda moved back home to Santa Ana, the only place in the country she felt tied to.
Once home De Anda got the opportunity to write for the OC Weekly, edited by journalist, founder of the column “Ask A Mexican,” and Anaheim native Gustavo Arellano. While there, she co-founded a weekly column titled “Deport This,” where she highlighted immigrant communities in resistance.
As Sandra De Anda wrote in an Instagram post about winning the Linda Purdy Memorial Prize, “I often zero in on the tiny details in my daily life too…My poem zeros in on a time where my parents did not yet know they would be parents; complete strangers sitting in a vermillion Chevy cruising down Bristol in Santa Ana.”
On June 1st, Long Beach announced its first Youth Poet Laureate. Claire Beeli will have the opportunity to enact positive change in her community through her activism and art.
Beeli was selected as Youth Poet Laureate, in part, because she’s already begun to enact positive change through art in her role as beta reader for The Young Writers’ Initiative and editor-in-chief of La Fuente, Wilson High School’s literary magazine. Beeli’s poems also inhabit positive change, as the city’s press release says, “melding poignant social commentary with clever metaphor and rich imagery.”
As Youth Poet Laureate, Beeli received a $1,500 scholarship to create a citywide initiative meant to engage young people in literary arts over the course of the program. She will receive mentorship and resources to help bring her program to life.
As Beeli said of being chosen as Long Beach’s first Youth Poet Laureate, “I’m incredibly grateful for the change to share my voice in support of the city I love so much…My goal is to improve access to writing resources and avenues of publication through initiatives like literary magazines and community workshops events, such as Wilson High School’s La Fuente Literary and Art Magazine.”
On June 10th, a celebration broke out in Downtown San Bernardino. It was at a nondescript storefront, its entrance set back several feet from the sidewalk. In a parking space out front a food stall set up shop selling both Mexican and Native food and across West 4th Street stood the State Government building. Across the storefront’s lone window it read in Aztec-influenced font: Barrio Fuerza Community Art Poetry Culture. A poetry and arts center from a Chicanx perspective, founded and run by local poet Alma Rosa Rivera and her husband.
The community showed up to celebrate, packing the small, long, rectangular space where the four poets—Brenda Vaca, Matt Sedillo, Angela Aguirre and Alma Rosa Rivera—took the mic before San Bernardino’s own—MILPA—rocked downtown with their folkloric rhythms from Jarocho, mixed with conga, caribe to Angola, Pacifico beats and tropic rodas.
Barrio Fuerza is attached to an art gallery and studio by a hallway off their back entrance. It creates an arts complex feel to Rivera’s space and to the building. In their front room, All Eyes On Me Studio set up chairs facing a projector screen for their own event that night. Paintings by different artists adorned the walls of the gallery, studio and even the hallway. The walls of Barrio Fuerza displayed paintings by Chicanx artists.
Before the four poets read, drag queens arrived, for what I assumed was the All Eyes On Me event, but I never found out for sure. In celebration of Pride Month, I assumed.
It was a night to celebrate the grand opening of a much needed community literary and arts space in a city and region (Inland Empire) that sorely needs them. Barrio Fuerza is such a space that’s been more than a year in the making.
Los Angeles Literature 