World Literature Book Club via West Valley Regional Branch Library, LAPL – Online Event
Join World Literature Book Club for a spirited and engaging discussion of the world’s best short stories!
This month’s selections are:
October 2: Sinking House by T. Coraghessan Boyle
October 16: The Only Rose by Sarah Orne Jewett
October 23: Strong Horse Tea by Alice Walker
October 30: Uglypuss by Margaret Atwood
Meetings are every Monday morning (excluding holidays).
RSVP: For the Zoom link, please e-mail wvally@lapl.org with “World Literature” in the subject line.
Where: West Valley Regional Branch Library, LAPL (Repeated at 2 pm via Woodland Hills Branch Library)
Date: Monday the 2nd
Time: 10 am
Address: Online Event (see site)
Website: https://lapl.org/whats-on/events/world-literature-book-club-8
Ab(solute)y Normal Event: Rocky Callen & Isabel Quintero at Cellar Door Bookstore – In-Person Event
Rocky Callen, editor of Ab(solutely) Normal: Short Stories That Smash Mental Health Stereotypes,is coming to Cellar Door along with short story contributor (and our friend!) Isabel Quintero.
In this inspiring, unflinching, and hope-filled mixed-genre collection, sixteen diverse and notable authors draw on their own lived experiences with mental health conditions to create stunning works of fiction that will uplift and empower you, break your heart and stitch it back together stronger than before. Through powerful prose, verse, and graphics, the characters in this anthology defy stereotypes as they remind readers that living with a mental health condition doesn’t mean that you’re defined by it. Each story is followed by a note from its author to the reader, and comprehensive back matter includes bios for the contributors as well as a collection of relevant resources.
Rocky Callen, the daughter of an Ecuadorian immigrant, has long lived a life of service ever since she was a 13-year-old advocating for the undocumented immigrants in her community. She interned at NASA at 12 years old, started lobbying congress at 13, and wrote and produced student radio stories at NPR at 14. She was a behavioral therapist for over ten years. She received an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and lives outside of Washington, DC with her husband, daughter, and baby boy. Rocky founded the Bleed Ink Foundation, a creative hub and resource center for writers, and the HoldOn2Hope Project, which unites creatives in suicide prevention and mental health awareness. She is the author of A Breath Too Late (Macmillan) and Crashing Into You.
Isabel Quintero is an award-winning writer and the daughter of Mexican immigrants. She proudly lives and writes in the Inland Empire of Southern California. Gabi, A Girl in Pieces (Cinco Puntos Press), her first YA novel, was the recipient of multiple awards including the Tomas Rivera Award, California Book Award Gold Medal, and the Morris Award for Debut YA Novel. She is the author of the chapter books, Ugly Cat and Pablo (Scholastic, Inc.) and Ugly Cat and Pablo and the Missing Brother (Scholastic, Inc.), among others.
NOTE: See site for RSVP, guidelines, and details.
Where: Cellar Door Bookstore
Date: Monday the 2nd
Time: 6 pm
Address: 473 E. Alessandro Blvd., Suite B, Riverside, CA 92508
Website: https://www.cellardoorbookstore.com/absolutelynormal
Glen E. Friedman, with Zack de la Rocha, & Just a Minor Threat at Book Soup off-site at The Colburn’s Zipper Hall – In-Person Event
Glen E. Friedman, in conversation with Zack de la Rocha, will present and discuss Just a Minor Threat: The Minor Threat Photographs of Glen E, Friedman.
This is a book of Glen E. Friedman’s most outstanding photographs of the Washington, DC, band Minor Threat, one of the most influential hardcore punk bands in music history. While the book offers Friedman’s best-known photographs of the band, most of the pictures in this volume, shot in 1982 and ’83, have never been seen before.
The book has writing by Jello Biafra, Alec MacKaye, Guy Picciotto, Zack de la Rocha, Jamie Shanahan, and Ian F. Svenonius. Friedman’s own introduction explains how he initially met the band, and the lifelong friendships that grew from there.
The first time Friedman made pictures of Minor Threat was in Southern California early in the summer of 1982, then later on their home turf of Washington, DC. At the end of that same year, he shot them at an “explosive and uncontrollable” performance at CBGB in New York City. In addition to these, Just a Minor Threat also comprises very rare candid and posed photos of the band, including many from the same roll as the now classic “Salad Days” image on the front steps of their “Dischord House.”
NOTE: See site for tickets, guidelines, and details.
Where: Book Soup
Date: Monday the 2nd
Time: 7 pm
Address: 200 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90012
Website: https://www.booksoup.com/event/book-soup-presents-glen-e-friedman
At Skylight: Jonathan Lethem, with Danzy Senna, & Brooklyn Crime Novel at Skylight Books – In-Person Event
Jonathan Lethem, in conversation with Danzy Senna, will discuss his book, Brooklyn Crime Novel.
This book is a sweeping story of community, crime, and gentrification, tracing more than fifty years of life in one Brooklyn neighborhood, from the bestselling and award-winning author of The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn.
On the streets of 1970s Brooklyn, a daily ritual goes down: the dance. Money is exchanged, belongings surrendered, power asserted. The promise of violence lies everywhere, a currency itself. For these children, Black, brown, and white, the street is a stage in shadow. And in the wings hide the other players: parents; cops; renovators; landlords; those who write the headlines, the histories, and the laws; those who award this neighborhood its name.
Jonathan Lethem is the bestselling author of twelve novels, including The Arrest, The Feral Detective, The Fortress of Solitude, and Motherless Brooklyn, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. He currently teaches creative writing at Pomona College in California.
Danzy Senna’s bestselling first novel, Caucasia (1998) won the Stephen Crane Award for Best New Fiction and the American Library Association’s Alex Award and has been translated into over a dozen languages. A recipient of a Whiting Writers Award, Senna is also the author of the novel, Symptomatic (2004), the memoir, Where Did You Sleep Last Night?, the story collection You Are Free (2011), and New People (2017). She lives in Los Angeles where she is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California. Her sixth book, a novel, is forthcoming in 2024 from Riverhead Books.
NOTE: See site for RSVP, guidelines, and details.
Where: Skylight
Date: Monday the 2nd
Time: 7 pm – 8:30 pm
Address: 1818 N. Vermont Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90027
Book Launch: Sean Howard, with Andy Greenwald, & Agents of Chaos at Stories Books & Café – In-Person Event
Sean Howard, in conversation with Andy Greenwald, presents the book launch for Agents of Chaos, which chronicles the life and time of High Times’ enigmatic founder Tom Forcade.
Forcade saw a new path forward—marijuana, he believed, could be used as a tool for cultural and economic revolution. What Playboy had done for sex, High Times would do for marijuana, dragging a taboo subject into the mainstream. Bankrolled by drug-dealing profits, the magazine was a travelogue of globe-trotting adventure and a wellspring of news about “the business” from a worldwide network of sources. The tragedies and triumphs of Tom Forcade mirror the cultural transformations of 1970s America, wrought by forces that continue to clash in the spaces between unrest, activism, and power.
NOTE: See site for RSVP, guidelines, and details.
Where: Stories Books & Café
Date: Monday the 2nd
Time: 7 pm – 8 pm
Address: 1716 W. Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90026
Website: https://storiesla.com/events
Zev Yaroslavsky, with Tomas Small, & Zev’s Los Angeles at Village Well Books & Coffee – In-Person Event
Village Well Book Club presents Zev Yaroslavsky, in conversation with former Culver City Mayor Thomas Small, to discuss his book, Zev’s Los Angeles.
Zev Yaroslavsky served in the Los Angeles City Council and the County Board of Supervisors from 1975-1994. he challenged the region’s power brokers, fought the L.A.P.D.’s excessive use of force and political spying policies; led the effort to ban local taxes from funding the 1984 Olympics; helped rescue L.A. County from near bankruptcy; played a pivotal role in the development of Disney Hall and the renovation of the Hollywood Bowl; and helped protect the Santa Monica Mountains from rapacious development.
Where: Village Well Books & Coffee
Date: Monday the 2nd
Time: 7 pm – 8 pm
Address: 9900 Culver Blvd., Culver City, CA 90232
Website: https://shop.villagewell.com/events/30308
Chloe Gong, with Raquel Marie, & Foul Hunt Hartsman at Vroman’s – In-Person Event
Chloe Gong, in conversation with Raquel Marie, will present and discussFoul Hunt Hartsman.
In Foul Hart Huntsman, winter is drawing thick in 1932 Shanghai, as is the ever-nearing threat of a Japanese invasion.
Rosalind Lang has suffered the worst possible fate for a national spy: she’s been exposed. With the media storm camped outside her apartment for the infamous Lady Fortune, she’s barely left her bedroom in weeks, plotting her next course of action after Orion was taken and his memories of Rosalind wiped. Though their marriage might have been a sham, his absence hurts her more than any physical wound. She won’t rest until she gets him back.
But with her identity in the open, the task is near impossible. The only way to leave the city and rescue Orion is under the guise of a national tour. It’s easy to convince her superiors that the countryside needs unity more than ever, and who better than an immortal girl to stir pride and strength into the people?
Racquel Marie grew up in Southern California, where her passion for storytelling of all kinds was encouraged by her friends and big family. She received a BA in English with an emphasis in creative writing and a minor in gender and sexuality studies from the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Ophelia After All, You Don’t Have a Shot, and many unfinished first drafts.
NOTE: See site for tickets, guidelines, and details.
Where: Vroman’s
Date: Monday the 2nd
Time: 7 pm
Address: 695 E, Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, CA., 91101
Website: https://www.vromansbookstore.com/Vromans-presents-Chloe-Gong-discussing-Foul-Heart-Huntsman
Monday Night Fiction Workshop at Beyond Baroque – Zoom Online Event
This free Monday Night Community Writing Workshop led by Raquel Baker is a workshop in which participants are asked to bring copies of 2-3 pages of fiction to read, and to use for critique and discussion. Registration is required.
Raquel Baker earned a PhD in English Literary Studies from the University of Iowa and an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Postcolonial and Transnational Literatures at California State University Channel Islands, teaching courses on creative writing and contemporary African literatures. Raquel has published poetry in Africology and The Arrow; fiction in Enculturation, The Daily Palette, The Womanist, and Crux; and non-fiction in Little Village; and has done readings with the Ventura County Poetry project. Raquel lives for talking about all things about the craft and social meanings of literature!
Where: Beyond Baroque – Online event
Date: Monday the 2nd
Time: 7:30 pm – 10 pm
Address: Zoom Online Event (see site)
Website: https://www.beyondbaroque.org/free_workshops or https://www.eventbrite.com/e/monday-night-fiction-workshop-tickets-726861521377
Under the Mic Influence & Open Mic featuring Ariana Iverson at LB Unified – In-Person Event
Join host Kuahmel Alyeeus KuahAllah and @djkevjam for poetry, Open Mic, rare grooves, cocktails, tasty bites.
In the tradition of Funkmosphere, Monday Night Delight, Melodic Mondays, Project Blowed, Griot Cafe, and Lady Basco’s Speakeasy, we come to light things right back up and take the poet & the MC to new heights. Every 1st and 3rd Monday, you will be Under Mic Influence. Come level up with carefree, high-caliber spitters, and leave ready to get the bars up & come back for more!
Our feature act for this edition is Ariana Iverson, ready to freak the words in ways only a Black woman could.
Soul Brother No. 7 Kuahmel and DJ Kev Jam captain this cruise with the necessary boom-bap & rare grooves. Only $5. Everyone from Santa Barbara to San Diego and beyond welcome!
Special invite to Blowedians, Good Lifers, the CLIque, and LBC poetry vets.
DM now to get at the #openmic!
NOTE: See site for RSVP, cost, and details.
Where: LB Unified Bar & Lounge
Date: Monday the 2nd
Time: 7:30 pm; Mic at 8 pm
Address: 2222 E. Anaheim, Long Beach, CA 90804
Website: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/mic-influence or https://www.eventbrite.com/e/mic-influence-tickets-595266607447
Poets From the Future: A Poetry Workshop for Kids at North Figueroa Bookshop – In-Person Kids Event
Poets From the Future is a free poetry workshop for kids ages 10-18, featuring readings, activities, and fun writing exercises for the next generation of poets!
NOTE: See site for RSVP, guidelines, and details.
Where: North Figueroa Bookshop
Date: Tuesday the 3rd
Time: 4 pm – 5:30 pm
Address: 6040 North Figueroa St., Los Angeles, CA 90042
Feminist Book Club: Sing Her Down at Cellar Door Bookstore – In-Person Event
Feminist Book Club participants will discuss this month’s selection, Sing Her Down: A Novel, by author Ivy Pochoda.
Florence “Florida” Baum is not the hapless innocent she claims to be when she arrives at the Arizona women’s prison—or so her ex-cellmate Diosmary Sandoval keeps insinuating.
Dios knows the truth about Florida’s crimes, understands what Florence hides even from herself: that she was never a victim of circumstance, an unlucky bystander misled by a bad man. Dios knows that darkness lives in women too, despite the world’s refusal to see it. And she is determined to open Florida’s eyes and unleash her true self.
When an unexpected reprieve gives both women their freedom, Dios’s fixation on Florida turns into a dangerous obsession, and a deadly cat-and-mouse chase ensues from Arizona to the desolate streets of Los Angeles.
Ivy Pochoda is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Wonder Valley, Visitation Street, and These Women. She won the 2018 Strand Critics Award for Best Novel and thePrix Page America in France and has been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times BookPrize and the Edgar Award, among other awards. For many years, Ivy taught creativewriting at Studio 526 in Los Angeles’s Skid Row. She is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of California Riverside-Palm Desert low-residency MFA program. She lives in Los Angeles.
NOTE: See site for RSVP, guidelines, and details.
Where: Cellar Door Bookstore
Date: Tuesday the 3rd
Time: 6 pm
Address: 473 E. Alessandro Blvd., Suite B, Riverside, CA 92508
Website: https://www.cellardoorbookstore.com/event/feminist-book-club-sing-her-down
Kelly Sather, with Rachel Koller Croft, & Small in Real LIfe at Diesel, A Bookstore – In-Person Event
Kelly Sather, in conversation with Rachel Koller Croft, will discuss her book,Small in Real Life.
Small in Real Life invokes the myth and melancholy of Southern California glamor, of starry-eyed women and men striving for their own Hollywood shimmer and the seamy undersides and luxurious mystique of the Golden State. Exiled to a Malibu rehab, an alcoholic paparazzo spies on his celebrity friend for an online tabloid. Down to her last dollar, a Hollywood hanger-on steals designer handbags from her dying friend’s bungalow. Blinded by grief, an LA judge atones after condescending to a failed actress on a date. When hunger for power, fame, and love betrays the senses, the characters in these nine stories must reckon with false choices and their search for belonging with the wrong people. Small in Real Life offers an insider’s view of California and the golden promises of possibility and redemption that have long made the West glitter.
Kelly Sather is a writer, former entertainment lawyer, and screenwriter. Her stories and interviews have appeared in Santa Monica Review, J Journal, Pembroke Magazine, PANK, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. She grew up in Los Angeles and lives in Northern California.
Rachel Koller Croft is the author of Stone Cold Fox and the WGA award-nominated screenwriter of Torn Hearts. She lives by the beach in Los Angeles with her husband, Charles, and their rescue pitbull Juniper. She is developing her first novel for television. Her second novel is coming Summer 2024.
Where: Diesel, A Bookstore
Date: Tuesday the 3rd
Time: 6:30 pm
Address: 225 26th St., Suite 33, Santa Monica, CA 90402
Website: https://www.dieselbookstore.com/event/Kelly-Sather-Author-signing
Conchas y Café Zine Workshop: Fall Semester Theme: “Out of Place” at DSTL Arts – Online Event
This is a virtual only writing workshop. Register now atGoogle Classroom (app or web). Registration code: kdcmthg.
For more information: DSTLArts.org/conchasycafezine.
Where: DSTL Arts
Date: Tuesday the 3rd (through 12/19/23)
Time: 6:30 pm – 8 pm
Address: Online Event (see site)
Website: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cw0cb1GLt-6/
Rewind the Wild: Generative Eco-Poetry Workshops with Nancy Lynée Woo via Gasher Press – Online Zoom Event.
Join a 4-week generative eco-poetry workshop on Zoom led by Nancy Lynée Woo, author of I’d Rather Be Lightning. Writers of all experience levels are welcome. In this workshop, we will explore our human relationship to nature, messy and complicated and beautiful as it may be during a time of rampant environmental destruction and rapid climate change. During each session, we will read an example poem for inspiration and then spend time writing together to a prompt inspired by the poem. Afterwards, participants will be invited to share their work with the group if they wish to.
Costs are sliding scale, $40-$100.
NOTE: See site for RSVP, guidelines, and details.
Where: Gasher Press
Date: Tuesday the 3rd (through the 24th)
Time: 6:30 pm – 8 pm
Address: Online Event (see site)
Website: https://www.gasherpress.com/events
At Skylight: Melissa Lozada-Oliva, with Olivia Gatwood, & Candelaria at Skylight Books – In-Person Event
Melissa Lozada-Oliva, in conversation with Olivia Gatwood, will discuss her new novel, Candelaria.
Author of Dreaming of You Melissa Lozada-Oliva delivers an unsettling, raucous debut novel written with tongue-in-cheek humor and sharp cultural criticism that unearths one troubled family’s legacy, feasting on diasporic identity politics and examining the limits of bodily autonomy and the dangers of wanting to belong at any cost.
A sweeping, mystical novel following three generations of women as they grapple with muddled pasts and predetermined futures, Candelaria is a story of love that eats us alive.
Melissa Lozada-Oliva is the child of Guatemalan and Colombian immigrants and the author of Dreaming of You and peluda. Her work has been featured in NPR, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, PAPER, Armani Beauty, and more. She is a member of the band Meli and the Specs. She holds an MFA in poetry from NYU and lives in New York City.
Olivia Gatwood is a writer from Albuquerque, New Mexico. She is the author of two poetry collections, Life of the Party (The Dial Press, 2019) and New American Best Friend (Button Poetry, 2017). She co-wrote the film The Governesses, which is currently being produced by A24. Her debut novel, Whoever You Are, Honey, is set to be released in Summer 2024.
NOTE: See site for RSVP, guidelines, and details.
Where: Skylight
Date: Tuesday the 3rd
Time: 7 pm – 8:30 pm
Address: 1818 N. Vermont Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90027
Book Launch: Erin Marie Lynch, with Guests, & Removal Acts at Stories Books & Café off-site at Hooverhaus – In-Person Event
Stories presents the book launch of Removal Acts by Erin Marie Lynch, iwith readings by Aria Aber, Alexandria Hall, and Jessica Abughattas.
Drawing its title from the 1863 Federal Act that banished the Dakota people from their homelands, this remarkable debut collection reckons with the present-day repercussions of historical violence. Through an array of brief lyrics, visual forms, chronologies, and sequences, these virtuosic poems trace a path through the labyrinth of distances and absences haunting the American colonial experiment.
Bar by Vinovore Wines and Topo Chico.
After-party to follow.
RSVP @ https://rb.gy/4tqx
NOTE: See site for RSVP, guidelines, and details.
Where: Stories Books & Café at Hooverhaus
Date: Tuesday the 3rd
Time: 7 pm – 8 pm
Address: 622 N. Hoover St., Silver Lake, CA
Website: https://storiesla.com/events
Steve Searles, with Chris Erskine & What the Bears Know at Vroman’s – In-Person Event
Steve Searles, in conversationwith Chris Erskine, will present and discuss his book,What the Bears Know: How I Found Truth and Magic in America’s Most Misunderstood Creatures.
In this wondrous and eye-opening exploration, Steve Searles, the renowned and respected “Bear Whisperer” of Mammoth Lakes, takes the reader on a journey into the lives of these remarkable creatures and the world we share.
NOTE: See site for tickets, guidelines, and details.
Where: Vroman’s
Date: Tuesday the 3rd
Time: 7 pm
Address: 695 E, Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, CA., 91101
Website: https://www.vromansbookstore.com/Steve-Searles-with-Chris-Erskine-discusses-What-the-Bears-Know
The Virtual Cobalt Series & Open Mic with Jeff Bettger – Virtual Zoom Event
The Virtual Cobalt Poets Series, presented by Rick Lupert via Zoom, will feature an Open Reading and guest Jeff Bettger.
Jeff Bettger is a poet and writer and the author of Musings About Reality. See more at jeffbettgerpoetry.com.
NOTE: Details and Zoom link at event link.
Where: Cobalt Poets – Online Zoom Event
Date: Tuesday the 3rd
Time: 7:30 pm – 9:30 pm
Address: Online event (see site)
Website: http://poetrysuperhighway.com/cobalt/calendar.html
The Sunless Sea Open Mic: Poetry and Spoken Word Show – In-Person Event
The Sunless Sea Open Mic: Poetry and Spoken Word Show is offered every week at the Unurban Coffee House. Hosted by DeForest Wright, all are invited to attend.
NOTE: Details at event link.
Where: Unurban Coffee House
Date: Tuesday the 3rd
Time: 7:30 pm – 9:30 pm
Address: 3301 Pico Blvd., Santa Monica, CA 90405
Website: https://www.facebook.com/groups or https://www.facebook.com/events/213407634459999/?active_tab=discussion
An Evening with Heather Cox Richardson & Democracy Awakening at New Roads School – In-Person Event SOLD OUT
In-Person Event is SOLD OUT, but tickets are available for Virtual event on October 7th (see site).
From historian and author of the popular daily newsletter Letters From An American, a vital narrative that explains how America, once a beacon of democracy, now teeters on the brink of autocracy—and how we can turn back.
Heather Cox Richardson is Professor of History at Boston College. She has written about the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, and the American West in award-winning books whose subjects stretch from the European settlement of the North American continent to the history of the Republican Party through the Trump administration. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and The Guardian, among other outlets. She is the cohost of the Vox Media podcast, Now & Then.
NOTE: Details at event link.
Where: Ann and Jerry Moss Theatre at New Roads School
Date: Tuesday the 3rd
Time: 8 pm
Address: 3131 Olympic Blvd., Santa Monica, CA 90404
Website: https://livetalksla.org/events/heather-cox-richardson/
Da Poetry Lounge: SLAM Night at Greenway Court – In-Person Event
The nation’s largest weekly Open Mic event is 25 years strong. They hold open mic nights. At an open mic, all are welcome to share their poetry or sit in their audience.
Every 3rd Tuesday is Slam Night so DPL holds themed poetry slam competitions every 3RD TUESDAY of the month. This competition is where poets perform their own original work and are then judged on a numeric scale by judges preselected from the audience.
See SLAM Night Details at site.
$10 donation. Do NOT line up prior to 7:30 p.m. Free parking adjacent to theatre.
Masks are encouraged. All ages are welcome.
Where: Greenway Court Theatre and YouTube Live Stream
Date: Tuesday the 3rd
Time: 9 pm – 11 pm
Address: 544 N. Fairfax Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90036
Website: https://www.instagram.com/p/ChLUBSRPCFb/ or
https://www.dapoetrylounge.com/events/open-mic-night
Write Your Novel Event at Platt Branch Library, LAPL – In-Person Event
The Platt Branch Library invites you to write your novel at their library.
Is writing one of your New Year’s resolutions for 2023? Is completing a book on your bucket list? Whether you shouted an emphatic yes or mumbled a hushed maybe to either of those questions, our new novel writing support group is for you. This new group will be a place to learn, practice, and receive support from other writers. We will use LinkedIn Learning courses available on lapl.org to guide us through the novel writing process one step at a time. With weekly goals and the encouragement of your peers, you can spend the year working your way toward a completed novel.
NOTE: See site for RSVP, guidelines, and details.
Where: Platt Branch Library, LAPL
Date: Wednesday the 4th
Time: 3:30 pm – 4:30 pm
Address: 23600 Victory Blvd., Woodland Hills, CA 91367
Website: https://lapl.org/whats-on/events/write-your-novel
2nd & 3rd Grade Book Club: The Sea of Terror at pages: a bookstore – In-Person Kids Event
2nd & 3rd Grade Book Club participants will discuss Mixed Up, by author Stuart Gibbs and illustrator Stacy Curtis.
Join Tim and his friends on a treacherous journey across the seas in the laugh-out-loud funny, highly illustrated third book of the New York Times bestselling Once Upon a Tim series from Spy School author Stuart Gibbs.
Where: pages: a bookstore (in the Courtyard)
Date: Wednesday the 4th
Time: 4:30 pm
Address: 904 Manhattan Ave., Manhattan Beach, CA 90266
Website: https://www.pagesabookstore.com/event/2nd-3rd-grade-book-club-0
Be the Change Writing Workshop with James Coats – Online Event
Be the Change, a social justice writing workshop, is led by writer James Coats and is offered online every first Wednesday of the month.
James Coats is an author, poet, and educator born in Los Angeles and raised in the Inland Empire. He received his BFA from Cal Poly Pomona and his MBA from Cal State San Bernardino. As a creative change agent, he believes the arts can inspire youth and influence positive change in the world. He is the author of Midnight and Mad Dreams.
NOTE: See site for registration, link, and details. Cost is pay what you want.
Where: Be the Change
Date: Wednesday the 4th
Time: 6 pm – 8 pm PT
Address: Online Zoom Event ID: 826 5843 0669
Website: N/A
Book Launch:Susie Yi, with Shiho Pate & A Sky of Paper Stars at Bel Canto Books KUBO – In-Person Event
Bel Canto Books celebrates the launch of A Sky of Paper Stars, with author Susie Yi, in conversation with Shiho Pate, illustrator ofRamen for Everyone.
The Farewell meets Nat Enough in this middle-grade graphic novel about a Korean American girl who makes an ill-fated wish to fit in and must grapple with the consequences when she returns to Korea to attend her grandmother’s funeral.
Susie Yi is a Korean American author-illustrator. She debuted her children’s graphic novel career with the series Cat & Cat Adventures, published by HarperAlley, based on her beloved webcomic Cat & Cat Comics. She currently lives in sunny southern California with her two cats Mickey and Minnie.
Shiho Pate started her career as an artist for several indie gaming studios in NYC. In her 10-plus years in that industry, she published many social games and mobile games, but her passion has always been children’s book illustration. She is the illustrator of 2 Pirates + 1 Robot, written by Henry Herz. Support and inspiration comes from her daughter and husband
NOTE: See site for RSVP, guidelines, and details.
Where: Bel Canto Books KUBO, LB
Date: Wednesday the 4th
Time: 6 pm – 8 pm
Address: 3976 Atlantic Avenue Long Beach, CA 90807
Website: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/susie-yi-a-sky-of-paper-stars-tickets-717382810297
History Book Club: Ghostland at Cellar Door Bookstore – In-Person Event
History Book Club participants will discuss this month’s selection, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, by author Colin Dickey.
Colin Dickey is on the trail of America’s ghosts. And embarks on a journey across the continental United States to decode and unpack the American history repressed in our most famous haunted places. Some have established reputations as “the most haunted mansion in America,” or “the most haunted prison”; others, like the haunted Indian burial grounds in West Virginia, evoke memories from the past our collective nation tries to forget.
With boundless curiosity, Dickey conjures the dead by focusing on questions of the living—how do we, the living, deal with stories about ghosts, and how do we inhabit and move through spaces that have been deemed, for whatever reason, haunted? Paying attention not only to the true facts behind a ghost story, but also to the ways in which changes to those facts are made—and why those changes are made—Dickey paints a version of American history left out of the textbooks, one of things left undone, crimes left unsolved.
Colin Dickey grew up in San Jose, California, a few miles from the Winchester Mystery House, the most haunted house in America. As a writer, speaker, and academic, he has made a career out of collecting unusual objects and hidden histories all over the country. He’s a regular contributor to the LA Review of Books and Lapham’s Quarterly, and is the co-editor (with Joanna Ebenstein) of The Morbid Anatomy Anthology. He is also a member of the Order of the Good Death, a collective of artists, writers, and death industry professionals interested in improving the Western world’s relationship with mortality. With a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Southern California, he is an associate professor of creative writing at National University.
NOTE: See site for RSVP, guidelines, and details.
Where: Cellar Door Bookstore
Date: Wednesday the 4th
Time: 6 pm
Address: 473 E. Alessandro Blvd., Suite B, Riverside, CA 92508
Website: https://www.cellardoorbookstore.com
In-Store Reading: Marsha Gordon, with Cara Robertson, & Becoming the Ex-Wife at Chevalier’s Books – In-Person Event
Marsha Gordon, in conversation with Cara Robertson, will read and discuss her book, Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life & Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott.
This book is the riveting biography of Ursula Parrott—best-selling author, Hollywood screenwriter, and voice for the modern woman.
Credited with popularizing the label “ex-wife” in 1929, Ursula Parrott wrote provocatively about divorcées, career women, single mothers, work-life balance, and a host of new challenges facing modern women. Her best sellers, Hollywood film deals, marriages and divorces, and run-ins with the law made her a household name. Part biography, part cultural history, Becoming the Ex-Wife establishes Parrott’s rightful place in twentieth-century American culture, uncovering her neglected work and keen insights into American women’s lives during a period of immense social change.
Although she was frequently dismissed as a “woman’s writer,” reading Parrott’s writing today makes it clear that she was a trenchant philosopher of modernity—her work was prescient, anticipating issues not widely raised until decades after her decline into obscurity. With elegant wit and a deft command of the archive, Marsha Gordon tells a timely story about the life of a woman on the front lines of a culture war that is still raging today.
Marsha Gordon is Professor of Film Studies at North Carolina State University, a past Fellow at the National Humanities Center, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar. She is the author of numerous books and articles, and co-director of several short documentaries. Her latest book is Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life & Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott (2023). Marsha regularly introduces films, gives lectures, and participates in panels all over the United States and Europe.
Cara Robertson began researching the Borden case as a Harvard undergraduate in 1990. She holds a PhD from University of Oxford and a JD from Stanford Law School. She clerked at the Supreme Court of the United States, served as a legal adviser to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at The Hague, and has written for various publications. Her scholarship has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Humanities Center, of which she is a Trustee. The Trial of Lizzie Borden, her first book, won the New England Society Book Award in 2020.
Where: Chevalier’s Books
Date: Wednesday the 4th
Time: 6 pm
Address: 133 N. Larchmont Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90004
Creative Writing Workshop with Tony DuShane at Los Feliz Branch Library, LAPL – In-Person Event
Join a free 90-minute writer’s workshop presented by UCLA instructor Tony DuShane, screenwriter of the film Confessions of a Teenage Jesus Jerk, based on his novel of the same name.
This workshop is open to adults only.
NOTE: See site for RSVP, guidelines, and details.
Where: Los Feliz Branch Library, LAPL
Date: Wednesday the 4th
Time: 6 pm
Address: 1874 Hillhurst Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90027
Website: https://lapl.org/whats-on/events/creative-writing-workshop-tony-dushane-23
David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker & Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane! at Diesel, A Bookstore – In-Person Event
David and Jerry Zucker in person with Jim Abrahams virtually are welcomed to the store to discuss and sign Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane!
Surely You Can’t Be Serious is an in-depth and hysterical look at the making of 1980’s comedy classic Airplane! by the legendary writers and directors of the hit film.
Airplane! premiered on July 2nd, 1980. With a budget of $3.5 million it went on to make nearly $200 million in sales and has influenced a multitude of comedians on both sides of the camera.
Surely You Can’t Be Serious is the first-ever oral history of the making of Airplane! by the creators, and of the beginnings of the ZAZ trio (Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker)–charting the rise of their comedy troupe Kentucky Fried Theater in Madison, Wisconsin all the way to premiere night. The directors explain what drew them to filmmaking and in particular, comedy. With anecdotes, behind the scenes trivia, and never-before-revealed factoids.
RSVP: There are a limited number of seats available, with the rest of the space standing room only. To reserve a seat, please purchase one copy of a book for one seat.
Where: Diesel, A Bookstore
Date: Wednesday the 4th
Time: 6:30 pm
Address: 225 26th St., Suite 33, Santa Monica, CA 90402
Website: https://www.dieselbookstore.com/event/David-Zucker-Jerry-Zucker-Jim-Abrahams-Author-signing
Nick McDonell, with Maggie Nelson, & Quiet Street: On American Privilege at Book Soup – In-Person Event
Nick McDonell, in conversation with Maggie Nelson,will present and discuss his book, Quiet Street: On American Privilege.
Quiet Street examines the problem of America’s one percent, whose vision of a more just world never materializes. Who are these people? How do they cling to power? What would it take for them to share it? Quiet Street looks for answers in a universal experience: coming to terms with the culture that made you.
NOTE: See site for RSVP, guidelines, and details.
Where: Book Soup
Date: Wednesday the 4th
Time: 7 pm – 8:30 pm
Address: 8818 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, CA 90069
Website: https://www.booksoup.com/event/nick-mcdonnell
Open Mic at Micky’s with Brian Sonia-Wallace and Nate Lovellat Micky’s West Hollywood – In-Person Event
The Mic at Micky’s is a safe space for LGBTQ talents to come and share their gifts with the world. Don’t miss out on this amazing opportunity to perform and show off your unique skills. Sign up in advance on the provided link to secure your spot and reserve the best view in the house!
You can also enjoy Micky’s $5 happy hour specials on wells, wines, beer & shot of the day, and an unforgettable evening of Queer talent, fun, and great deals!
Hosted by Brian Sonia-Wallace and Nate Lovell.
Featuring special guests, performances & YOU! Sign up at site.
NOTE: See site for RSVP, guidelines, and details.
Where: Micky’s West Hollywood
Date: Wednesday the 4th
Time: 7 pm – 10 pm
Address: 8857 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood, CA 90069
Website: https://www.mickys.com/tc-events/the-mic-at-mickys-oct-4th/
At Skylight: Sheena Patel & I’m a Fan: A Novel at Skylight Books – In-Person Event
Sheena Patel will discuss her book, I’m a Fan: A Novel.
Sheena Patel’s incandescent first novel begins with the unnamed narrator describing her involvement in a seemingly unequal romantic relationship. With a clear and unforgiving eye, she dissects the behavior of all involved, herself included, and makes startling connections between the power struggles at the heart of human relationships and those of the wider world. I’m a Fan offers a devastating critique of class, social media, patriarchy’s hold on us, and our cultural obsession with status and how that status is conveyed.
Sheena Patel is a writer and assistant director for the film and TV industry. She is part of the 4 BROWN GIRLS WHO WRITE collective and her debut novel I’m a Fan won a British Book Award in the Discover category, has been longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Jhalak Prize.
NOTE: See site for RSVP, guidelines, and details.
Where: Skylight
Date: Wednesday the 4th
Time: 7 pm – 8:30 pm
Address: 1818 N. Vermont Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90027
Website: https://www.skylightbooks.com/event/skylight-sheena-patel-presents-im-fan
Louis Friedman & Alone But Not Lonely at Vroman’s – In-Person Event
Louis Firedman will present and discuss his book,Alone But Not Lonely: Exploring for Extraterrestrail Life.
In this book the author argues that intelligent life is probably rare in the universe (maybe even uniquely on Earth) but that simple life is likely abundant on millions or billions of planets waiting now to be discovered. He asserts that studying and searching for extraterrestrial life cannot be done by interstellar probes—due to the vastness of space and the comparative brevity of human lifespans—but it can be done remotely by a new technique involving the solar gravity lens that can magnify exoplanets by tens of billions. This technique will allow humankind to explore exoplanets and open up an exciting new field of comparative astrobiology.
Wide-ranging in scope, this book discusses the history of searching for extraterrestrial life, the scientific evidence thereof, and finally his own conclusions on what’s next. Included in the book are three appendices: an explanation of interstellar messaging, a reprint of a debate between Carl Sagan and Ernst Mayr on extraterrestrial intelligence, and an opinion essay on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. (University of Arizona Press)
NOTE: See site for tickets, guidelines, and details.
Where: Vroman’s
Date: Wednesday the 4th
Time: 7 pm
Address: 695 E, Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, CA., 91101
Website: https://www.vromansbookstore.com/Louis-Friedman-discusses-Alone-But-Not-Lonely
Anansi Virtual Writers Workshop at The World Stage – In-Person Event
The Anansi Writers Workshop was founded in 1990 by Kamau Daáood, Akilah Oliver, Nafis Nabawi and Anthony Lyons. In 1993, Michael Datcher initiated the development of a three-part format for the workshop. Our tradition of a community workshop began in the late 1960s at the Watts Writers’ Workshop, where World Stage co-founder Kamau Daáood started his writing career. For general information and booking, contact V. Kali, the Anansi Writers Workshop Coordinator, at vkaliflowers@gmail.com.
- 7:30 pm – 8:30 pm — Formal workshop;
- 8:30 pm – 9:00 pm — Readings: TBA;
- 9:05 pm – 10:00 pm — Open mic.
Suggested: $5.00 Donation via PayPal: The World Stage Gallery.
NOTE: See site for further details, and any change in the schedule. Contact kaliflowers@gmail.com or call (323) 293-2451
Where: The World Stage
Date: Wednesday the 4th
Time: 7:30 pm – 10 pm
Address: 4321 Degnan Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90008
Website: https://www.instagram.com/anansiwritersworkshop/
Wednesday Night Poetry Workshop at Beyond Baroque – Online Zoom Event
Join Beyond Baroque’s longest-running free poetry workshop via Zoom online as we welcome new and seasoned poets to share their work and provide feedback. Please be prepared to share one poem. This workshop will be hosted via the Zoom video-conferencing platform. Please sign up for each workshop session at least 24 hours in advance of the meeting, and you will be contacted with instructions on how to join the meeting.
The workshop facilitator this quarter is James Fujinami Moore, whose debut poetry collection is indecent hours (Four Way Books, 2022), winner of the GLCA New Writers Award in Poetry and finalist for the Golden Poppy’s Martin Cruz Smith Award & the Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Barrow Street’s 4×2, The Brooklyn Rail, Guesthouse, Jet Fuel Review, The Margins, the Pacifica Literary Review, and Prelude. He has received fellowships from Poets House, Bread Loaf, and the Frost Place, and received his MFA from Hunter College in 2016. He lives in Los Ángeles.
Please spend some time before the workshop learning how to share documents via Zoom. It will keep the session moving if you’re able to make your poem viewable quickly and easily. Here’s an instructive video that might help.
The workshop can sometimes reach high levels of attendance, which means not everyone will get a chance to read every session.
NOTE: See site for further details, tickets, and information.
Where: Beyond Baroque
Date: Wednesday the 4th
Time: 8 pm – 10 pm
Address: Online event (see site)
Website: https://www.beyondbaroque.org/free_workshops or https://www.eventbrite.com/e/wednesday-night-poetry-workshop-tickets-728329381787
Poetry Reading & Open Mic by Two Idiots Peddling Poetry with Ben Trigg & Featured Guest J.D. Isip at The Ugly Mug – In-Person Event
Join host Ben Trigg and Two Idiots Peddling Poetry at the Ugly Mug on Wednesday Night for our Reading & Open Mic, with featured guest J.D. Isip.
J.D. Isip, (he/him) is the author of Kissing the Wound (Moon Tide Press, 2023) and Pocketing Feathers (Sadie Girl Press, 2015). He’s a local boy who has an AA from Long Beach City College and both a BA and MA from Cal State Fullerton. He received his doctorate from Texas A&M University-Commerce, and he decided to stay in Texas where he teaches at Collin College. His biggest fans and those who benefit most from his book sales are his dogs Ivy and Bucky (if you see the pictures, you’ll buy more books – promise).
$4 cover fee, cash only
The format is to welcome a featured artist for an individual reading, as well as an Open Mic reading.
$4 cover fee, cash only.
NOTE: See site for further details.
Where: The Ugly Mug, Orange
Date: Wednesday the 4th
Time: 8 pm – 10 pm
Address: 261 N. Glassell St., Orange, CA 92866
Website: https://www.facebook.com/people/Two-Idiots-Peddling-Poetry/ or https://allevents.in/orange/jd-isip-at-the-ugly-mug/200025170113803
Book Talk & Signing: Andy Romanoff & Stories I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You at Chevalier’s Books – In-Person Event
Andy Romanoff will read and discuss his book Stories I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You.
Andy Romanoff’s memoir is a book about life and living, stories of hard choices and unlikely outcomes disguised as a book about running wild and raising hell. Filled with 80 years of stories told as fresh as today Romanoff takes you along for the ride as he makes a meaningful life for himself without turning his back on the person he’d been or the places he’d come from.
Where: Chevalier’s Books
Date: Thursday the 4th
Time: 6 pm
Address: 133 N. Larchmont Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90004
David Kipen & Dear California: The Golden State in Diaries and Letters at Diesel, A Bookstore – In-Person Event
Davis Kipen will discuss his new book,Dear California: The Golden State in Diaries and Letters.
David Kipen reveals this long-storied place through its diaries and letters and gives readers a highly anticipated follow-up to his book Dear Los Angeles.
Running from January 1 through December 31, leaping across decades and centuries, Dear California reflects on the state’s shifting landscapes and the notion of place. Entries talk across the centuries, from indigenous stories told before the Spanish arrived on the Pacific coast through to present-day tweets, blogs, and other ephemera. The collected voices show how far we’ve wandered—and how far we still have to go in chasing the elusive California dream.
California native David Kipen has worked as the San Francisco Chronicle’s book editor/critic, Director of Literature at the NEA, and, lately, L.A. Times critic at large and founder-director of the Libros Schmibros Lending Library. Previous books include Dear Los Angeles and four reissued WPA Guides. His California-set historical paranoid conspiracy thriller, The Anniversarist, is forthcoming.
Where: Diesel, A Bookstore
Date: Thursday the 5th
Time: 6:30 pm
Address: 225 26th St., Suite 33, Santa Monica, CA 90402
Website: https://www.dieselbookstore.com/event/David-Kipen-Author-signing/
Local Author Event: Eugenio Volpe & Caravaggio at pages: a bookstore – In-Person Event
Author Eugenio Volpe will present and discuss his new book. Caravaggio.
The famous bi-sexual libertine who would be more at home on Tinder than at a Roman Cathedral, gallivants through the streets like brush strokes to become a Baroque 16th century icon. The year is 1604 and Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio is a superstar, his blockbuster paintings packing the pews of Rome. Caravaggio should be reveling in prosperity, but the artistic trailblazer and nefarious street-brawler is his own worst enemy. While the genius paints masterpieces, the ruffian in him can’t stay out of jail. Caravaggio is a man at existential odds with himself until falling in love with Lena Antognetti, the prostitute modeling his newest Virgin pictures. Caravaggio paints Lena into a life of wealth and celebrity, but the power couple’s provocative fame earns them a horde of resentful and jealous enemies. I, Caravaggio dramatizes the superstar’s psychological unraveling under the sexual and political pressures of the Catholic Reformation.
Eugenio Volpe is a Redondo Beach resident who spends half his time surfing between Second and Third Point Malibu and the other half immersed in 17th-century art history scandal. He is a winner of the PEN Discovery Award in Fiction. His debut novel I, Caravaggio is a modernized portrayal of the baroque master’s turbulent launch into superstardom. Volpe’s writing can be found in Gulf Coast, the Massachusetts Review, Hobart, New York Tyrant, and elsewhere. His essay “Jesus Kicks His Oedipus Complex” was a notable in Best American Essays 2021. Volpe’s scholarly interests include critical theory, narrative design, and rhetoric. He teaches at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He couldn’t have done any of this without the support of his wife and son. For more, visit: https://www.eugeniovolpe.com/
Where: pages: a bookstore
Date: Thursday the 5th
Time: 6:30 pm
Address: 904 Manhattan Ave., Manhattan Beach, CA 90266
Website: https://www.pagesabookstore.com/event/eugenio-volpe-discusses-i-caravaggio
Let Freedom Read: A Banned Books Week Panel Discussion at Flintridge Bookstore – In-Person Event
Let Freedom Read: A Banned Books Week Panel Discussion will be moderated by writer/educator Benin Lemus, in discussion with participants: bookstore manager/book buyer Robert Gibbs, children’s book author Andrea Looney, and La Cañada Flintridge Public Library manager Mark Totten.
From their unique perspectives, panelists will explore this polarizing issue and discuss, among other topics, why books continue to be banned, the harm censorship causes, and their own personal or professional experiences regarding banned or challenged titles.
NOTE: See site for RSVP, guidelines, and details.
Where: Flintridge Bookstore
Date: Thursday the 5th
Time: 7 pm – 8:30 pm
Address: 858 Foothill Blvd., La Cañada Flintridge, CA, 91011
Mobar Coffee Open Mic Monthly Event at Mobar Coffee Company – In-Person Event
Calling all Musicians, Authors, Poets, Stand Up Comedians and much more! Share your art with our local community and enjoy half off drinks!
NOTE: See site for RSVP, guidelines, and details.
Where: Mobar Coffee Company
Date: Thursday the 5th
Time: 7 pm – 9 pm
Address: 4884 Huntington Drive South, Los Angeles, CA
Website: https://allevents.in/los%20angeles/mobar-coffee-co-open-mic/10000399850633007
Elle Nash & Deliver Me at North Figueroa Bookshop – In-Person Event
Elle Nash will present and discuss her book, Deliver Me.
At a meatpacking facility in the Missouri Ozarks, Dee-Dee and her co-workers kill and butcher 40,000 chickens in a single shift.
The work is repetitive and brutal, with each stab and cut a punishment to her hands and joints, but Dee-Dee’s more concerned with what is happening inside her body. After a series of devastating miscarriages, Dee-Dee has found herself pregnant, and she is determined to carry this child to term. Dee-Dee fled the Pentecostal church years ago, but judgment follows her in the form of regular calls from her mother, whose raspy voice urges Dee-Dee to quit living in sin and marry her boyfriend Daddy, an underemployed ex-con with an insect fetish.
With a child on the way, at long last Dee-Dee can bask in her mother’s and boyfriend’s newfound parturient attention. She will matter. She will be loved. She will be complete. When her charismatic friend Sloane reappears after a twenty-year absence, feeding her insecurities and awakening suppressed desires, Dee-Dee fears she will go back to living in the shadows. Neither the ultimate indignity of yet another miscarriage nor Sloane’s own pregnancy deters her: she must prepare for the baby’s arrival.
Elle Nash is the author of the novel Animals Eat Each Other (Dzanc Books), which was featured in O Magazine and hailed by Publishers Weekly as a “complex, impressive exploration of obsession and desire.” Upon publication of her novel in the UK, she appeared at the Edinburgh International Book Festival to present the work of under-represented voices with Amnesty International, and to speak about sex, death and feminism in literature. Her work appears in Guernica, Adroit, The Creative Independent, Hazlitt, Literary Hub, Cosmopolitan, New York Tyrant and elsewhere. She is a founding editor of Witch Craft Magazine and currently lives in Glasgow, Scotland.
NOTE: See site for RSVP, guidelines, and details.
Where: North Figueroa Bookshop
Date: Thursday the 5th
Time: 7 pm – 9 pm
Address: 6040 N. Figueroa St., Los Angeles, CA 90042
Website: https://northfigbookshop.com/event/#calendar-8a0f87f6-17d6-4f10-9815-04df4c8251ba-event-lmi7gv4d
At Second Home Hollywood: Viet Thanh Nguyen, with Susan Straight, & A Man of Two Facesat Skylight Books off-site at Second Home Hollywood – In-Person Event
Viet Thanh Nguyen, in conversation with Susan Straight, will present and discusshis new memoir, A Man of Two Faces, a ticketed event with PEN America.
This highly original, blistering, and unconventional memoir by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer, which has now sold over one million copies worldwide, is the newest work from Viet Thanh Nguyen.
With insight, humor, formal invention, and lyricism, A Man of Two Faces rewinds the film of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s own life. He expands the genre of personal memoir by acknowledging larger stories of refugeehood, colonization, and ideas about Vietnam and America, writing with his trademark sardonic wit and incisive analysis, as well as a deep emotional openness about his life as a father and a son.
At the age of four, Nguyen and his family are forced to flee his hometown of Ban M Thuột and come to the USA as refugees. After being removed from his brother and parents and homed with a family on his own, Nguyen is later allowed to resettle into his own family in suburban San Jos. But there is violence hidden behind the sunny facade of what he calls AMERICATM. One Christmas Eve, when Nguyen is nine, while watching cartoons at home, he learns that his parents have been shot while working at their grocery store, the S iG n Mới, a place where he sometimes helps price tins of fruit with a sticker gun. Years later, as a teenager, the blood-stirring drama of the films of the Vietnam War such as Apocalypse Now throw Nguyen into an existential crisis: how can he be both American and Vietnamese, both the killer and the person being killed? When he learns about an adopted sister who has stayed back in Vietnam, and ultimately visits her, he grows to understand just how much his parents have left behind. And as his parents age, he worries increasingly about their comfort and care, and realizes that some of their older wounds are reopening.
Profound in its emotions and brilliant in its thinking about cultural power, A Man of Two Faces explores the necessity of both forgetting and of memory, the promises America so readily makes and breaks, and the exceptional life story of one of the most original and important writers working today.
Viet Thanh Nguyen is a novelist and the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of English and American Studies at USC. His best-selling novel, The Sympathizer, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Other honors include the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Literary Excellence from the American Library Association.
Susan Straight is the author of several novels, including Mecca (2022, Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and the national bestseller Highwire Moon, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She also wrote A Million Nightingales, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, as well as the memoir In the Country of Women, named a best book of 2019 by NPR and Real Simple. She is the recipient of the Edgar Award for Best Short Story, the O. Henry Prize, the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and her stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, Granta, Harper’s, and elsewhere. She was born and continues to live in Riverside, California, with her family, where she serves as Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside.
NOTE: See site for tickets, guidelines, and details.
Where: Skylight at Second Home Hollywood
Date: Thursday the 5th
Time: 7 pm
Where: 1370 N. St. Andrews Pl.,Los Angeles, CA., 90028
At Skylight: Anders Carlson-Wee, with F. Douglas Brown, Michelle Bitting & Edgar Kunz, & Disease of Kings at Skylight Books – In-Person Event
Join Skylight for a vivid chronicle of friendship and loneliness amid the precarity of life in late capitalism when every day is a fight for survival.
Carlton Wee’s collection,Disease of Kings explores the tender yet volatile friendship between two young scammers living off the fat of society. Here are stories of an odd couple who scrounge, con, hustle, and steal, alternately proud of their ability to fabricate a life at the margins and ashamed of their own laziness and greed.
Anders Carlson-Wee is the author of Disease of Kings (W.W. Norton, 2023), The Low Passions (W.W. Norton, 2019), a New York Public Library Book Group Selection, and Dynamite (Bull City Press, 2015), winner of the Frost Place Chapbook Prize. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, Harvard Review, BuzzFeed, American Poetry Review, and many other publications. The recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, he is the winner of the Poetry International Prize. Anders holds an MFA from Vanderbilt University and is represented by Massie & McQuilkin Literary Agents. He lives in Los Angeles.
F. Douglas Brown is the author of two poetry collections, ICON (Writ Large Press, 2018), and Zero to Three (University of Georgia, 2014), winner of the 2013 Cave Canem Poetry Prize selected by US Poet Laureate, Tracy K. Smith. He also co-authored with poet Geffrey Davis, Begotten (URB Books, 2016), a chapbook of poetry as part of the Floodgate Poetry Series. Brown, an educator for over 25 years, currently teaches African American Poetry and African American Studies at Loyola High School of Los Angeles, where he serves as the Director of the Office of Equity and Inclusion.
Michelle Bitting is the author of five poetry collections, Good Friday Kiss, winner of the inaugural De Novo First Book Award; Notes to the Beloved, which won the Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award; The Couple Who Fell to Earth; Broken Kingdom, winner of the 2018 Catamaran Poetry Prize; and Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize and recently named one of Kirkus Reviews 2022 Best of Indie. Her chapbook Dummy Ventriloquist is forthcoming in 2024. Bitting is a lecturer in poetry and creative writing at Loyola Marymount University.
Edgar Kunz is the author of two collections of poems: Fixer (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2023) and Tap Out (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2019), a New York Times New & Noteworthy pick. He has been a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. New poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, APR, Poetry, and Oxford American. He lives in Baltimore and teaches at Goucher College.
NOTE: See site for tickets, guidelines, and details.
Where: Skylight
Date: Thursday the 5th
Time: 7 pm
Where: 1818 N. Vermont Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90027
Book Launch: Lucretia Tye Jasmine, with Pamela Des Barres & 70s Teen Pop at Stories Books & Café – In-Person Event
Stories presents the book launch of 70s Teen Pop by Lucretia Tye Jasmine, who will be in conversation with Pamela Des Barres.
70s Teen Pop examines how liberation and a true counterculture can be possible through music.
NOTE: See site for RSVP, guidelines, and details.
Where: Stories Books & Café
Date: Thursday the 5th
Time: 7 pm – 8 pm
Address: 1716 W. Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90026
Website: https://storiesla.com/events
Tonalli Thursday Open Mic Monthly Event via Los Angeles Poetry Society – Online Event
Tonalli Open Mic is offered online every 1st Thursday of the month by Los Angeles Poet Society.
NOTE: See site for RSVP, link, and details.
Where: Tonalli Open Mic via LAPS
Date: Thursday the 5th
Time: 7 pm – 9 pm
Address: Online Zoom event ID: 897 1039 1895
Website: https://www.lapoetsociety.org/events
Immigration Stories with UCLA Professor Alicia Gaspar de Albaat Village Well Books & Coffee – In-Person Event
Alicia Gaspar de Alba,originally from El Paso, Texas, has been a professor of Chicana/o Studies, English, and Gender Studies at UCLA since 1994. She has published 13 books, among them award-winning novels, collections of short fiction and poetry, as well as academic books. Her noir novel, Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders, won the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Prize for Best Lesbian Mystery in 2005.
Where: Village Well Books & Coffee
Date: Thursday the 5th
Time: 7 pm – 8 pm
Address: 9900 Culver Blvd., Culver City, CA 90232
Website: https://shop.villagewell.com/events/28410
50 Years of Ms. Magazine: Conversations with Dolores Huerta and Eleanor Smealat Hammer Museum – In-Person Event
The magazine’s executive editor Katherine Spillar looks back on the legacy of Ms. and the future of feminism alongside labor rights champion Dolores Huerta; Eleanor Smeal, cofounder of the Feminist Majority Foundation; Carmen Rios, consulting digital editor for Ms.; and Michele Bratcher Goodwin, award-winning author and host of the Ms. podcast On the Issues.
Katherine (Kathy) Spillar is the Executive Editor of Ms. and editor of and contributor to 50 Years of Ms: The Best of the Pathfinding Magazine that Ignited a Revolution. Under her oversight, Ms. has increased its investigative reporting and in-depth analysis and today is the largest print and online feminist platform—reaching millions from across the globe via the quarterly print magazine, a vibrant and popular website, a robust daily and weekly e-newsletter mailing list, social media, the innovative digital textbook resource Ms. Classroom and audio and video programming from Ms. Studios. Kathy is also the Executive Director of Feminist Majority Foundation and Feminist Majority, national organizations working for women’s equality, empowerment, and non-violence; one of the founders, she has been a driving force in executing the organizations’ diverse programs securing women’s rights both domestically and globally since its inception in 1987.
Dolores Huerta is a member of the Ms. Advisory Board and the Board of the Feminist Majority Foundation, which publishes Ms. magazine, and the founder and president of the Dolores Huerta Foundation. She was the co-founder, alongside Cesar Chavez, of the United Farm Workers Union. She remains a pillar of civil, labor, LGBTQ+ and women’s rights activism, anti-poverty efforts and community organizing. Among her many accolades, Dolores was named Ms. magazine’s One of the Three Most Important Women in 1997, and in 2012, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama.
Eleanor (Ellie) Smeal is co-founder and president of the Feminist Majority Foundation, the publisher of Ms. One of the architects of the modern drive for women’s equality, Ellie is a political analyst, strategist, and grassroots organizer, and she has led efforts for the economic, political and social equality and empowerment of women worldwide for more than four decades—including the original drive to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. She continues to be a leading strategist in the movement to ensure the ERA is added to the Constitution.
Dr. Michele Bratcher Goodwin is the Executive Producer of Ms. Studios, host of the popular Ms. podcast On the Issues with Michele Goodwin and a frequent contributor to Ms. whose work appears in the 50 Years of Ms. collection. She is the Linda D. & Timothy J. O’Neill Professor of Constitutional Law and Global Health Policy at Georgetown University. She previously held the chancellor’s professorship at University of California, Irvine and founded and directed its Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy and its Reproductive Justice Initiative. Michele is an award-winning author and journalist whose work has been published by outlets like Forbes, Salon, L.A. Times, Politico, Chicago Sun Times, Houston Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor, and the New York Times, and she is a global thought leader and advisor on matters related to law, society and global health.
Carmen Rios is the Consulting Digital Editor at Ms. and former Managing Digital Editor for the magazine. She is a feminist writer, broadcaster and community-builder whose pieces on queerness, gender, race and class have been published by BuzzFeed, Bust, CityLab, DAME, ElixHER, Everyday Feminism, Feministing, Feminist Formations, GirlBoss, GrokNation, MEL, Mic, the National Women’s History Museum, SIGNS and the Women’s Media Center; and she produced and hosted the popular feminist podcasts POPAGANDA, with Bitch Media, and THE BOSSY SHOW. Her work has been covered by outlets including NPR, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Vox, Good Morning America, and Jezebel.
Where: Hammer Museum
Date: Thursday the 5th
Time: 7:30 pm – 9 pm
Address: 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90024
Website: https://hammer.ucla.edu/programs-events/2023/50-years-ms-magazine-dolores-huerta-and-eleanor-smeal
erica lewis, Kazim Ali, A.H. Jerriod Avant at Poetic Research Bureau – In-Person Event
Poetic Research Bureau presents erica lewis, Kazim Ali, and A.H. Jerriod Avant reading from their newly released poetry collections at 2220 Arts + Archives.
In mahogany, lewis’s short lines flow down the page like postmodern psalms, connecting dailyness to timelessness, merging the historical and the beloved through reverence for family, music, and the realities of life.
Ali’s Sukun: New and Selected Poems draws a generous selection from his previous books, letting shine his lyrical and expressive language that pays close attention to both the spiritual and the visceral.
Avant’s debut collection, Muscadine, accentuates the sonic joys that Black Southern voices bring to bear on memorializing the present and commemorating the past.
Free to attend.
NOTE: See site for RSVP, guidelines, and details.
Where: Poetic Research Bureau
Date: Thursday the 5th
Time: 7:30 pm (Doors at 7 pm)
Address: 2220 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90057
Website: https://www.poeticresearch.com/events/erica-lewis-kazim-ali-ah-jerriod-avant
Spectacular Storytime at Once Upon a Time Bookstore – In-Person Kids Event
Spectacular Storytime is a weekly time to have fun with books with enthusiastic troubadour, Maddi!
Free to attend.
NOTE: See site for RSVP, guidelines, and details.
Where: Once Upon a Time Bookstore
Date: Friday the 6th
Time: 9:30 am
Address: 2207 Honolulu Ave., Montrose, CA 91020
Website: https://www.shoponceuponatime.com/event/spectacular-story-time-52
Aguanta Corazon: 3-Day Workshop at Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore – In-Person Event
Aguanta Corazon is a 3-day workshop series about grief, heartbreak, and healing, offered by Plant Ed Creative Collective, and the facilitator for the 1st day on Writing will be poet Andres Sanchez.
Day 2 and Day 3 will cover themes of Printing and Tea (see link for details).
This workshop series will explore grief after heartbreak and heartache. There will be elements of writing/guided journaling, block printing, and education around the healing powers of coffee/tea. This is a FREE event to all community members, but there are limited spaces for each workshop. The event is a collaboration between Xitlalic Guijosa-Osuna, Plant Ed Creative Collective, and Andres Sanchez
NOTE: See site for RSVP, guidelines, and details.
Where: Tia Chucha’s Bookstore
Date: Friday the 6th
Time: 5 pm – 7 pm
Address: 12677 Glenoaks Blvd., Sylmar CA
Website: https://www.facebook.com/
‘The Craft’ Open Mic with Soul Stuf at Spoke Bicycle Café – In-Person Event
‘The Craft’ Open Mic is hosted by Soul Stuf & Fictitious Professor and features:
Sharra Lou
Camile Zhang
Ror
NOTE: See site for RSVP, guidelines, and details.
Where: Spoke Bicycle Cafe
Date: Friday the 6th
Time: 5:30 am
Address: 3050 N. Coolidge Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90039
Website: N/A
Book Launch: Laura Hogan and Guests & Butterfly Nebula at Chevalier’s Books – In-Person Event
Laura Hogan willread her latest collection of poems, Butterfly Nebula, alongside guests Donna Spruijt-Metz, Vandana Khanna, and Chloe Martinez.
Winner of the Backwaters Prize in Poetry, Butterfly Nebula reaches from the depths of the sea to the edges of space to chart intersections of the physical universe, the divine, the human, and the constantly unfolding experience of being “one thing in the act of becoming another.” This collection of poems teems with creatures and cosmic phenomena that vivify and reveal our common struggle toward faith and identity. The longing and metamorphosis of the human heart and soul are reimagined in an otherworldly landscape of firework jellyfish, sea slug, stingray, praying mantis, butterfly and moth, moon and star, and celestial events ranging from dark matter and Kepler’s Supernova remnant to a dozen classified nebulae. Our desire for purpose and renewal collides with the vast constellation of divine possibility in this collection, which invites the reader to enter a transformative world both deeply interior and embracing of the far-flung cosmos.
Laura Reece Hogan is the author of Butterfly Nebula (Backwaters, University of Nebraska Press, 2023), winner of the Backwaters Prize in Poetry, Litany of Flights (Paraclete Press, 2020), winner of the Paraclete Poetry Prize, the chapbook O Garden-Dweller (Finishing Line Press), and the nonfiction spiritual theology book I Live, No Longer I (Wipf & Stock). A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, she is one of ten poets featured in the anthology In a Strange Land (Cascade Books) and serves on the poetry advisory board of Wildhouse Press. Her poems have appeared in Sugar House Review, Scientific American, RHINO, America, Connecticut River Review, Amsterdam Review, EcoTheo Review, Verse Daily and elsewhere.
Vandana Khanna. Born in New Delhi, India, Vandana Khanna is a writer, educator, and editor. She is the author of three collections of poetry, Train to Agra, Afternoon Masala, and Burning Like Her Own Planet, as well as the chapbook, The Goddess Monologues. Her work has won the Crab Orchard Review First Book Prize, The Miller Williams Poetry Prize, the Diode Editions Chapbook Competition, and the Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize. She has been published widely in journals and anthologies such as The New Republic, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, New England Review, Guernica, and The Penguin Book of Indian Poets.
Van’s new book: Burning Like Her Own Planet 2023, Alice James Books
Donna Spruijt-Metz is a poet, an emeritus psychology professor, and a recent MacDowell Fellow. Her first career was as a classical flutist. She is a recognized leader in the field of health behavior change and published over 200 peer reviewed papers She lived in the Netherlands for 22 years and translates Dutch poetry to English. Her poetry and translations appear in Copper Nickel, RHINO, Poetry Northwest, the Tahoma Literary Review, the Los Angeles Review, the Inflectionist Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbooks are Slippery Surfaces (Finishing Line Press) and And Haunt the World (a collaboration with Flower Conroy, Ghost City Press). Camille Dungy (Orion Magazine) chose her full-length General Release from the Beginning of the World (January 2023, Free Verse Editions) as one of the 14 Recommended Poetry Collections for Winter 2022. Her recent microchapbook, Dear Ghost, won the 2023 Harbor Editions Editors Prize.
Donna’s new book General Release from the Beginning of the World (2023, Free Verse Editions)
Chloe Martinez is a poet and a scholar of South Asian religions. The author of the collection Ten Thousand Selves (The Word Works, 2021) and the chapbook Corner Shrine (Backbone Press, 2020), her poems and translations have appeared in Ploughshares, POETRY, The Common, Agni, Prairie Schooner and elsewhere. Her translations have won the Robert Fitzgerald Prize and the Anne Frydman Prize. She is a visiting editor at Beloit Poetry Journal and the poetry editor of The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. She works at Claremont McKenna College and lives with her family on the unceded territories of the Tongva/Gabrielino people.
Chloe’s most recent book is Ten Thousand Selves (The Word Works, 2021).
Where: Chevalier’s Books
Date: Friday the 6th
Time: 6 pm
Address: 133 N. Larchmont Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90004
Long Beach Poetry Fest Series: Kickoff at Helen Borges Theatre – In-Person Event
The Helen Borgers Theater will have a collection of spoken word and poetry with scheduled readings from selected poets.
This kick-off for the 2-part event on Saturday and Sunday begins at 6 pm Friday, with Bernadette McCormish and typewriter poetry in the foyer.
Then from 6:30 – 8:30 pm there will be a featured poetry reading hosted by Matt Sedillo, and featuring readings by:
Willam Cushing, Margaret Elysia Garcia, Lee Boek, Jeff Rogers, Christina Cha.
Open Mic sign ups are at 6 pm, and first-comers will be guaranteed a spot in the theatre.
View the biography at site for the synopsis of the show and how it fits into our season theme.
NOTE: See site for tickets, guidelines, and details.
Where: Helen Borgers Theatre
Date: Friday the 6th
Time: 6 pm
Address: 4250 Atlantic Ave., Long Beach, CA 90807
Website: N/A (Facebook)
At Skylight: Daniel Sweren-Becker & Kill Show: A True Crime Novel at Skylight Books – In-Person Event
Join us to hear Daniel Sweren-Becker discuss his book Kill Show: A True Crime Novel.
Sara Parcell disappeared without a trace on a crisp April morning in Frederick, Maryland. Her tragic story was a national obsession and the centerpiece of a controversial television docuseries that followed her disappearance in real time. But is it possible that everyone missed the biggest secret of all?
By revealing the seedy underbelly of the true crime entertainment machine, Kill Show probes literary territory beyond the bounds of the standard whodunit; it’s a thoughtful exploration into America’s obsession with the mysteries, cold cases, and violent tales we turn to for comfort. Groundbreaking, fast-moving, and informed, this is a novel about who is responsible for the tragedies we love to consume.
Daniel Sweren-Becker is an author, television writer, and playwright living in Los Angeles. His play Stress Positions premiered in New York City at the SoHo Playhouse. A native of Manhattan, he is the author of the novels The Ones and The Equals.
NOTE: See site for tickets, guidelines, and details.
Where: Skylight
Date: Friday the 6th
Time: 6:30 pm
Where: 1818 N. Vermont Ave.,Los Angeles, CA., 90027
Website: https://www.skylightbooks.com/event/skylight-daniel-sweren-becker-presents-kill-show
Zachary Sergi, with Robbie Couch, & This Pact Is Not Ours at Book Soup – In-Person Event
Zachary Sergi, in conversation with Robbie Crouch, will discuss his new book, This Pact is Not Ours.
The summer before college Luca Piccone returns to Copper Cove, the idyllic campsite he and his closest friends have visited every year since they were kids. To Luca, Copper Cove is like the setting of the fantasy movies he loves, a sanctuary, protected from the dangers of the outside world, where nothing goes wrong and everything stays the same.
But this year things are changing.
Desperate to make this summer the best one yet, Luca tries to ignore the freshly torn rifts within his tight friend group, the pangs of unrequited love, the anxiety attacks he thought he’d left back at school, and the shadows at the edge of the forest threatening to break free. Until he learns the terrible truth.
Every generation, the children of four families are bound by a pact. A pact designed to keep the camp pristine and the monstrous force lurking beneath the campsite imprisoned. But to do this, an unthinkable price must be paid—a price that has soaked the previous generations in blood. Can Luca keep his friends, and his favorite place, from being ripped apart?
NOTE: See site for RSVP, guidelines, and details.
Where: Book Soup
Date: Friday the 6th
Time: 7 pm
Address: 8818 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90069
Website: https://www.booksoup.com/event/zachary-sergi-robbie-couch
The Prose Bowl: A Night of Spoken Word with Get Lit at The Crawford – In-Person Teen Event
Get Lit, Words Ignite is a complete program of working with and sustaining poetic communities inside Los Angeles Schools and their neighborhoods.
Get Lit’s open mic events are offered each month for teens to expand their spoken word skills.
Tickets: $0 – $15.
NOTE: See site for RSVP, guidelines, and details.
Where: The Crawford
Date: Friday the 6th
Time: 7 pm – 8:15 pm
Address: 474 S. Raymond Ave., Pasadena, CA
Website: https://www.getlit.org/events or https://laist.com/events/the-prose-bowl-a-night-of-spoken-word-with-get-lit-oct-2023
Serpentine Monthly Poetry Showcase + Open Reading with Ingrid M. Calderon-Collins at North Figueroa Bookshop – In-Person Event
Serpentine is a monthly open mic poetry reading with featured poets curated and hosted by Ingrid M. Calderon-Collins.
Bring us your works-in-progress, your experiments, your magnum opuses – all are welcome!
Serpentine is a monthly open mic poetry reading with featured poets curated and hosted by Ingrid M. Calderon-Collins.
Bring us your works-in-progress, your experiments, your magnum opuses – all are welcome!
NOTE: See site for RSVP, guidelines, and details.
Where: North Figueroa Bookshop
Date: Friday the 6th
Time: 7 pm – 9 pm
Address: 6040 N. Figueroa St., Los Angeles, CA 90042
Made in L.A. Volume 5 Vantage Points: Readings at Page Against the Machine – In-Person Event
PATM welcomes an in-person group reading featuring contributors to the latest volume in the Made in L.A. anthology series published by Resonant Earth Publishing.Made in L.A. Volume 5 Vantage Points is a love letter to the sprawl, diversity, and inconsistent topography of Los Angeles offered by a diverse array of 16 Angeleno writers.
Six of the Made in L.A. contributors will read: 𝗝. 𝗣. 𝗛𝗶𝗴𝗴𝗶𝗻𝘀, 𝗡𝗼𝗿𝗶𝗸𝗼 𝗡𝗮𝗸𝗮𝗱𝗮, 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝗮 𝗣𝘂𝗲𝘀𝗰𝗵𝗲𝗹, 𝗧𝗶𝘀𝗵𝗮 𝗠𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗲 𝗥𝗲𝗶𝗰𝗵𝗹𝗲-𝗔𝗴𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗲𝗿𝗮, 𝗟𝘂𝗰𝘆 𝗥𝗼𝗱𝗿𝗶𝗴𝘂𝗲𝘇-𝗛𝗮𝗻𝗹𝗲𝘆, and 𝗛𝗮𝘇𝗲𝗹 𝗪𝗶𝘁𝗵𝗮𝗺. Their stories navigate us through the streets, neighborhoods, and narratives that introduce us to characters who call Los Angeles home. Whether by foot, by car, or by skateboard, the stories invite us to explore the vantage points in different areas of our sprawling metropolis where we find commonalities and differences, joy and sorrow, and moments of sublime convergence.
The Made in L.A. series is edited by Sara Chisolm, Gabi Lorino, Allison Rose, and Cody Sisco. The event will be hosted by writer, multi-media artist, yoga teacher, and 𝘔𝘢𝘥𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘓.𝘈. contributor, Thea Pueschel.
NOTE: See site for RSVP, guidelines, and details.
Where: Page Against the Machine
Date: Friday the 6th
Time: 7 pm – 9 pm
Address: 2714 E. 4th St., Long Beach, CA 90814
Website: https://www.facebook.com/events/774339741159779
Author Event: Steve Searles, with Chris Erskine, & What the Bears Know at pages: a bookstore – In-Person Event
Author Sterve Searles, in conversation with Chris Erskine, will present and discuss the new book. What the Bears Know.
Unlike us, bears waste little time on unreasonable fears. Bears are fully in the moment. They have an inner peace that seems to offset their power and strength. That may explain why no other animal on the planet is as revered as the bear.
As Searles shares his remarkable knowledge and we become immersed in the ursine world, you’ll never look at bears or nature the same way again. Warm and poignant, and perfect for anyone who has been fascinated by the natural world, What the Bears Know shows that wisdom and fulfillment can come from unexpected places.
Author and journalist Chris Erskine will be discussing What the Bears Know which he co-wrote with bear whisperer and Mammoth wildlife expert Steve Searles. This is a not to be missed event for fans of Mammoth wildlife and CHRIS!! Friday October 6th at 7 pm, you’ll have time to make an 8:30 dinner reservation or join Chris at Ercole’s for a burger and beer.
This is a ticketed event. Ticket [$35].
Steve Searles is a self-taught bear expert who’s been working with the animals for nearly three decades. Since 1996, he has been the wildlife specialist for the ski town of Mammoth Lakes, Calif., where he developed a global reputation for his novel approaches to keeping residents—and the bears—safe. Steve founded the town’s “Don’t Feed Our Bears” program and helped formulate Yosemite National Park’s initial bear program. In 2010, he was the topic of the reality show “The Bear Whisperer” on Animal Planet. He is a native of Orange County, Calif.
Chris Erskine is a nationally known columnist, with most of his work appearing in the Los Angeles Times and distributed to 600 papers nationwide. As an editor there, he was part of two Pulitzer Prize-winning teams. He is best known to readers for his weekly pieces on life in suburban Los Angeles. This is his fifth book. He is a native of Chicago and now lives in Los Angeles.
Where: pages: a bookstore
Date: Friday the 6th
Time: 7 pm
Address: 904 Manhattan Ave., Manhattan Beach, CA 90266
Website: https://www.pagesabookstore.com/event/steve-searles-chris-erskine-discuss-what-bear-knows
Book Launch: Kate Flannery, with Laura Albert (aka JT LeRoy), & Strip Tees: A Memoir of Millennial Los Angeles at Stories Books & Café – In-Person Event
Stories presents the book launch of Strip Tees: A Memoir of Millennial Los Angeles, with author Kate Flannery, who will be in conversation with Laura Albert (aka JT LeRoy).
Strip Tees is a fever dream of a memoir—Hunter S. Thompson meets Gloria Steinem—about a recent college graduate and what happens when her feminist ideals meet the real world.
NOTE: See site for RSVP, guidelines, and details.
Where: Stories Books & Café
Date: Friday the 6th
Time: 7 pm – 8 pm
Address: 1716 W. Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90026
Website: https://storiesla.com/events
Eric Ripert, with Ben Mims, & Seafood Simple at Vroman’s – In-Person Event
Eric Ripert, with Ben Mims (LA Times), will present and discuss his book Seafood Simple: A Cookbook.
Le Bernardin has been celebrated as one of the finest seafood restaurants in the world and its iconic chef Eric Ripert as the expert in fish cookery. Now, in Seafood Simple, Ripert demystifies his signature cuisine, making delectable fish dishes achievable for home cooks of all skill levels—yet still with elegance and panache.
Ben Mims is a James Beard Award-nominated cookbook author, food writer and editor, radio host, and video personality. He has worked at Food & Wine, Saveur, Lucky Peach, Food Network, and Buzzfeed’s Tasty and is the cooking columnist for The Los Angeles Times. He lives in Los Angeles.
NOTE: See site for tickets, guidelines, and details.
Where: Vroman’s
Date: Friday the 6th
Time: 7 pm
Address: 695 E, Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, CA., 91101
Website: https://www.vromansbookstore.com/Eric-Ripert-with-Ben-Mims-discussing-Seafood-Simple
A Night of Spoken Word: L.A. Poets at Beyond Baroque – In-Person Event
Beyond Baroque presents a night of spoken word featuring an impressive group of Black and Brown authors and Los Angeles-based poets.
Jennifer “Miss B.” Baptiste is a writer, actress and librarian of Haitian descent based in North Hollywood. She likes creating lyrical writings that resonate with the heart and mind to promote healing, empowerment, and curiosity. Miss B. has several poems published with independent literary presses and can be heard at local open mics around the Los Angeles area.
Aiyana Sha’niel is a modern spoken word artist born and raised in Los Angeles, California. She has been writing for seven years, beginning at Hamilton High School, where she wrote and performed on the school’s poetry team, Hamlit. She has performed and featured for various open mics, such as Da Poetry Lounge, Junior High LA, Get Lit mic, Sunday Jump, Project Pit and countless others. She is a Community Literature Initiative alumna and is currently a teaching artist in partnership with various organizations. Sha’niel released her first body of work, Little Black Poetry Book, before the age of 20.
Diosa Xochiquetzalcóatl is a multilingual and multidimensional, 3x slam/spoken word winner, international poetiza, and workshop presenter. She is a seasoned language arts educator with a Bachelor’s in English and Master’s in Cross-Cultural Teaching. As a published poet, you can find her work in a variety of anthologies and literary journals in both English and Spanish. Diosa X is also the author of three poetry collections with a fourth on its way. Her collections include, A Church of My Own (2021), Hechizera: Sus Sultry Spells (Editorial Raíces, 2022), West of the Santa Ana and Other Sacred Places (Riot of Roses Publishing, 2023), and coming just in time for the holidays, Felices Fiestas (Read and Green Books, 2023). You can find all of Diosa’s pertinent information at https://linktr.ee/DiosaX.
Matthew ‘Cuban’ Hernandez is a poet, emcee, speaker, actor, and performance coach from Jacksonville, Florida. He has toured as far as Abu Dhabi and nearly every major city in the United States and Europe, performing, teaching, and coaching poetry. A teaching artist for over 15 years, Matthew has spent the last ten years working in youth detention centers across Los Angeles County, currently serving as the Director of Camp Programming for Street Poets, Inc. In addition, he is a current Lead Teacher and Co-Founder of Spoken Literature Art Movement. Cuban has opened for artists such as Wu-Tang, performed for platforms such as BuzzFeed and NPR and even appeared on the award-winning television show, Better Things. Matthew is also a three-time Southern Fried poetry slam champion and an award-winning poetry coach. Cuban’s favorite activity is making people feel great; sometimes he does this through hip hop and poetry.
Where: Beyond Baroque
Date: Friday the 6th
Time: 8 pm – 10 pm
Address: 681 Venice Blvd Venice Beach Los Angeles, CA 90291
Website: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/a-night-of-spoken-word-tickets-724300651747
SWAAM Spoken Word, Art & Music Event at Barbara Morrison Performing Arts Center – In-Person Event
SWAAM Spoken Word, Art & Music is hosted by Loranzo Frank and features an Open Mic, Live Band, food and drinks, plus featured guests.
Don’t miss featured guest and the multi-talented “Lady KDay” live at SWAAM.
This event is offered every 1st & 3rd Fridays of the month.
NOTE: See site for RSVP, guidelines, and details.
Where: Barbara Morrison Performing Arts Center
Date: Friday the 6th
Time: 8 pm
Address: 2851 Overland Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90064
Website: https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=686278490226047&set=pb.100065317067345.-2207520000
First Fridays Rapp Saloon Reading Series, with host Cynthia Alessandra Briano, via Rapp Saloon – Hybrid In-Person & Online Event
First Fridays at Rapp Saloon: Open Mic & Featured Readers, is offered every 1st Friday of the month by host Cynthia Alessandra Briano.
This event is a HYBRID event, with a return to live in-person events while maintaining at HISUA Zoom option for our performers and guests.
Our featured guest poets and artists this month TBA
We invite you to join us in amplifying and celebrating Black voices by bringing a poem or prose excerpt by a Black author to read alongside your own work. All themes/formats welcome. All languages welcome.
Share your voice at the Open Mic, where there is a time limit of 4 minutes max. Sign-ups are at 8:15 pm. Zoom ID posted 3 hours prior to event.
NOTE: See site for event details.
Where: Rapp Saloon at HISUA – In-Person & Online Event
Date: Friday the 6th
Time: 8:30 pm – 10:30 pm
Address: 1436 2nd St., Santa Monica, CA 90401
Website: https://www.facebook.com/RappSaloonReadingSeries/
Saturday Class: Writing and Performance Workshop & GLP Practice Event at Get Lit, Words Ignite Office – In-Person Teen Event (Check to Verify at link)
Get Lit, Words Ignite is a complete program of working with and sustaining poetic communities inside Los Angeles Schools and their neighborhoods.
Get Lit’s Saturday Class Workshop events are offered every Saturday for teens to expand their poetic and spoken word skills, and are followed by GLP Practice sessions.
Free to attend.
NOTE: See site for RSVP, guidelines, and details.
Where: Get Lit Office
Date: Saturday the 7th
Time: 10 am – 2 pm & 2 pm – 4 pm
Address: 672 S. La Fayette Park Place #10, Los Angeles, CA 90057
Website: https://www.getlit.org/events (CHECK TO VERIFY)
Grand Re-Opening Celebration! at Cellar Door Bookstore – In-Person Event
Schedule of the day’s events:
11:00- Jade Sasser and Victoria Reyes
12:00 – Mónica Mancillas
1:00 – Greg van Eekhout and Ernesto Cisneros
1:45PM – We will close the store for Drag Queen Storytime
2:00 – Drag Queen Storytime with Athena Monet Kills and Scalene OnyxXx
3:00 – Evan Turk
4:00 – John Jennings
5:00 – Myisha Cherry
Isabel Quintero will also be here, and we’ll update you on when you can meet her!
We’ll be celebrating all day and we want our extraordinary community to be there with us!
If you are interested in attending our Drag Queen Storytime, follow the link at website.
NOTE: See site for RSVP, guidelines, and details.
Where: Cellar Door Bookstore
Date: Saturday the 7th
Time: 10 am – 6 pm
Address: 473 E. Alessandro Blvd., Suite B, Riverside, CA 92508
Website: https://www.cellardoorbookstore.com
Western Edge Writers at Eagle Rock Branch Library, LAPL – In-Person Event
Writers and aspiring writers, join us for a group that supports writing endeavors of all genres: fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and memoir.
Please email eaglrk@lapl.org for the writing prompt.
NOTE: See site for RSVP, guidelines, and details.
Where: Eagle Rock Branch Library, LAPL
Date: Saturday the 7th
Time: 10 am
Address: 5027 Caspar Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90041
Website: https://lapl.org/whats-on/events/western-edge-writers
Finding the Power and Voice Behind Your Real-Life Stories, with Lori Horvitz. at Beyond Baroque – In-Person Event
This intensive Saturday workshop come up with a list of story ideas, and from this list, focus on drafting a short memoir. We’ll start with timed writing exercises that will help you hone in on the crux of a story. You’ll continue to develop your story with further writing exercises and through sharing in small groups. Everyone will walk away with an understanding of voice, pacing, and imagery for their story, along with a focus on its most captivating angle. At the end of the workshop, you’ll have the opportunity to read your stories aloud.
Lori Horvitz’s first collection of memoir-essays, The Girls of Usually, won the 2016 Gold Medal IPPY Book Award in Autobiography/Memoir. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in a variety of journals including Hobart, South Dakota Review, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Hotel Amerika. Professor of English at UNC Asheville, Horvitz has been awarded fellowships from Yaddo, Cottages at Hedgebrook, VCCA, Ragdale, Blue Mountain Center, and Brush Creek. She holds a Ph.D. in English from SUNY Albany, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College. In a starred review from Kirkus, the critic calls Horvitz’s new book is, Collect Call to My Mother: Essays on Love, Grief, and Getting a Good Night’s Sleep.
NOTE: See site for tickets, costs, and details.
Where: Beyond Baroque
Date: Saturday the 7th
Time: 11 am – 3 pm
Address: 681 Venice Blvd Venice Beach Los Angeles, CA 90291
Jennifere Holm & The BIG Adventures of Babymouse: Besties! at Children’s Book World – In-Person Kids Event
Babymouse learns how to be a good friend in this BIG, FULL-COLOR graphic novel series, perfect for young readers who love to laugh! Babymouse has the BEST imagination. She makes the BEST cupcakes. And her BEST friend is Wilson. Then why is Wilson hanging out with the new kid in school so much? And why is the new kid so GOOD at everything?! Well, Babymouse is just going to have to be even BETTER than this new kid. No, she’s going to have to be the BEST! This larger-than-life young graphic novel, full of humor and fun, is a spin-off of the bestselling series that’s sold more than three million copies!
Jennifer L. Holm and Matthew Holm are the sister-and-brother team behind the Eisner Award-winning Babymouse graphic novel series and the New York Times bestseller Sunny Side Up. Jennifer is the author of many acclaimed novels, including three Newbery Honor winners, Our Only May Amelia, Penny from Heaven, and Turtle in Paradise. Matthew Holm is a graphic designer and freelance writer. They are also the creators of the Squish series. To find out more, visit Babymouse.com and facebook.com/babymousebooks.
NOTE: See site for RSVP, guidelines, and details.
Where: Children’s Book World
Date: Saturday the 7th
Time: 11 am
Address: 10580 ½ W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90064
Social Justice Book Club: Beloved at Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore – Online Event
Tia Chucha’s Social Justice Book Club participants will discuss the modern classic novel Beloved, by author Toni Morrison.
NOTE: See site for RSVP, guidelines, and details.
Where: Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore
Date: Saturday the 7th
Time: 11 am – 12 pm
Address: Online event (see site)
Website: https://www.instagram.com/tiachuchas/
Rebel Girls Fest: International Day of the Girlat Vroman’s – In-Person Kids Event
Vroman’s is collaborating with REBEL GIRLS: “a global empowerment brand dedicated to raising the most inspired and confident generation of girls,” to create a FREE event that will include FUN CRAFTS that will showcase their creativity, INSPIRING ACTIVITIES designed just for girls, and STORYTELLING!
For more information about the Rebel Girls and the work that they do, please check out their website: https://www.rebelgirls.com/.
They’ve also released a new book: Growing Up Powerful: A Guide to Keeping Confident When Your Body Is Changing, Your Mind Is Racing, and the World Is…Complicated (Growing Up Powerful) by Nona Willis Aronowitz (Author) and Caribay Marquina (Illustrator). It may help your Rebel Girl prepare for the big celebration, and life in general!
NOTE: For the full list of Rebel Girls Fest venues in SoCal, visit, https://www.rebelgirls.com/events/rebel-girls-fest-2023.
Where: Vroman’s
Date: Saturday the 7th
Time: 11 am
Address: 695 E, Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, CA., 91101
Website: https://www.vromansbookstore.com/REBEL-GIRLS-FEST-2023
So You Want to Be a Writer: Workshop with James Coats at Riverside Main Library – In-Person Teen Event
Author and writer James Coats will lead a free writing workshop for teens ages 13-19 on Saturdays from September 9 through November 11, 2023.
This fall, Inlandia brings college-level creative writing workshops to teen-aged creatives thanks to a unique partnership with the City of Riverside Library. Led by James Coats, working writers drawn from the area community will lead teens through a ten-week progressive series. The program will be held at the Riverside Main Library on Saturdays beginning September 9, from 12:00 – 2:00 PM.
Workshop leader James Coats, himself an author, poet, and educator, will welcome a new guest writer each week, offering teens the opportunity to learn from professional working writers in a library environment. Topics will include: poetry, and the different modes of poetic expression; memoir and memory; fiction writing including micro fiction, flash, short stories, and long-form fiction; journalism and the newspaper industry; writing for magazines and periodicals; reading and performing your work for an audience; strategies for revising work toward publication; what it’s like to be an editor; and getting published. The final session will be a public reading and discussion.
NOTE: See site for details.
Where: Riverside Main Library
Date: Saturday the 7th (through November 11th)
Time: 12 pm – 2 pm
Address: 3900 Mission Inn Ave., Riverside, CA 92501
Website: https://inlandiainstitute.org/events/?time=week&dy=03&month=09&yr=2023&cid=mc-3d5a35dc491e7c24858a2c2a1c6047be
A Reading with Four Feathers Press at Beyond Baroque – In-Person & Online YouTube Hybrid Event
Beyond Baroque hosts an afternoon of literary delight at “A Reading with Four Feathers Press” featuring a diverse cast of Four Feathers Press authors:
Lynne Bronstein, Jackie Chou, and Alicia Viguer-Espert will be reading new and selected works alongside publisher and emcee of the event, Don Kingfisher Campbell.
Don Kingfisher Campbell, MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles, taught Writers Seminar at Occidental College Upward Bound for 36 years, been a coach and judge for Poetry Out Loud, a performing poet/teacher for Red Hen Press Youth Writing Workshops, L.A. Coordinator and Board Member of California Poets In The Schools, poetry editor of the Angel City Review, publisher of Four Feathers Press, and host of the Saturday Afternoon Poetry reading series in Pasadena, California. For awards, features, and publication credits, please go to: http://dkc1031.blogspot.com.
Lynne Bronstein is the author of five poetry collections, Astray from Normalcy, Roughage, Thirsty in the Ocean, Border Crossings, and Nasty Girls. Her poetry and short fiction have been published in magazines, newspapers, anthologies, and on web sites, including Playgirl, Beyond Baroque Obras, California State Poetry Quarterly, VolNo, Electrum, Poetry Superhighway, poeticdiversity, Silver Birch Press, Chiron Review, Galway Review, Lummox, Spectrum, Voices from Leimert Park, The Art of Being Human, Revolutionary Poets Brigade, Free Venice Beachhead, Caffeine, OnTarget, Subtletea, The Stone Bird, and Al-Khemia. In addition, she has been a journalist for five decades, writing for the Los Angeles Times and other Los Angeles area newspapers. She adapted Shakespeare’s As You Like It as a contemporary Valley-speak spoof which was performed at the Studio City and Hollywood public libraries. She has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes for poetry and for five Best of the Net Awards for poetry and short fiction. She won a prize for her short story “Why Me” and two prizes from Channel 37 public access for news writing. She has taught poetry and journalism workshops for children at 826LA and for the Arcadia Library and was cited by the city and county of Los Angeles for her mentoring work with Jewish Vocational Service. She has also published a short story in the crime fiction anthology LAst Resort from Sisters in Crime. A native New Yorker and LA transplant, she lives in Van Nuys in the San Fernando Valley and has three cats.
Jackie Chou is a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee who’s poem “Formosa” was a finalist in the 2023 Stephen A DiBiase Poetry Prize. She has numerous poems published by Fevers of the Mind Poetry Digest inspired by the late great Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Pablo Neruda, Langston Hughes, Jack Kerouac, and others. Her collection of poetry Finding My Heart in Love and Loss, published by cyberwit in 2023, can be purchased on Amazon.
Alicia Viguer-Espert, born and raised in the Mediterranean city of Valencia, Spain, lives in Los Angeles. A three times Pushcart nominee, she has been a featured poet at numerous venues within the greater LA area, and at on-line sites nationally. Her work has been published in Lummox Anthologies, Altadena Poetry Review, ZZyZx, Panoply, Rhyvers, River Paw Press, Amethyst Review, Odyseey.pm, and Live Encounters among others. Her chapbooks To Hold a Hummingbird, Out of the Blue Womb of the Sea and 4 in 1, focus on language, identity, home, nature, and soul. In addition to national and international publications, she is included in “Top 39 L.A. Poets of 2017,” “Ten Poets to Watch in 2018,” and “Bards of Southern California: Top 30 poets,” by Spectrum.
NOTE: See site for guidelines and details.
Where: Beyond Baroque
Date: Saturday the 7th
Time: 2:30 pm (Doors at 2 pm)
Address: 681 Venice Blvd Venice Beach Los Angeles, CA 90291
Website: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/a-reading-with-four-feathers-press-tickets-695584741687
Long Beach Poetry Fest Series: Part I at Helen Borges Theatre – In-Person & Online Hybrid Event
The Helen Borgers Theater will have a collection of spoken word and poetry with scheduled readings from selected poets. NOTE: The works presented in this part differ from those in Part II.
Linda Ravenswood will lead a Shakespeare Workshop at 2 pm.
Featured readings begin at 3 pm, and include readings by: Nancy Lynee Woo, Alixen Pham, Natalie Nicole Dressel, Jeffrey McCray, Brian Dunlap, Rich Ferguson, Bonnie S. Kaplan, Christian Perfas.
Masks are no longer required. You are still welcome to wear them for your own comfort.
For special seating needs please use the CUSTOMER NOTES section after you enter your credit card info.
When purchased, you will receive an email confirmation from The Helen Borgers Theatre, subject line: SeatEngine: Order # (your order number)
NOTE: See site for tickets, guidelines, and details.
Where: Helen Borgers Theatre
Date: Saturday the 7th
Time: 2 pm (Doors at 1:30 pm)
Address: 4250 Atlantic Ave., Long Beach, CA 90807
Website: https://www.lbshakespeare.org/shows/233681
Expressions: Poetry Reading Series & Open Mic at Studio City Branch Library, LAPL – In-Person & Online Hybrid Event
Join us for Expressions L.A. Poetry Reading Series, featuring poetry readings and open poetry mic.
RSVP:
Please email studio@lapl.org for instructions on how to join the program.
NOTE: See site for RSVP, guidelines, and details.
Where: Studio City Branch Library, LAPL
Date: Saturday the 7th
Time: 3 pm – 5 pm
Address: 12511 Moorpark St., Studio City, CA 91604
Website: https://lapl.org/whats-on/events/expressions-la-poetry-reading-series-and-open-mic-0
Saturday Afternoon Poetry: Meeting Cancelled + Four Feathers Press will be at Beyond Baroque at 2 pm – In-Person & Live on YouTube Event
NO MEETING TODAY. Four Feathers Press will be at Beyond Baroque at 2pm.
Don Kingfisher Campbell hosts and curates these events.
Where: Saturday Afternoon Poetry
Date: Saturday the 7th
Time: 3 pm – 5 pm
Address: Online Zoom Event
Website: http://saturdayafternoonpoetry.blogspot.com/
Latina Author Panel: Hispanic/Latine Heritage Monthat The Ripped Bodice – In-Person Event
The Ripped Bodice presents a Latina Author Panelto celebrate Hispanic/Latine Heritage Month.
Editor Nicole Moreno-Deinzer will chat with authors Annette Chavez Macias and Margo Candela.
About our Panel Guests:
Nicole Moreno-Deinzer, a dynamic Latina entrepreneur, radiates a passion for nurturing potential and embracing adventure. As the driving force behind “Just Nicole,” she shares her compelling journey from a third-generation Latina entrepreneur to a trailblazer in the business coaching industry. Nicole’s mission is to guide others toward lives defined by freedom, zeal, and attainable aspirations. Her remarkable story has graced prestigious platforms such as Relate & Elevate, Latina Maid Not Made, Happy Apple Podcast, and more. In her free time, she dives into her favorite novels and tries to not purchase too many books. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and her cat Honey Darling.
Annette Chavez Macias writes stories about love, family, and following your dreams. She is proud of her Mexican American heritage, culture, and traditions, all of which can be found within the pages of her books. For readers wanting even more love stories and guaranteed happily ever afters, Annette also writes romance novels under the pen name Sabrina Sol. A Southern California native, Annette lives just outside Los Angeles with her family.
Margo Candela was born and raised in Los Angeles and began her writing career when she joined Glendale Community College’s student newspaper. She transferred to San Francisco State University as a journalism major, and upon graduation began writing for websites and magazines before writing her first two novels, Underneath It All and Life Over Easy. She returned to Los Angeles to raise her son and wrote More Than This and Good-bye to All That. The Neapolitan Sisters, a 2023 International Latino Book Award winner, is her fifth novel and her first after a decade-long hiatus from writing. She now lives in San Francisco.
NOTE: See site for tickets, guidelines, and details.
Where: The Ripped Bodice
Date: Saturday the 7th
Time: 5 pm – 6:30 pm
Address: Main Street, Culver City, CA 90323
Website: https://www.therippedbodicela.com/events-and-tickets
Lit Angels Journal Anniversary Celebrationat Village Well Books & Coffee – In-Person Event
Celebrate the anniversary of one our favorite local literary journals, Lit Angels!
Featuring readings from:
Daniel Weizmann is the author of the debut mystery, The Last Songbird. His fiction, humor, and pop culture rants have appeared in the LA Times, UK Guardian, Mojo, AP Newswire, Jewish Journal, Billboard, L.A. Reader, and California Magazine, as well several books including Too Cool, Hardcore California, Turn Up the Radio!, and Drinking with Bukowski.
Kathryn McGee is the New York Times bestselling author of the Thousandth Floor series. She studied English and French literature at Princeton and has an MBA from Stanford. She’s been speculating about American royalty since her undergraduate days, when she wrote a thesis on “castle envy”: the idea that the American psyche is missing out on something, because Americans don’t have a royal family of their own.
Cara Lawson is about art, reading, and writing and directing in filmmaking. She is intentionally political and uses science fiction and fantasy to explore empathy and humanity in her work. Her multi-ethnic background influences her to search for diversity, both in front of and behind the camera.
Lezlie Mitchell is a prolific storyteller through multiple creative platforms including writing, acting, and modeling. She has appeared in numerous print ads and national commercials for popular brands like Ancestry, AT&T, MTV, Albertsons, Orbit Gum, Livestrong, and Fossil. Lezlie has been featured in NY Post, NPR, and Voyage LA for her range of work. She currently writes for Reebok and is an editor for Best Of Vegan.
She is an advocate for plant-based eating and was noted as 100 Black Vegans To Check Out as well as featured in the documentary, “The Invisible Vegan.” Connect with her at http://www.LoveLezlie.com for more.
Where: Village Well Books & Coffee
Date: Saturday the 7th
Time: 5 pm – 6 pm
Address: 9900 Culver Blvd., Culver City, CA 90232
Website: https://shop.villagewell.com/events/30278
Nick Offerman, with George Saunders, & Where the Deer and The Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Likes to Walk Outside at First Congregational Church of Los Angeles – In-Person Event
Nick Offerman, in conversation with George Saunders, will discuss his new book, Where the Deer and The Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Likes to Walk Outside.
In this book, Nick Offerman takes a humorous, inspiring, and elucidating trip to America’s trails, farms, and frontier to examine the people who inhabit the land, what that has meant to them and us, and to the land itself, both historically and currently.
In 2018, Wendell Berry posed a question to Nick, a query that planted the seed of this book, sending Nick on two memorable journeys with pals—a hiking trip to Glacier National Park with his friends Jeff Tweedy and George Saunders, as well as an extended visit to his friend James Rebanks, the author of The Shepherd’s Life and English Pastoral. He followed that up with an excursion that could only have come about in 2020—Nick and his wife, Megan Mullally, bought an Airstream trailer to drive across (several of) the United States. These three quests inspired some “deep-ish” thinking from Nick, about the history and philosophy of our relationship with nature in our national parks, in our farming, and in our backyards; what we mean when we talk about conservation; and the importance of outdoor recreation, all subjects very close to Nick’s heart.
NOTE: See site for RSVP, guidelines, and details.
Where: Book Soup off-site at First Congregational Church of Los Angeles
Date: Saturday the 7th
Time: 6 pm (Doors at 5:30 pm)
Address: 540 S. Commonwealth Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90020
Website: https://www.booksoup.com/event/book-soup-presents-nick-offerman
Monthly Open Mic Event with Local Poet Kunthon “Katon” Meas at LibroMobile – In-Person Event
LibroMobile presents on 1st Saturdays of every month an open mic series hosted by Local Poet Kunthon “Katon” Meas, he’ll be featuring local writers & hold the mic for all of you!
RSVP
NOTE: See site for RSVP, guidelines, and details.
Where: LibroMobile
Date: Saturday the 7th
Time: 6 pm – 8 pm
Address: 1150 S. Bristol St., #A3, Santa Ana, CA 92704
Tristan Taormino & A Part of the Heart Can’t Be Eaten at North Figueroa Bookshop – In-Person Event
Award-winning author, sex educator, filmmaker, and podcast host Tristan Taormino shares her coming-of-age story, revealing how her radical sexuality and unconventional career grew out of an extraordinary queer father-daughter relationship. Raised by a hard-working single mother on Long Island, Tristan got her sex ed from the 1980s TV show Solid Gold and The Joy of Sex. She spent summers at drag shows in Provincetown with her father, Bill, who had come out as gay in the mid-1970s. Her sexual identity bloomed during her college years at Wesleyan University, where she discovered her desire for butches and kinky sex.
Bracingly emotional and erotically charged, A Part of the Heart Can’t Be Eaten reveals the transformative power of queer pleasure and defiance.
NOTE: See site for RSVP, guidelines, and details.
Where: North Figueroa Bookshop
Date: Saturday the 7th
Time: 6 pm – 8 pm
Address: 6040 N. Figueroa St., Los Angeles, CA 900
Website: https://northfigbookshop.com/event/#calendar-8a0f87f6-17d6-4f10-9815-04df4c8251ba-event-lmi7y0od
Dual Book Launch: Sukun: New and Selected Poems & mahogany at Beyond Baroque – In-Person & Live YouTube Event
Beyond Baroque hosts a captivating evening of poetry as we celebrateSukun: New and Selected Poems by Kazim Ali and mahogany by erica lewis, published by Wesleyan University Press!
The authors will be joined by friends Vandana Khanna, whose third collection, Burning Like Her Own Planet, was published by Alice James Books; and Southern California-based poet and Editor-in-Chief of Poetry International, Blas Falconer. Copies of their newest collections will be available at the bookstore. A book signing will follow the readings.
Where: Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center
Date: Saturday the 7th
Time: 7 pm – 8:30 pm
Address: 681 Venice Blvd Venice Beach Los Angeles, CA 90291
Griot Café Open Mic with Sistah Shy & Samuel Rain & Featured Guest at Shades of Africa, Long Beach – In-Person Event
Sistah Shy & Samuel Rain host the Griot Café Open Mic & Poetry event every Saturday evening at Shades of Africa in Long Beach. See site to subscribe for reminders, etc.
Where: Griot Café at Shades of Africa
Date: Saturday the 7th
Time: 8 pm – 10 pm
Address: 1001 E. 4th St., Long Beach, CA 90802
Website: https://shadesofafrika.com/griot-cafe-open-mic-poetry/
Valerie June Workshop Event & Light Beams: A Workbook for Being Your Badass Self at Diesel, A Bookstore – In-Person Event
Valerie June will present an interactive workshop based on her new book, Light Beams: A Workbook for Being Your Badass Self.
Light Beams uses contracts and agreements, self-healing wishes and spells, and maps and prescriptions in exercises that guide readers deeper on their journey of self-love. Each of the instructive prompts is a recipe for cultivating more harmony, healing, and balance within yourself and the planet. These inspiring words and exercises encourage us to become more attuned with nature and to align our inner shine with the cycles of the sun and the moon.
Valerie June Hockett is a Grammy– nominated singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist from Tennessee. She’s been hailed by The New York Times as one of America’s “most intriguing, fully formed new talents.” She has recorded three critically acclaimed, best-selling solo albums and has also written songs for legendary artists such as Mavis Staples and The Blind Boys of Alabama. She is also the author of the children’s book, Somebody to Love: The Story of Valerie June’s Sweet Little Baby Banjolele, published by Jack White’s Third Man Books. When she’s not touring, she splits her time between Tennessee and New York.
NOTE: See site for RSVP, guidelines, and details.
Where: Chevalier’s Books
Date: Sunday the 8th
Time: 12 pm
Address: 225 26th St., Suite 33, Santa Monica, CA 90402
Website: https://www.dieselbookstore.com/event/Valerie-June-Author-signing
APLA Zine Making Workshop with Brian Sonia-Wallace at ONE Gallery – In- Person Event
APLA Health HIVE Zine Making Workshop is facilitated by West Los Angeles Peot Laureate Brian Sonia-Wallace and co-hosted by APLA Health.
Got a book inside you?
Create your own tiny book in an hour! Cartoons, poetry, how-tos…no experience necessary.
This generative workshop for folks living with HIV and their friends will take you through the process of creating a Zine—a short, DIY book—from concept to execution. Zines can be hilarious, informative, snarky, or lyrical. All you need is a piece of paper and a pen, and a willingness to play!
NOTE: See site for free tickets, guidelines, and details.
Where: ONE Gallery
Date: Sunday the 8th
Time: 12 pm – 1:30 pm
Address: 626 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, CA 90069
Website: https://circafestival.org/event/apla-health-hive-zine-making-workshop/ or https://allevents.in/west%20hollywood/apla-health-hive-zine-making-workshop/10000700318761267
Cellar Door Book Club: A Map for the Missing at Cellar Door Bookstore – In-Person Event
Cellar Door Book Club participants will discuss this month’s selection, A Map for the Missing: A Novel, by author Belinda Huijuan Tang.
This book is an epic, mesmerizing debut novel set against a rapidly changing post–Cultural Revolution China, A Map for the Missing reckons with the costs of pursuing one’s dreams and the lives we leave behind
Tang Yitian has been living in America for almost a decade when he receives an urgent phone call from his mother: his father has disappeared from the family’s rural village in China. Though they have been estranged for years, Yitian promises to come home.
When Yitian attempts to piece together what may have happened, he struggles to navigate China’s impenetrable bureaucracy as an outsider, and his mother’s evasiveness only deepens the mystery. So he seeks out a childhood friend who may be in a position to help: Tian Hanwen, the only other person who shared Yitian’s desire to pursue a life of knowledge.
Reuniting for the first time as adults, Yitian and Hanwen embark on the search for Yitian’s father, all the while grappling with the past—who Yitian’s father really was, and what might have been. Spanning the late 1970s to 1990s and moving effortlessly between rural provinces and big cities, A Map for the Missing is a deeply felt examination of family and forgiveness, and the meaning of home.
Belinda Huijuan Tang is a 2021 graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow and recipient of the Michener-Copernicus Fellowship. She holds a BA from Stanford University and was a 2019 work-study fellow at the Middlebury Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She lived in China from 2016 to 2018 and, while there, received an MA from Peking University in Beijing. She currently lives in Los Angeles.
NOTE: See site for RSVP, guidelines, and details.
Where: Cellar Door Bookstore
Date: Sunday the 8th
Time: 2 pm
Address: 473 E. Alessandro Blvd., Suite B, Riverside, CA 92508
Website: https://www.cellardoorbookstore.com
Long Beach Poetry Fest Series: Part II at Helen Borges Theatre – In-Person & Online Hybrid Event
The Helen Borgers Theater will have a collection of spoken word and poetry with scheduled readings from selected poets. Enjoy another line up of spoken word and poetry with scheduled readings. NOTE: The works presented in this part differ from those in Part I.
Poetry Reading Production Curated by Linda Ravenswood.
Featured readings begin at 2 pm, and include readings by:
Daniel Yarayan, Diosa Xochilquezalcoatl, Anna Goodman Herrick, Don Campbell, Richard Modiano, Iris De Anda, Michele Raphael, Dorsay Dujon, Bernadette Mc Cormish, Aruni Wijesinghe, Veronica Juaregui.
Brian Sonia-Wallace will lead How to Make a Monster Workshop at 8 pm.
Masks are no longer required. You are still welcome to wear them for your own comfort.
For special seating needs please use the CUSTOMER NOTES section after you enter your credit card info.
When purchased, you will receive an email confirmation from The Helen Borgers Theatre, subject line: SeatEngine: Order #
NOTE: See site for tickets, guidelines, and details.
Where: Helen Borgers Theatre
Date: Sunday the 8th
Time: 2 pm (Doors at 1:30 pm)
Address: 4250 Atlantic Ave., Long Beach, CA 90807
Website: https://www.lbshakespeare.org/shows/233683
Writ Large Projects Presents: Next Line: Teen Open Mic Series at Avenue 50 Studio – In- Person Event
The 309 Collective & Writ Large Projects presents a new series offered every 2nd Sunday of the month: Teens Only Open Mic—For Teens By Teens For Writers & Musicians
Teens and Adults are welcome to attend this inaugural event.
(Sign Up starts at 4; Reading starts 4:30)
NOTE: See site for details.
Where: Avenue 50 Studio
Date: Sunday the 8th
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm
Address: 131 N. Avenue 50, Los Angeles, CA 90042
Website: https://www.facebook.com/events/869656407920713/
Book Launch: Laura Taylor Namey, with Autumn Krause, & A British Girl’s Guide to Hurricanes and Heartbreak at The Ripped Bodice – In-Person Event
Laura Taylor Namey, in conversation with Autumn Krause,will present and discuss A British Girl’s Guide to Hurricanes and Heartbreak
Winchester, England, has always been home for Flora, but when her mother dies after a long illness, Flora feels untethered. Her family expects her to apply to university and take a larger role in their tea shop business, but Flora isn’t so sure. More than ever, she’s the chaotic “hurricane” in her household, and she doesn’t always know how to manage her stormy emotions.
So, she decides to escape to Miami without telling anyone—especially her longtime friend Gordon Wallace.
Laura Taylor Namey’s newest novel navigates heartbreak that feels like a hurricane in a city that is famous for them.
NOTE: See site for tickets, guidelines, and details.
Where: The Ripped Bodice
Date: Sunday the 8th
Time: 4 pm
Address: Main Street, Culver City, CA 90323
Website: https://www.therippedbodicela.com/events-and-tickets
Wildflower Communications Presents: A Canva Workshop Series with ARKALA via Sims Library of Poetry – Online Event
Have you heard of Canva? If not, it is a new, user-friendly design app that makes it super easy for anyone to design flyers, websites, social media graphics and more. In this workshop, you will learn the basics using Canva for all of your design needs.
At the end of the first 1.5 hour workshop, you will understand:
1. The basics of graphic design
2. How to use Canva templates to make your own branded content
3. How to download and publish your designs
About Arkayla:
Arkayla’s storytelling philosophy is most closely related to wildflowers– embracing freedom and steady, unending growth, by any means necessary.
From using stories to secure funding for air quality monitors in key neighborhoods so organizers can “own the data” to building relationships through her personal story at direct actions in the streets of St. Louis, MO, Arkayla learned many facets of powerful storytelling. From creating community education around direct action first aid, to door-knocking to get the first Black female mayor, expressive, engaging, and impactful stories have been her art, and super-power, in movement building.
As a queer Black woman, she is a natural-born storyteller. Her spirituality, professional career and lifestyle enhance my creative flow. Combined with her bachelor’s degree in public relations from Kent State University, she is confident in her ability to tell stories powerfully.
NOTE: See site for tickets, guidelines, and details.
Where: Sims Library of Poetry
Date: Sunday the 8th (through December 10th)
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm
Address: Online Zoom Event (see site)
Forevermore: A Romance Anthology Launch Party with Contributors at Bel Canto Books KUBO – In-Person Event
Bel Canto Books celebrates the launch of Forevermore: A Romance Anthology, featuring Elle Cruz, Kaye Rockwell, Liz Durano and Mia Hopkins.
Forevermore, A Romance Anthology is a collection of new and never-been-published stories by the authors that brought you Pasko Na, My Love, A Holiday Romance Anthology, and from exciting voices in Filipino American Romantic Fiction. Lola Naty is back along with her sprawling multicultural family, friends from all over the world, and a gatecrasher or two.
Acclaimed and bestselling Filipino American authors Elle Cruz, Kaye Rockwell, Liz Durano, and Mia Hopkins are among the creative team behind Forevermore, a new collection of stories celebrating romance, family, and love everlasting. A follow-up to the holiday anthology Pasko Na, My Love, Forevermore explores the true meaning of happily ever after. Learn more at https://kwentitas.wixsite.com/forevermore.
NOTE: See site for RSVP, guidelines, and details.
Where: Bel Canto Books KUBO, LB
Date: Sunday the 8th
Time: 5 pm – 7 pm
Address: 3976 Atlantic Avenue Long Beach, CA 90807
Website: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/forevermore-a-romance-anthology-launch-party-tickets-721576443567
Second Sunday Poetry Series: Carol V, Davis, hosted by Alex M. Frankel, at The Studio Theatre – In-Person Event
Second Sunday Poetry host Alex M. Frankel welcomes Carol V. Davis to read and discuss her work.
Carol V. Davis is the author of Below Zero, Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2023, Because I Cannot Leave This Body (Truman State Univ. Press, 2017) and Between Storms (TSUP, 2012). She won the 2007 T.S. Eliot Prize for Into the Arms of Pushkin: Poems of St. Petersburg. Her poetry has been read on National Public Radio, the Library of Congress and Radio Russia. Twice a Fulbright scholar in Russia, she taught in Siberia, winter 2018 and teaches at Santa Monica College, California and at Antioch University, Los Angeles. She was awarded a Fulbright Specialist grant for Siberia in 2020, postponed because of Covid restrictions and now cancelled.
Where: The Studio Theatre at St, Denis Building
Date: Sunday the 8th
Time: 5 pm – 6:30 pm
Address: 3433 Cahuenga Blvd West, Los Angeles 90068 (Near Universal Studios)
Website: https://www.secondsundaypoetry.com/
Mystery Book Launch with Terry Shamesat Village Well Books & Coffee – In-Person Event
Join mystery author Terry Shames talking about the writing of Guilt Strikes at Granger’s Store, the tenth book in her popular Samuel Craddock series, releasing October 3. She will also read a selection from the book, followed by a Q&A.
In this book, Mark Granger is assaulted after he’s been warned not to renovate Granger’s Feed Store. When Michael Sullivan is shot in the store’s back room and a fire is set to conceal his body, Jarrett Creek Chief of Police Samuel Craddock starts looking for motives. But the construction crew ripping up the floor finds a long-dead body. Craddock has to delve deep into the past to solve the two murders. Are the two murders connected?
Terry Shames writes the popular, award-winning Samuel Craddock series, set in small-town Texas. Kirkus reviews said, “A favorite of fans who like their police procedurals with a strong ethical center.” Mystery People has twice named Shames one of the top five mystery authors.
Where: Village Well Books & Coffee
Date: Sunday the 8th
Time: 5 pm – 6:30 pm
Address: 9900 Culver Blvd., Culver City, CA 90232
Website: https://shop.villagewell.com/events/29890
Library Girl Reading Series: Moon Tide Press Authors at Ruskin Theatre – In-Person Event
Library Girl Reading Series, hosted by Susan Hayden (Now You Are a Missing Person), presents a Celebration of Moon Tide Press authors.
Featuring: Nicelle Davis, Christian Hanz Lozada, Terri Niccum, G. Murray Thomas, Jeremy Ra, Alexandra Umlas + Moon Tide Publisher + Editor in Chief, Eric Morago.
Nicelle Davis is the author of the newly released collection The Language of Fractions.
Christian Hanz Lozada is the author of Leave With More Than You Came With.
Terri Niccum is the author of The Knife Thrower’s Daughter and Dead Letter Box.
G. Murray Thomas is the author of numerous books and the publisher of Lummox anthologies.
Jeremy Ra is the author of Another Way of Loving Death.
Alexandra Umlas is the author of At the Table of the Unknown.
$20 admission includes free parking + dessert. “Moon Tide Press: always bringing new and necessary voices to the forefront of the Southern California poetry scene and beyond.”
NOTE: See site for tickets, guidelines, and details.
Where: Ruskin Theatre Group
Date: Sunday the 8th
Time: 7 pm – 9 pm
Address: 3000 Airport Ave., Santa Monica, CA 9002
Website: https://app.arts-people.com/index.php?show=163080
The Capacity Presents Readings at Stories Books & Café – In-Person Event
Stories hosts readings from Elle Nash, Andrew Berardini, Grace Byron, Melahn Frierson, Rebecca Sacks, and Shy Watson at the second event presented by the new Los Angeles based literary project The Capacity.
NOTE: See site for RSVP, guidelines, and details.
Where: Stories Books & Café
Date: Sunday the 8th
Time: 7 pm – 8 pm
Address: 1716 W. Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90026
Website: https://storiesla.com/events
Los Angeles Literature 