On the Northwest corner of Florence and Van Ness Avenues sits a building constructed of part brick, sharp right angles with glass automatic doors at its entrance. A colorful mural painted to the right of the entrance in green, blue, brown and shades of orange, depicts Black children. Displayed above, words that read: Hyde Park Miriam Matthews Branch, Los Angeles Public Library.

On the 23rd of September, in the library’s garden, another edition of the new poetry reading series “Miriam’s Garden” was about to take place.

This branch of the Los Angeles Public Library is named for Miriam Matthews, California’s first Black librarian, hired by the Los Angeles Public Library in 1927. During her decades-long career, “she archived Black life in Los Angeles, promoted intellectual freedom while opposing censorship and was a devoted patron of the arts.”

According to Cal170, at the re-opening of the rebuilt and renamed library in 2004, then City Council Member Bernard C. Parks remarked, “Miriam Matthews faced gender and racial discrimination while ‘breaking down not the glass ceiling, but the stone ceiling.’”

Upon Matthews’s retirement “in 1960, she manage[d] 12 branches.”

When the reading commenced, hosted by librarian, writer and publisher of the micro-press Hinchas, Yago Cura, he relayed a condensed version of Matthews’s history to the small audience sitting in plastic chairs. The garden itself was quiet and cool, but the noise from Florance Avenue reminded everyone where they were.

The three poets that featured were Erika Ayón, William Gonzalez and Jeff Rogers.

Cura then stated he started Miriam’s Garden to provide a very community and library-focused reading for the neighborhood of Hyde Park and South Central. A community, he reminded us, that lacks such outdoor nature spaces and literary events. He started booking features when poet, professor and founder of the Sims Library of Poetry and local press World Stage, Hiram Sims, gifting him and the library a bunch of World Stage Press books written by local poets. Two of the features for September—Erika Ayón and Jeff Rogers—had published their debut poetry collections through World Stage. I had not noticed Erika Ayón and William Gonzalez featuring anywhere in years, a major reason I attended. Shortly after the release of Orange Lady, Ayón gave birth to a boy and currently, she’s attending Cal State Northridge, pursuing a masters in English with a concentration in Creative Writing. It was fitting to hear her read her library poem “Love Letter to Octavio:”

	Octavio Paz, I did the unspeakable,
	I tore a poem from one of your poetry books
	at the library…
	I read the poem and felt you were speaking
	to me…
	I tore it as a desire to have you, to take you
	with me. I had never fallen in love with a poem,
	with a poet, like I fell in love with you that day.

And Gonzalez has been busy raising three daughters, seeing his oldest graduate from San Jose State, the middle graduating from high school in June and graduating himself from Mount St. Mary’s summa cum laude. He read an ode to Tía Chucha’s Centro Cultural, a space similar to the Hyde Park Branch Library, a community space that promotes the love of literature.

When Jeff Rogers read, as they all did, he paused his reading to let the revving and rumbling of motorcycles and souped-up engines dissipate.

Being outside in the warm SoCal air for a literary event is an advantage of living in the Southland not utilized often enough. Most often poets, writers and literary lovers find themselves in bookstores, coffee shops, libraries, literary nonprofits, museums and other venues, while the mild evening air or the bright clear skies remain at arm’s length. Yet, such weather is a major reason we live here.

A year ago, a third of a mile down the street at the Sims Library of Poetry, Rogers finally released his debut poetry collection Right Wrong Night Song, 39 years after he dropped out of college and moved to Los Ángeles to pursue the life of a writer. Here, at Miriam’s Garden, that was the book he read from. One poem he read was “Death and My Father” a touching poem, where during the middle of the pandemic in 2020, Rogers flies back to Charleston to see his father in his final hours, but:

	He died about the time I got off in Newark to change planes
	but I didn’t know until I landed in Charleston at 10:55 a.m.
	and texted her as I raced towards baggage claim.

After the reading, William Gonzalez complemented Rogers on the poem before the obligatory group picture of the features. Just like Miriam Matthews had done during her career to preserve Black California history, the poems Erika Ayón, William Gonzalez and Jeff Rogers read, chronicled their history in California as well.