he First Annual Northeast Los Angeles Poetry Festival (NELA Poetry Festival) took place on April 13 and 14 at Los Angeles College Prep Academy (LACPA). A cold, rainy day, sky gray, the charter high school is tucked away in Monterey Hills. The views out of classroom windows looked out over quiet residential streets, scattered palm trees, jacarandas yet to bloom, stretching over Highland Park, Mt. Washington and beyond, the drone of vehicles rising up from the hidden 110 Freeway.
The festival is the brainchild of VCP SoCal Poets, an “organization committed to the cultivation and advancement of poetry in Southern California.” A spiritual successor to the original Valley Contemporary Poets founded by Nan Hunt in 1980 in the San Fernando Valley, the festival was conceived by Board Members James Everet Jones, Elizabeth Iannaci and Teresa Mei Chuc over “a meal in Studio City,” poet, teacher and activist Chuc told me via email. They were “talking poetry and planning and that’s where the idea of the festival in the embryonic stage was formed.”
And Chuc took the lead. Or it felt that way when I attended on Saturday. She sat at a table right outside the classroom where the readings took place, that essentially functioned as a sign-in desk, greeting everyone who arrived. She delt with logistics, keeping in contact with writers who ran late, providing updates to the MC James Everet Jones, so he could buy some time by letting a poet or two read long. She even suggested he read a couple of his own.
“We had initially thought of using the gorgeous outdoor amphitheater as the main stage…but rain was in the forecast all weekend and the crew at LACPA quickly had a rainy day plan,” Chuc informed me in the same email. Inside a math class, a poster of the Pythagorean Theorem taped to a wall, poets such as Matt Sedillo, Soulf Stuf, Gerda Govine and Lauren Yang read verse on a makeshift stage, that ranged wildly in style and voice.
Sedillo read a couple of his loud, politically charged truths that expose the fallacy of American capitalism and expose the racism embedded in American society. Soul Stuf recited several of his spoken word poems, some infused with humor about poets and poetry; others, on his identity and experience as a Filipino American; his world play as rich, detailed and smooth as the best MCs.
Govine, founder of the Pasadena Rose Poets, a poetry troupe, read her spare verse recounting memories—the time she met her husband and sexy poems about romance and love. And Lauren Yang read deep and involved poems from the stack of printouts she brought, browsing through them between each poem, searching for the next perfect one, that combines narrative and exploration, history and her identity.
On both days, many other poets graced the lectern, standing in front of the whiteboard. Many who live in or have ties to NELA, from Angelina Sáenz and Jessica Cabellos y Campbell to Carla Sameth and Iris de Anda. One of Chuc’s “goals for the poetry festival is to mainly uplift the voices of Northeast L.[Á.] and surrounding areas.”
That’s due to Chuc’s close “connection with the…community…” where “for many years, I volunteered at the shower of Hope, a mobile shower at All Saints Episcopal Church in Highland Park supporting people experiencing houselessness with free showers…mostly giving them a sense of humanity…,” hosted “an open mic called The Shower of talent…” where the houseless “shared poetry, music and song and built community…, began teaching at Franklin High School on Avenue 54 this school year” and “ connected with Los Angeles Prep Academy several years ago” with the Regenerative Collective she co-founded, that supports communities with planting native plants and other regenerative projects, by planting the foliage at the academy.
For this weekend, Chuc continued to build community in NELA, but this time through poetry.
When I arrived at LACPA on Saturday, a row of tables outside the math class lined the far wall of the hall, sat mostly empty. Inside the classroom next door, tables formed a ring around the room, half empty. They were set up for authors and local presses and literary organizations to table their wares.
I had not been made aware through the festival’s fliers posted on social media and considering how small an organization VCP SoCal Poets is, that they’d be able to handle the time and work it’d take to find local presses and organizations willing to table, especially for a festival in its first year.
The two most prominent tablers I saw Saturday were Peggy Dobreer, promoting Slow Lightning Lit, the daily online somatic poetry group she founded during the pandemic and the Los Angeles Press, publishing literature and art from Los Angeles and the West, manned by Bernadette McComish, who’s poetry collection Profits of Los Angeles the press is publishing.
Yet, based on the empty tables and tables with what appeared at first glance to be strewn with a few forgotten books, tabling itself wasn’t fully utilized to truly help build and maintain community. There weren’t enough opportunities for busy poets to learn about or refamiliarize themselves with what others in the community are doing to support each other, or to create more opportunities for them to be featured or get published.
However, Chuc’s “always wanted to organize a poetry festival where diverse poets could ‘hang out,’ share their books, support each other, have food together, have fun and enjoy each other’s company.” Reflecting back on how Matt Sedillo and Steve Abe reconnected after many years and how I had not seen Dobreer for many months, on the human level, the poetry festival was a success.
As Chuc told me in her email, “I would love to continue to put on the festival for years to come.” But finding a venue space for literary events, especially in Highland Park and Northeast L.Á., to specifically uplift the voices of this, and surrounding communities, can be especially challenging. There are so few community spaces and the ones that do exists are “so fragile due to heavy gentrification in the area.”
This is even true about LACPA, which is struggling financially to stay open. No matter what the reasons are for the school’s financial troubles, administratively or otherwise, Tresa Mei Chuc believes in transformation, where everyone in the community works together to ensure all aspects of it thrive.
“Having the NELA Poetry Fest at LACPA was a way to support their efforts to stay open.” Continuing in the future, the “poetry fest could offer an opportunity for the school to fundraise, bringing people onto the campus to learn about the school and its importance as a learning and community space,” to most Latinx students.
As for the NELA Poetry Fest going forward, “I would like to bring together different generations, elders and youth poets…poetry has the power to touch our hearts and souls and that’s where transformation happens, listening to and hearing each other’s stories and poems, cultivating understanding and compassion.” And in this country, where compassion and understanding are so tenuous, VCP SoCal Poets have decided it should be permanent.
Los Angeles Literature 