Los Angeles Literature’s first community news of 2025 and a lot has already occurred. The devastating fires that kicked off the new year in January to book releases to the Culver City Book Festival to a new bookstore opening in Echo Park to author announcements and a new poet laureate. Long running open mic staples such as Da Poetry Lounge, Obsidian Tongues, Anasi Writers Workshop, Two Idiots Peddling Poetry, The Definitive Soapbox, Recess, Expressions L.A. and Saturday Afternoon Poetry are still going strong, with Sunday Jump and Tuesday Night Project starting their new seasons later this year.
Beyond Baroque and the Inlandia Institute continue to offer writing workshops, including Beyond Baroque’s Wednesday Night Poetry Workshop, the West Coast’s longest-running free poetry workshop, which debuted in 1968. While Get Lit and WriteGirl continue to inspire the next generation of writers by encouraging young people to find their voices through creative expression.
In spite of Donald Trump taking office again and his administration’s hostile stance toward literature and the arts—putting literary arts funding, and possibly future funding, for the Greater Los Ángeles literary community in flux—affecting organizations such as the Sims Library of Poetry, Inlandia, and Get Lit, as well as individual writers who rely on programs like the NEA fellowships, the community continues to write, publish, create literary events, and build community. Not only for themselves, but also for the wider Greater Los Ángeles community, fostering dialogue and critical thinking, while speaking truth to power.
Since the hot, dry hurricane force winds blew through Southern California in January, off the desert, causing a spark to explode into the Palisades and Eaton Fires respectively, different parts of the Greater Los Ángeles literary community have come together for charity and fundraising readings to support their neighbors and community whose lives have been turned upside down.
As poet, teacher and San Gabriel Valley resident Sesshu Foster said in an Instagram post for a “Fire Relief Reading” on February 24, “Los [Á]ngeles is a different city than it was six weeks ago.” Seeing how many streets are still cluttered with debris from the fires, residents whose living situation is caught in the web of bureaucracy, Trump threatening to withhold federal disaster recovery funds, over two and a half months later, it’s no wonder. Like poet and Altadena resident Laura Sermeño who had her son’s education thrown in flux when his elementary school, Aveson Charter, burned to the ground.
One such reading, the “Fire Relief Reading,” supported the Pasadena Community Job Center, “an organization whose immediate response made them a community hub during the fires and whose consistent, continued support keeps them on the frontlines of the wildfire response” Foster said in the same Instagram post. This reading featured Maya Binyam, Rosecrans Baldwin, Joshuah Bearman, Sesshu Foster, Brittany Menjivar and Christina Catherine Martinez. Poets, novelists and performers, Joshua Bearman having grown up in Altadena.
There have been other fire relief efforts throughout the community such as Octavia’s Bookshelf, Pasadena’s first and only Black owned bookstore, transforming into a relief center “providing essential supplies and support to those affected” they said in an Instagram post. It started with owner Nikki High offering displaced residents use of the store’s Wi-Fi and a place to charge their devices. From there, it evolved into a mutual aid hub as people started to drop off water before food arrived, served on folding tables.
Other community efforts include publications featuring writing from locals about the fires—how they impacted them and the community and about Los Ángeles more broadly. For example writer, poet and teaching artist, Sophia Aguilar, sent out a call for submissions on Instagram, for a zine of “creative writing an visual art that speaks to the theme of [L]os [Á]ngeles…[A]ll proceeds from the zine will go towards [Anti-Recidivism Coalition], which supports incarcerated fire crews through scholarships, training, certification, and job acquisition upon release, with the ultimate goal of ending mass incarceration across California.” The zine is titled Los Angeles.
On February 22, the 4th Annual Culver City Book Festival took place at the Wende Museum in Culver City from 10 am to 5 pm. The festival featured local authors tabling and reading, local publishers and panels. El Martillo Press, co-owned and run by local poets Matt Sedillo and David A. Romero; the community’s oldest literary arts organization, Beyond Baroque; World Stage Press, “dedicated to the creation and proliferation of African-American Literature;” Village Well Books & Coffee; The Santa Monica Review and Heavy Manners Library, among others tabled their wares. Even spoken word poet Christian Perfas aka Soul Stuf, tabled his poetry on demand with a sign that read “Come talk to me and see your feelings turn into art!
Beyond Baroque hosted a panel on Altadena writers and the recovery from the Eaton Fire, moderated by San Gabriel Valley resident, poet and publisher, Thelma T. Reyna. Altadena Poet Laureate Lester Graves Lennon spoke on how he and his neighbors joined together to patrol their streets, on the lookout for anyone rummaging through their debris, searching for precious metals and other valuables to sell and make a tidy profit from, in the absence of any real police presence.
To end the book festival, El Martillo Press hosted several readings that included several poets whose books they’re publishing later this year. These were mostly Black and brown poets such as Matthew Cuban Hernandez, Alysha Wise, Cory “Besskepp” Coffer, Food4Thought, Queen Socks and their daughter Love.
As poets of color writing in the midst of ongoing attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion in this country, each poet used their own voice to speak truth to power. Food4Thought, Queen Socks and Love captivated attendees with their strong words of authentic, healthy, tight nit, Black love. Love for themselves and love for each other.
Hernandez and Wise read poems through cathartic anger, as if they could no longer suppress their feelings about the hate permeating the country. The certainty they infused their spoken word performance in rippled through the growing crowd, not mincing their words.
In the end, the crowd that attended the 4th Annual Culver City Book Festival, filled their back courtyard.
In the opening months of 2025, local poets, writers and publishers continue to release books. Poet and founder of Barrio Fuerza, Alma Rosa Azul, released her debut poetry collection Mariaposa: Poems of Love and Liberation from local Riot of Roses Publishing House in February. The collection is about radical love, submerging the reader into her dream of a new world, a world where love, anarchy and poetry co-exist; a world where the molotov’s fly among the butterflies.
Southland native, poet and teacher, Jose Hernandez Diaz, released his second full length collection of poetry, The Parachutist, in January. The collection is about the heart of the Chicano experience. He captures the conflict between the hardships passed down through generations and present-day privilege, bringing to life the untold narratives of his ancestors. It’s framed by Southern California and the mystical landscapes of Mexican mythology.
Matt Sedillo, El Sereno native, poet and co-founder of El Martillo Press, announced his third poetry collection, Mexican Style, is now available for pre-order from FlowerSong Press. All three of his poetry collections have found a home at FlowerSong, an independent press in Texas that, according to its website, “nurtures verse, fiction, and nonfiction from, about, & throughout the borderlands, amplifying the voices of those from the Americas and beyond.” Like his previous collections, Sedillo remains directly political as he explores themes of struggle, identity and dedication to a cause and a people. However, included throughout, there is a different more whimsical side of Sedillo with nods, homages and reinterpretations to the works of Rulfo, Marquez, Bunuel and Gogol, to name a few.
Also, 1925: A Literary Encyclopedia by Tom Lutz—the founding editor-in-chief and publisher of Los Angeles Review of Books and a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside—was published this month by local Rare Bird Books. The book makes the argument that the year 1925 was the peak of literature’s centrality in America. There were more magazines, more journals, more reviews, more book news, and more book gossip than ever before or since.
Plus, local World Stage Press, has already released three new poetry collections: These Chasms in the Earth: Upheaval Poems on Motherhood, Sacrifice, and Self by Cecily Stone, Yahya Is Home Alone by Yazmenne Romae Archer and Taiko Quartz Beat by David Maruyama.
And finally, other local writers and presses such as Carolyn Huynh (April 1st) and Moontide, have published books and poetry collections. In the novel, The Family Recipe, Huynh writes a family dramedy about estranged siblings competing to inherit their father’s Vietnamese sandwich franchise and unravel family mysteries.
On February 19, Beyond Baroque announced on Instagram, that “We’re thrilled…that Luivette Resto (@lulubell.96) has been elected President of Beyond Baroque’s Board of Trustees! She’s been a true leader in our community as a poet, trustee, supporter, workshop facilitator, curator, and organizer. Now we’re incredibly lucky to have her lead our board as it works to support our mission and grow Beyond Baroque in the coming years.”
Luivette Resto is an award-winning poet, a mother of three revolutionary humans, and a middle school English teacher. She was born in Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico but proudly raised in the Bronx and currently lives in the San Gabriel Valley.
On January 29, Angel City Books and Records in Santa Monica posted news to its Instagram page about Tim Horner, a former employee who is now “opening his own store at 1519 W. Sunset Blvd in Echo Park, the Reverie Bookstand.” He “has made many friends working here for the past couple years.”
The Reverie Bookstand is a one room used bookstore, the size of a two car garage, selling books in a curated selection of subjects that most interest Horner: alchemy, hermeticism, and the occult. Plus, he offers poetry.
With the opening of Horner’s store, Echo Park now has five bookstores, each within a few blocks of each other. He also plans to host events: readings and speakers.
On February 20th, Pomona introduced Natalie Sierra as the city’s next poet laureate at a ceremony sponsored by the city of Pomona and the Pomona Library. Sierra said in an Instagram post that “Pomona is my heart and poetry is my soul.” This poet and writer whose been shaped and molded by Pomona her entire life noted, “putting the two together, for me, is the natural course of my life.”
Sierra is the author of the chapbook Medusa (DSTL Arts, 2020) Charlie Forever and Ever (FlowerSong Press, 2021) and the forthcoming Beyond the Grace of God. At the same ceremony, the city of Pomona introduced its first youth poet laureate, Kea Lee. Natalie said of Lee “I look forward to seeing her grow as a poet and a person.”
Los Angeles Literature 