In 2025, these writers continued putting pen to paper and fingers to keyboards despite heightened censorship and efforts to defund the arts during the first year of President Trump’s second term. Some, like the young debut poet from Panorama City, Katherine Preza Leonor and William Archila, who escaped the Salvadoran civil war as a child, published the poetry collections Russeting Fruits (Daxson Publishing) and S is for (Black Lawrence Press) respectively. They engage in personal and familial narratives, confronting themes of migration, exile and belonging, highlighting both the individual and social dimensions of immigration in the US and beyond. Lenor depicting the personal stress stemming from her, her family and her community being targeted as criminals, as other, in her own country and Archila exploring the loss of homeland, family and identity that often accompanies emigration and especially his experience immigrating from the Northern Triangle (El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras) towards the United States.

However, others, like journalist, essayist and L.Á. native Lynelle George; Teresa Mei Chuc, local public school teacher who immigrated to the US as one of the Boat People from Vietnam as a young child; and longtime Altadena resident Ashtion Cynthia Clark, wrote about the devastating Altadena Fire and how it affected them and what the destruction means to this deeply artistic and historically Black community. While others published zines and anthologies dedicated to both the Palisades and Altadena fires, like author and zine publisher, Sofía Aguilar and her zine Los Angeles. 

“L.[Á]. has changed,” it says in its “note from the editors,” written by both Aguilar and Paula Macena, “…the recent blazes have completely transformed the fabric of this city.”

Other writers wrote about place, Greater Los Ángeles, like poet and Beyond Baroque’s Interim Executive Director, jimmy vega. In his poem “Another Freeway Poem–An Ars Poetica Written near the 710” from his debut collection zirconium ash, he takes the famous L.Á. freeway poem, where local SoCal poets use the freeway as a defining emotional and cultural environment, reflecting L.Á.’s identity as a city built on motion, congestion and paradox, and turns it into a socio-political commentary (mostly writers of color do this). In vega’s poem, he turns the freeway into a corridor of enforcement, in this case for ICE’s deportations; as a mechanism to separate Brown families; as a mechanism of segregation; and a metaphor for the suffering of local Black and brown communities–unlike the freedom and personal journey that white writers often associate with the freeway–because vega knows it was and still is, used in prominent ways that helps create a city “rot with ghosts.”

Also, its LGBTQIA+ writers were busy writing and publishing, such as Gina Rae Duran, Gustavo Hernandez, Brian Lin, Jeremy Ra and Steven Reigns. They edited anthologies like Duran did for FlowerSong Press with The White Picket Fence: Stories of Individuality as Rebelliousness, which aims to highlight stories that challenge conventional narratives about identity; books such as Outliving Michael by Steven Reigns and Bachelor by Orange County Poet Laureate Gustavo Hernandez; and essays and poems by the likes of Brian Lin and Jeremy Ra.

Not only did the writers of the Greater Los Angeles literary community find publishing success in 2025, they were also recognized for their hard work. Local poet and educator Benin Lemus was awarded with a Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs 2025 Trailblazer Award. Percival Everett won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for his novel James, a reimagining of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, told from the perspective of the slave Jim.

Ariadna Sanchez Hernandez won a Bronze Medal for Best Children’s Nonfiction Book at the International Latino Book Awards for her book La jugada del dia (Alegria Publishing). Kathleen Contreras won a Gold Medal for Most Inspirational Children’s Picture Book–English at the International Latino Book Awards for her book Born to play Beisbol: The magical career of Fernando Valenzuela (Espejo Press). Kitty Felde won a Gold Medal for Best Educational Chapter Book at the International Latino Book Awards for her book Estado de la Union (Chesapeake Press). Mona Alvarado Frazier won a Silver Medal for Best Young Adult Latino Focused Book at the International Latino Book Awards for her book A Bridge Home (Arte Publico Press). Daniel A. Olivas won a Silver Medal for Latina/o/e Communities at the International Latino Book Awards for his book Chicano Frankenstein (Forest Avenue Press). Jean-Pierre Rueda won a Gold Medal for The Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award–One Author–Bilingual for his book Amor Entre Aguaceros/Love Between Downpours (Alegria Publishing).

Amy Raasch’s poem “ontology of llorando” was also announced as a winner in Sonora Review’s Noise Contest, her poem “Ornament” was selected as a finalist for The Florida Review 2025 Editor’s Award for Poetry and her poem “My Sister Donates Her Eyes to the State of Minnesota” won the Beullah Rose Poetry Prize.

Plus, many other writers were nominated for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net, like Kevin Ridgeway’s Best of the Net poetry nomination from The Literary Underground and both Lynne Bronstein’s Best of the Net prose nominations from Dashboard Horus and Four Feathers Press. Others were finalists for or won awards as well, such as fiction writer Pete Hsu who won the Granum Foundation Prize, a foundation whose mission is to identify and invest in the next generation of pathbreaking writers and artists; Mike Sonksen who was one of ten teacher winners of Get Lit’s Certificate of Performance, chosen by a pannel of professional judges in their If I Awaken in Los Angeles compitition; and Lynne Bronstein who won Poem of the Year from Four Feathers Press for her poem “The Crude and the Sweet.”

As in years past, with “Los Ángeles Writers Publish in 2025,” Los Angeles Literature attempts to be as comprehensive as possible in highlighting the publication success of the Greater Los Ángeles literary community. Regrettably, with so many avenues to publish today, with so many local writers publishing, some writers and publications have been unintentionally missed. Nevertheless, every publication is a cause to celebrate. Here’s to all the writers who’ve published in 2025.

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Publications in Journals, Magazines, Anthologies and Newspapers

Books Published in 2025

Along The Way, We Saw The World: A 20th Anniversary Collection of Prose and Poetry (826LA) edited by 826LA

In honor of 826LA’s 20th Anniversary, Along The Way, We Saw The World celebrates 826LA’s past, present, and future. In the following pages, you will see work from 826LA students, volunteers, educators, community partners, staff members, and board members. In response to the prompt, coming into your own as a way of transforming the future, this collection of work represents authors devoted to their authentic selves, a hopeful future, an honest and preserved past, and all the moments of unbridled joy in between.

Los Angeles (Self-Published) edited by Sofía Aguilar and Paula Macena

LOS ANGELES is a zine anthology created in the throes of the Palisades and Eaton fires in L.A. County. Co-edited by L.A. poets Sofía Aguilar and Paula Macena, the collection features selected writing, photos, and artwork from 17 artists from or in proximity to L.A. There are cats watching the fires from the writer’s apartment window, memories of old L.A. loves, and ordinary L.A. sights pre-fires, such as the Metro buses on Van Nuys and the rollercoaster at Santa Monica Pier.

As Angelenos learn to re-navigate life, many now without homes, this zine not only documents a tumultuous time in L.A. history, but also serves as a testament to the power of community organizing, neighbors, and home.

Some Final Beauty and Other Stories (University of Nevada Press) by Lisa Alverez

Some Final Beauty and Other Stories showcases women and Chicanx characters whose resistance, reconciliation, and strength vigorously affirm community. Author Lisa Alvarez captures the spirit of empowerment in the struggle for justice faced by marginalized communities in a nation defined by politicians from Reagan to Trump.

From the vibrant streets of Southern California to the arid Nevada Nuclear Test Site, these thematically linked stories explore self-discovery, rebellion, and solidarity as complex personalities and values meet at the intersection of art, love, relationships, activism, and identity. A Mexican American returns from WWII to encounter Paul Robeson. A Spanish Civil War veteran befriends a recovering addict. Young 1980s female activists take to the streets. A big-city Latino mayor discovers the limits of ambition. A grieving aunt confronts her dead niece’s toxic lover.

Yahya Is Home Alone (World Stage Press) by Yazmenne Romae Archer

In her first poetry collection, follow Yazmenne as she embarks on a turbulent journey through grief and loss. Each poem is a step in her journey toward acceptance, exploring the raw emotions and moments of solitude that come with loss, and the challenges of losing herself and finding herself again. Through her words, she navigates the darkness to reclaim herself and eventually find solace in past and present relationships. This poignant collection offers a glimpse into the complexities of mourning and resilience found in embracing the shadows of sorrow.

S is For (Black Lawrence Press) by William Archila

S is For is an investigation by poet William Archila of the Central American migrant crisis haunted by the past of the civil war in El Salvador, the meanings of family spirits, and trees disappearing to urban sprawl—always wielding the voice of the immigrant, the refugee, and the ever-present exile as a weapon against invisibility and displacement. Inventive and compassionate, Archila’s poems navigate the meanings of family spirits, weeds and wildflowers, and the irreverence to lay down roots with our dead. The collection expresses the importance of an inner voice from the perspective of exile—people with no country, no language, ghosts split between present and past, between home and foreign. In a variety of forms—quasi-sonnet, sestina, ekphrastic, syllabic, lyric, memorial—the poems create a bridge between flaws and fractures, between the northern region of Central America and the beloved north which is the US. S is for: every letter never uttered, but evoked.

With Dim Lights & Obsidian Tongues: A Pomona Poetry Anthology (El Martillo Press) edited by Ceasar K. Avelar and Cory “Besskeep” Cofer

Pomona’s second poet laureate Ceasar K. Avelar and the host of Pomona’s longest running poetry venue Cory “Besskepp” Cofer join forces as editors of an anthology collecting poetry and essays about the people and places of Pomona. Poets who have read and performed over the decades at poetry venues based in Pomona: A Mic and Dim Lights and Obsidian Tongues, explore themes of grief, memory, injustice, trauma, and healing. This collection features work by Michael Torres, Matt Sedillo, Judah 1, Tamara Blue, Kat Magill, Alex Tha Great, Natalie Sierra and more.

Confessions of A Sad Girl (Self-Published) Jennifer Baptiste

Confessions of A Sad Girl blends intimate reflections on emotional life with explorations of mental health, hope, and introspection. The book collects “sad girl confessions”—short lyrical pieces that meditate on vulnerability, inner struggle, identity, and resilience—interweaving poetic and prose writing with a focus on both the ache that comes with difficult feelings and the broader work of healing and self-understanding.

Lonnie Holiday (Rizzoli Electa) by John Beardsley and Harmony Holiday

Lonnie Holley’s widely admired practice spans painting, drawing, assemblage sculpture, and performance that combines experimental music and poetry.

In Lonnie Holiday’s first major monograph, every facet of his artistic practice is explored. Holiday considers Holley’s art and music as interconnected components of the artist’s overall creative vision. Beardsley focuses on the artist’s Birmingham roots connecting the cultural firmament of that city with other major creative communities in Alabama, most notably Boykin, more popularly known as Gee’s Bend, home of the famous quilters.

white men my age (World Stage Press) by Mike Bonifer

White Men My Age is a collection of poems Bonifer workshopped between 2019 and 2025 at the Anansi Writers Workshop and in the Community Literature Initiative, where writers from underserved communities get their voices heard and see their writing through to the printed page. In the process, these fellow artists became his muses, his sounding boards, his kindred spirits on a journey to celebrate one another in their most meaningful and authentic light. Sometimes the light is comedic. Sometimes it’s angry. Other times heartbreaking. Always it’s honest.

Bonifer describes the poems in White Men My Age as “A report from a spy in the camp of the oppressor.” It is his acknowledgement of his privilege. It is also an observation that we are all complicit in one another’s stories. The more clearly we can see and honor that reality, the better all our realities can be.

Shooting Stars at Sky: the Poetry of Play (Mama’s Kitchen Press) edited by Mike Bonifer

Shooting Stars At Sky—The Poetry of Play delivers poetic verses from the world’s most prominent fields and arenas, local gyms, neighborhood playgrounds, suburban backyards and distant peaks. In 70 poems by 50 extraordinary poets, it recalls shared histories, recounts life-changing competitions, and reveals our most heroic dreams.

Shooting Stars At Sky shows us that play is a metaphor for everything. It brings us together, sees us confronting our most profound challenges, and celebrates the zenith of our achievements.

Poetry is the ball that keeps the metaphor bouncing.

The Tautology of Water (Moontide Press) by Giovanni Boskovich

The Tautology of Water, Giovanni Boskovich’s debut book of poems, focuses on intersecting bodies of water and bloodlines, while exploring topics as wide-ranging as Marcel Proust and the byzantine nature of Los Angeles freeways. The book functions as an ersatz field guide to his native Southern California, but more specifically a tribute to the interstitial, overlooked towns of his youth.

The Lost Songs of Nina Simone (RIZE) by Shonda Buchanan

Shonda Buchanan weaves a prism of language, sound and light around and through the life of concert pianist, singer and Civil Rights activist, the incomprehensible Nina Simone. With this book, Buchanan is declaring this The Century of the Black Woman, providing a realistic glimpse into not only Simone’s life, but the lives of Black women in America, past and present, and their choices in a myopic, unforgiving country.

A grandchild of enslaved Africans, American Indians and Irish migrants, born into poverty as Eunice Waymon in a traditionally large family, Nina Simone lived a life few Black American women lived during the Jim Crow era in the South, yet rose to ultimately impact the world with her creative genius and determined spirit.

This book is both an emotional and historical excavation of an artist’s life, capturing the rise and descent of that life, including Simone’s family history, her childhood and young womanhood, as well as the addiction, mental health struggles and abuse. The Lost Songs of Nina Simone embodies the rich legacy—the pleats between the cloth—of Simone’s artistry, beauty, self-immolation and rage.

America Sin Fronteras (Daxson Publising) edited by Erica Castro

America Sin Fronteras is a powerful bilingual anthology that brings together the voices of Hispanic authors from across the Americas, each offering a unique perspective on identity, culture, and the immigrant experience. Featuring writers from Peru, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Honduras, Chile, Guatemala, Ecuador, and the United States, this collection of poems and stories captures both the struggles and triumphs of life across borders.

The Payback (Atria Books) by Kashana Cauley

Jada Williams is good at judging people by their looks. From across the mall, she can tell not only someone’s inseam and pants size, but exactly what style they need to transform their life. Too bad she’s no longer using this superpower as a wardrobe designer to Hollywood stars, but for minimum wage plus commission at the Glendale mall.

When Jada is fired yet again, she is forced to outrun the newly instated Debt Police who are out for blood. But Jada, like any great antihero, is not going to wait for the cops to come kick her around. With the help of two other debt-burdened mall coworkers, she hatches a plan for revenge. Together the three women plan a heist to erase their student loans forever and get back at the system that promised them everything and then tried to take it back.

A Sentimental Garden (Daxson Publishing) by Hope Cerna

A Sentimental Garden takes readers onto a bare-faced, unflinching journey through illness, grief, love, and the quiet strength found in the spaces between. This collection is a compelling and vulnerable reflection on the anticipation of grief, the experience of enduring it, and the long, uneven path of surviving it. It examines every facet of the impossible difficulties of being a caretaker in a country that so often does not care. It tells of a young daughter who is forced to become a mother to her own mother, and of relentless grief that carves its way into every moment.

Hangry Hearts (Wednesday Books) by Jennifer Chen

Julie Wu and Randall Hur used to be best friends. Now they only see each other on Saturdays at the Pasadena Farmers Market where their once close families are long-standing rivals.

¡Pónk! (Nightboat Books) by Marcus Clayton

¡PÓNK! follows Moose, an alienated academic and lead guitarist for Pipebomb!, as he navigates through spaces in and out of South East Los Angeles: punk clubs, college classrooms, family gatherings, street protests, and euphoric backyard shows. Oscillating between autofiction, memoir, and lyric, Clayton blurs genres while articulating the layered effects of racism, trauma, immigration, policing, Black hair, performance, and toxic academic language to uncover how one truly becomes an “ally.” Borrowing from the spatial lyricism of Claudia Rankine, the genre-bending storytelling of Alexander Chee, and the racial musings of James Baldwin, ¡Pónk!’s narrative takes back punk rock and finds safe space in the mosh pit.

Nightshade (Little Brown and Company) by Michael Connelly

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Detective Stilwell has been “exiled” to a low-key post policing rustic Catalina Island, after department politics drove him off a homicide desk on the mainland. But while following up the usual drunk-and-disorderlies and petty thefts that come with his new territory, Detective Stilwell gets a report of a body found weighed down at the bottom of the harbor—a Jane Doe identifiable at first only by a streak of purple dye in her hair. At the same time, a report of poaching on a protected reserve turns into a case fraught with violence and danger as Stilwell digs into the shady past of an island bigwig.

The Proving Ground (Little, Brown and Company) by Michael Connelly

Following his “resurrection walk” and need for a new direction, Mickey Haller turns to public interest litigation, filing a civil lawsuit against an artificial intelligence company whose chatbot told a sixteen-year-old boy that it was okay for him to kill his ex-girlfriend for her disloyalty.

Representing the victim’s family, Mickey’s case explores the mostly unregulated and exploding AI business and the lack of training guardrails. Along the way he joins up with a journalist named Jack McEvoy, who wants to be a fly on the wall during the trial in order to write a book about it. But Mickey puts him to work going through the mountain of printed discovery materials in the case. McEvoy’s digging ultimate delivers the key witness, a whistleblower who has been too afraid to speak up. The case is fraught with danger because billions are at stake.

Rivers of Angels (What Books Press) by Stephen Cooper

Ten stories of blood relations, ancestral revenants, random forces, and the often-violent folly of love. Set against the double-edged splendors of greater Los Angeles, from downtown streets to studio soundstages to gated mansions, from desert to mountains to sea, these are stories of people striving to reckon with the American hands they’ve been dealt in the marked-card gamble of their lives.

Mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, husbands, wives, and roving agents of chaos collide here with sometimes comic, often tragic but always lasting effects. In story after story something happens that matters—not least to the reader.

The Big Empty (G.P. Putnam’s Sons) by Robert Crais

Traci Beller was thirteen when her father disappeared in the sleepy town of Rancha, not far from Los Angeles. The evidence says Tommy Beller abandoned his family, but Traci never believed it. Now, ten years later, Traci is a high-profile influencer with millions of followers and the money to hire the best detective she can find: Elvis Cole.

Elvis heads to Rancha where an ex-con named Sadie Givens and her daughter, Anya, might have a line on the missing man. But when Elvis finds himself shadowed by a gang of vicious criminals, the missing persons cold case becomes far more sinister.

The Parachutist (Sundress Publications) by Jose Hernandez Diaz

In The Parachutist, Jose Hernandez Diaz weaves a breathtaking tapestry of poetry that delves into the heart of the Chicano experience. Diaz’s poetic voice shines brightly, capturing the tension between inherited struggles and present-day privilege, translating the untold stories of his ancestors into vivid, surreal verses. This collection is a tribute to those who, due to circumstance, could not tell their stories, as if the speaker is furiously documenting the poetry they never had the chance to create.

Against the backdrop of Southern California and the mystical landscapes of Mexican mythology, Diaz’s poetry blurs the lines between reality and fantasy.

Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man (Red Hen Press) by Jose Hernandez Diaz

This collection consists of odes to the Mexican American, first-gen experience as well as surreal prose poems with cultural references and settings native to the Los Angeles area.

Portrait as an Artist opens with odes to everyday images and symbols of the Latinx community. In an age of elevated racism, these odes seek to celebrate Latinx culture in the face of constant scapegoating, ridicule, and surveillance. Also, this collection explores surreal prose poetry both in the suburbs and barrios of Los Angeles and the larger American landscape.

Fix-It Familia (HaperCollins) by Lucky Diaz

No job is too big, no task is too small. We’re the Fix It Familia. We help one, we help all!

The Reformatory (S&S/Saga Press) by Tananarive Due (Paperback Edition)

Gracetown, Florida.

June 1950.

Twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens Jr. is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a reformatory, for kicking the son of the largest landowner in town in defense of his older sister, Gloria. So begins Robbie’s journey further into the terrors of the Jim Crow South and the very real horror of the school they call The Reformatory.

The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora (University of California Press) edited by Lan P. Duong, Isabelle Thuy Pelaud and Viet Thanh Nguyen

Edited by Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Lan P. Duong, and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Cleaving brings together Vietnamese artists and writers from around the world in conversation about their craft and how their work has been shaped and received by mainstream culture and their own communities. This collection highlights how Vietnamese diasporic writers speak about having been cleaved—a condition in which they have been separated from, yet still hew to, the country that they have left behind.

The White Picket Fence: Stories of Individuality as Rebelliousness (FlowerSong Press) edited by Gina Rae Duran and Edward Vidaurre

Prayers With a Side of Cash follows a filmmaker’s road trip from New York to Los Angeles, capturing moments through a series of poems that reframe the classic American road trip through a female perspective. Along highways and rest stops, encounters with hitchhikers, strangers, ghosts, and landscapes inscribed with symbols and contradictions explore belonging in a country in flux. The collection asks what it means to travel not only through space but through the shifting stories that shape us. Written in a moment of cultural uncertainty, the poems serve as both a personal pilgrimage and exploration of American identity, accompanied by a soundtrack that dares believe there is hope to be found in the sweetness of life.

Iconistas! (Lit Kit Collective) by Margaret Elysia Garcia

A homage to the women who fought during the Mexican revolution and after, in particular celebrating artists, activists, and writers. A zine-like poetry work that blends political, historical, and feminist themes through poetic homage and reflection.

All The Sad Music (DSTL Arts) by Nikolai Garcia

Nikolai Garcia’s sophomore chapbook, All the Sad Music, is an ekphrasis experiment that explores the relationship between music and poetry. Songs and memory blend together to explore the universal themes of love, loss, beginnings, and endings. Rather than simply describing music, the work investigates how musicality and mood intertwine with personal and emotional landscapes, translating the affective power of sound into poetic language.

Only Way Out (Thomas & Mercer) by Tod Goldberg

Failed lawyer Robert Green has such a good plan: Crack three hundred safe-deposit boxes and sail off to South America with his brilliant, morally flexible sister, Penny. If it weren’t for the damned freezing rain.

In the dying resort town of Granite Shores, cop Jack Biddle is self-appointed king—mostly of bad decisions. Between his family’s crumbling legacy, a wife who just joined the city council, and life-threatening gambling debts, Jack’s looking for a way out. Then he spots a van spinning off a mountain road into the valley below. In the wreckage, Jack finds a very dead Robert, millions in heisted loot…and opportunity.

All Jack has to do is clean up the mess, disappear Robert’s body, make off with the fortune, and not get caught. One hitch is Penny. Another is Mitch Diamond, a wild card ex-con who knows more about the missing fortune than he lets on. Jack, Penny, and Mitch each have an endgame. But there’s only one way out, and they’re crashing headlong toward it.

Catching Fire: The Los Angeles Wildfires (Rose of Sharon Press) edited by S.A. Griffin and Richard Modiano

Poppy State: A Labyrinth of Plants and a Story of Beginnings (Timber Press) by Myriam Gurba

Myriam Gurba has lived in California her entire life, with its plants and soils, forests and ecology, immersing herself in the language of the landscape as refracted through the languages and memories of her ancestors. In Poppy State, California plants serve as structural anchors in a wildly inventive work of narrative nonfiction that is part botanical criticism, part personal storytelling, part study of place. Gurba traverses themes of language, power, ancestry, and California’s ecology, in masterfully constructed sentences that seem to defy gravity, in the structure of a labyrinthine secret garden. The reader is invited to commune with California with Gurba as their guide, and is ushered through a compendium of anecdotes, reminiscences, utterances, lists, incantations, newspaper articles, and other ephemera.

Look What I Did About Your Silence (El Martillo Press) edited by gábor g. gyukics, Edoardo Olmi and Matt Sedillo

Look What I Did About Your Silence is a multilingual anthology compiling contemporary poetry from the United States and Europe addressing the many ways poets contemplate and respond to the concept of silence: divine and interpersonal silences; as well as the silences in public spaces that allow for everyday injustices and great atrocities. Edited by Matt Sedillo, Edoardo Olmi, gábor g.gyukics and Loris Ferri. Cover art by Alessandro Giampaoli.

Motherlands (Finishing Line Press) by Camille Herandez

Motherlands is a lyrical meditation on the parallel journeys of motherhood and immigration—each a radical act of love, each a quiet kind of loss. In this collection of poems, the speaker navigates the shifting terrain between daughter and mother, homeland and new land, memory and body. With tenderness and grief, Motherlands explores how the severance of migration echoes the ruptures of childbirth, and how both leave behind a scarred but sacred map.

Drawing from the poet’s experience as a second-generation American, the daughter of an immigrant mother, Aunty, niece, and mother of three children, this chapbook asks: What do we lose when we cross borders—geographic, generational, or otherwise? What do we carry forward? What language do we give our children, and what silence?

Bachelor (FlowerSong Press) by Gustavo Hernandez

In Bachelor’s opening poem, Gustavo Hernandez writes “I often stand right here and wonder about my voice. What it is now.” The “here” in Hernandez’s poems is opalescent: the physical and spiritual footprint of the family home; the wide wake of loss; the stillness of guarded detachment; and the threshold of new love, of the future. In these liminal waystations, the voice of Bachelor’s speaker reaches out to love, passion, heartbreak, inheritance, familial responsibility, and legacy. Many of the poems in this collection share titles: “Bachelor,” “Husband,” “Son,” “Nocturne,” “Conclusion.” Each of these words becomes a paradigm that Hernandez mines in his compressed and focused style, each a different interpretation, a facet of the consummate bachelor trying to reconcile the recollected past with the rapid pace of the present tense, trying to establish and maintain connection, trying to comprehend relation and condition.

Silent Scars of Healing Hands: Oral Histories of Japanese American Doctors in World War II Detention Camps (Applewood Books) Naomi Hirahara and Gwen M. Jensen (Rerelease)

Within the confines of detention centers in their own country, Japanese Americans who practiced medicine worked under the most dire conditions during World War II. Collected by a special team organized by the Japanese American Medical Association, these oral histories tell the stories of men and women who depended on ingenuity and compassion to care for their patients in remote makeshift hospitals. In this updated edition, the lives of incarcerated Japanese American medical professionals who endured the wound of a nation’s betrayal reveal the triumph of community and care amid hardship.

The Family Recipe: A Novel (Atria Books) by Carolyn Huynh

Open Season (Ballantine Books) by Jonathan Kellerman

People come to Los Angeles to chase their dreams. Sometimes they find themselves cast into a nightmare. And sometimes, the most ardent dreamers turn out to be the most vicious monsters.

The body of an aspiring actress is found dumped near a hospital emergency room. She’s been drugged and murdered and the motive for the callous crime remains maddeningly out of reach. Until, a prime suspect materializes. Another Hollywood hopeful. Only to be shot dead by a sniper using a weapon that turns out to have been catalogued in a previous murder. And another, before that. It’s not long before more bodies begin piling up.

Myth Opportunities (Daxson Publishing) by Perer Lechuga

Peter Lechuga crafts a debut poetry collection where the personal and the mythic collide. Drawing from his Mexican-American upbringing in Southern California, Lechuga weaves together the ancient and the contemporary, blending Aztec and Greek mythology with raw, heart-wrenching stories of love, loss, and the search for meaning. With intricate rhyme schemes and lyrical finesse, he transforms personal pain into powerful, timeless mythologies-inviting readers to witness the sacred and the everyday in new and profound ways. These poems don’t just tell stories–they forge new myths.

Russeting Fruits (Daxson Publishing) by Katherine Preza Leonor

Russeting Fruits by Salvadoran American poet and writer, Katherine Preza Leonor, is a politically charged and deeply personal literary collection that blends poetry, short stories, and essays to explore the realities of life as a person of color in the United States under the specter of contemporary political turmoil. At its core, the book responds to the fraught climate under the Trump administration and its aftermath while giving voice to experiences too often marginalized.

Rather than clinging to the myth of the American Dream, Russeting Fruits reframes these narratives through the lens of lived experience and cultural survival, offering a counter-narrative to societal erasure and political hostility.

Crime Wave (Giant Claw) by Suzanne Lummis

These Personae relate their stories in voices darkly comic, irreverent, fantastical or in the manner of 21st century urban realism. Crime or shady dealings is the throughline, from the low streets to corruption and deceit at the highest echelons of power. Even the dead can’t stop talking. Or tweeting. Suzanne Lummis, a principal definer of the poem noir, now, in her fourth collection, gives full expression to the stark, tearless sensibility.

Poetry Goes to the Movies (Beyond Baroque Books) edited by Suzanne Lummis

Poetry Goes to the Movies, an anthology of national reach, with poems exploring aspects of individual films, the movie-going experience, movies and memory, and in context of the larger culture, as well as “the industry” and the behind-the-scenes production end. Poets featured include D. A. Powell, Lynn Emanuel, Ed Hirsch, Martín Espada, Dorothy Barresi, John Murillo, Tim Seibles, Kim Addonizio and A. Van Jordan.

In Poetry Goes to the Movies, poets of Los Angeles, along with noted poets from across the country, re-imagine, recollect, pay homage to, or argue against, movies and the many figures connected to them. Responding to movies from Nosferatu (1922) to Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), these voices express something of the concerns and manners of our times. And then there are those moods that never go out of style, the tenderness, pathos, bawdy mischief, bouts of dissatisfaction and, sometimes, surpassing wonder.

Chillona Chingona (Daxson Publishing) by Ely Lupe

Chillona Chingona is a book for people on the lifelong, intentional journey of finding their best, most favorite selves. For the overthinkers, the ones who live in their heads. For dreamers, especially daydreamers, who are constantly imagining other realities. For those upset with the current state of the world. for those who struggle to find the beauty in life and stay afloat. For those who have thought about disappearing, you matter. For those who struggle to feel like they are enough, you are. For heart on the sleeve wearers, who bleed empathy, you are loved. For people who embrace the duality of their soft and strong selves, you belong. And especially for first generation people, especially women, attempting to reconcile the identities that live within and being true to oneself. In this poetry collection, you will witness the journey of a poet who has struggled with all of these issues and found solace through poetic expression. You are not alone. The pain is real, but there exists healing on the other side of the written word. Reading and writing poetry will lead you to a journey of self-discovery where you can finally feel comfortable in your own skin, and through this healing you will thrive.

The Great Mann (Crown) Kyra Davis Lurie

In 1945, Charlie Trammell steps off a cross-country train into the vibrant tapestry of Los Angeles. Lured by his cousin Marguerite’s invitation to the esteemed West Adams Heights, Charlie is immediately captivated by the Black opulence of L.A.’s newly rechristened “Sugar Hill.”

Settling in at a local actress’s energetic boarding house, Charlie discovers a different way of life—one brimming with opportunity—from a promising career at a Black-owned insurance firm, the absence of Jim Crow, to the potential of an unforgettable romance. But nothing dazzles quite like James “Reaper” Mann.

Reaper’s extravagant parties, attended by luminaries like Lena Horne and Hattie McDaniel, draw Charlie in, bringing the milieu of wealth and excess within his reach. But as Charlie’s unusual bond with Reaper deepens, so does the tension in the neighborhood as white neighbors, frustrated by their own dwindling fortunes, ignite a landmark court case that threatens the community’s well-being with promises of retribution.

1925: A Literary Encyclopedia (Rare Bird Books) by Tom Lutz

The year 1925 was arguably the peak of literature’s centrality. There were more magazines, more journals, more reviews, more book news, and more book gossip than ever before or since. Literature’s rivals for cultural attention were on the rise—film was becoming a more significant part of people’s media diet, radio was just taking off, television technologies were advancing—but literature was still king. Even mediocre books got dozens of reviews, and the reviews were (most often) thoughtful and intellectually engaged. The belief that literary writing was an essential and consequential business was nearly universal. Modernist ferment continued to excite discussion while the pulp revolution in genre fiction—detective stories, science fiction, Westerns, romance—was booming. These popular books, even if sometimes condescended to, were also given thoughtful review attention.

Chagos Archipelago (Red Hen Press) by Tom Lutz

Mónica has had enough of her life as a contract killer when she meets lonely wanderer Frank Baltimore in a stupidly expensive resort in Madagascar. A few hundred miles away, Alain has had more than enough of his solitary post on a tiny island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and so when the mysterious Skye offers him a job, he says yes—he doesn’t know if she is CIA, Wagner, Darkwater, or a gangster, but he wants in. She takes him to Diego Garcia, the top-secret US military base in the middle of the Indian Ocean, for training. Things turn ugly and deadly when a man from Frank’s past turns up trying to break into the lucrative, secretive, already crowded world of paramilitary contractors. He, Monica, Alain, and Skye end up on his bad side and turn to each other for help.

And Still Her Voice (Sibylline Press) by Ruthie Marlenée 

It’s Easter, 1967, when Anna LeMar, a lonely half-Mexican teen, stabs her father and runs away, but she’s not alone. Grandma Phoebe, her dead white grandmother, has colonized her brain and hitched along in a mental sidecar for the ride of their lifetime. Anna has also inherited Grandma’s musical talent and so reluctant travel companions, they navigate the world with Anna’s guitar strapped to her back and the knife she used on her father strapped to her leg.

Soul Open (Daxson Publishing) by Jeffrey Martin

Soul Open is a book that reflects the poet’s struggles in navigating difficult experiences in his life. In this collection of poetry the poet exposes his soul, and paints a picture of the pain and suffering he endures, but at the same time moves forward towards healing. For some reason the poet couldn’t cover up real emotions, and he couldn’t smile at the right moment and mask the pain. The journey in this collection is raw and real. The poet spills the words on the page, and this allows him to move forward, cry and curse. The honesty in this collection is compelling. There is no hiding or painting of soft landscapes. The poet is emotionally naked and he represents the quote “Tell the truth and shame the devil” as the old folks used to say. This book is a vulnerable masterpiece that leaves the reader in a state of understanding and compassion. When reading the truth in this book, it leaves readers less alone because the author drops all walls and shows his true authenticity.

Taiko Quartz Beat (World Stage Press) by D Hideo Maruyama

Taiko Quartz Beat is the result of several decades of writing dating from the 1990s. It contains “Quartz City”, which is a closet screenplay, and other poems in thematic sections often examining Los Angeles from a historical perspective.

Hollywoodski (Tiger Van Books) by Lou Matthews

Dale Davis is a man encumbered by a natural writing talent, corrupted by early success, and reduced to scrambling for crumbs. He arrives in Hollywood, unbattered and innocent, with a novel about his days as an almost Olympic-caliber swimmer. But his faith in the prevailing powers of talent and justice in Tinseltown leaves him essentially black-listed and unemployable, a talented writer who just can’t get paid. Despite the fading of a once-promising career, Davis still believes that his talent will propel him back into prominence. But that belief, in Hollywood, is about as realistic as the belief that “Someday my prince will come,” and as likely to make you depressed and crazy.

Hollywoodski is a nonlinear journey through Davis’s life, weaving his memories with stories he’s written over the years, charting how his hopes and dreams have changed over time. Featuring stories originally published in prominent publications such as The New England Review, ZYZZYVA, and Black Clock, Hollywoodski is a sweeping and inventive telling of the strange avenues that a life follows.

Kintsugi (Daxion Publishing) by Jamie Maxwell

Maxwell’s debut collection, Kintsugi, is a manifestation of recovery, weaving poetry that speaks to the broader human struggles of foster care, addiction, and domestic violence. These experiences, often marked by silence and stigma, become in her work a place of honesty, reflection, and renewal.

Gray Dawn (Mulholland Books) by Walter Mosley

The name Easy Rawlins stirs excitement in the hearts of readers and fear in the hearts of his foes. His success has bought him a thriving detective agency, with its first female detective; a remote home, shared with children and pets and lovers, high atop the hills overlooking gritty Los Angeles; and more trouble, more problems, and more threat to those whom he loves. In other words, he’s still beset on all sides.

A number of below-the-law powerbrokers plead with Easy to locate a mysterious, dangerous woman—Lutisha James, though she’s gone by another name that Easy will immediately recognize. 1970s Los Angeles is a transient city of delicate, violent balances, and Lutisha has disturbed that. She also has a secret that will upend Easy’s own life, painfully closer to home.

Matriarchy: Sacred Poems (El Martillo Press) by Briana Muñoz

In Matriarchy Briana Muñoz’s inhabits a perspective that is sometimes beyond the parameters of our colonized languages. Through this perspective she honors her indigenous lineage through her ancestral history as she reminds us that, despite it all, we belong to mother earth, to our own mothers, to the land and rivers, and to one another.

To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other (The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures) (Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press) by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Born in war-ravaged Vietnam, Viet Nguyen arrived in the United States as a child refugee in 1975. The Nguyen family would soon move to San Jose, California, where the author grew up, attending UC Berkeley in the aftermath of the shocking murder of Vincent Chin, which shaped the political sensibilities of a new generation of Asian Americans.

The essays here, delivered originally as the prestigious Norton Lectures, proffer a new answer to a classic literary question: What does the outsider mean to literary writing? Over the course of six captivating and moving chapters, Nguyen explores the idea of being an outsider through lenses that are, by turns, literary, historical, political, and familial.

A List of Things I Lost (World Stage Press) by Grace Olguin

In Underground Samoan Orator the reader is taken on a journey to Long Beach, California and Samoa through the Usolosopher’s perspective. The book features poems from his previous books and new poems to give the reader his best works. The vulnerability of this big man’s poetry will have you in deep thoughts, in awe, and with tears of joy and pain.

Atmosphere: A Love Story (Ballantine Books) by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Joan Goodwin has been obsessed with the stars for as long as she can remember. Thoughtful and reserved, Joan is content with her life as a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University and as aunt to her precocious niece, Frances. That is, until she comes across an advertisement seeking the first women scientists to join NASA’s space shuttle program. Suddenly, Joan burns to be one of the few people to go to space.

Selected from a pool of thousands of applicants in the summer of 1980, Joan begins training at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, alongside an exceptional group of fellow candidates: Top Gun pilot Hank Redmond and scientist John Griffin, who are kind and easygoing even when the stakes are highest; mission specialist Lydia Danes, who has worked too hard to play nice; warmhearted Donna Fitzgerald, who is navigating her own secrets; and Vanessa Ford, the magnetic and mysterious aeronautical engineer, who can fix any engine and fly any plane.

As the new astronauts become unlikely friends and prepare for their first flights, Joan finds a passion and a love she never imagined. In this new light, Joan begins to question everything she thinks she knows about her place in the observable universe.

Death of the Coppertone Girl (Luchador Press) by Kevin Ridgeway

Death of the Coppertone Girl by Kevin Ridgeway is a poetry collection that explores life on the margins of contemporary America through vivid, emotionally resonant verse. The poems act as dispatches from the frontlines of everyday struggle—touching on experiences in halfway houses, sober living facilities, and the difficult realities faced by people trying to get by in a country marked by economic precarity and personal hardship.

Euthanasia (Daxson Publishing) by J. Saravia

In Jessica Saravia’s debut poetry collection, Euthanasia explores trauma and suicidality in three distinct parts of the poets’ life that ends with hope for the future. She creates a poetry timeline that depicts her journey through a difficult childhood, insecure teenage years, trying to find her identity, carrying the pain through adulthood, and finally finding her way to healing. Exploring recovery and reflection, the book takes readers on a journey from childhood to now.

Homeboy Art Academy: Youth Anthology, Vol. 1 (El Martillo Press) edited by Matt Sedillo

Homeboy Art Academy: Youth Anthology Vol. 1 collects poetry written by teens during poetry workshops at Homeboy Art Academy with poet and publisher Matt Sedillo. These poems detail the poets’ love for their neighborhoods, their families, their life-changing experiences at Homeboy Art Academy as well as, themes of love and loss, crime and punishment, and their hopes for their futures.

Mexican Style (FlowerSong Press) by Matt Sedillo

In Mexican Style Sedillo explores themes of struggle and identity and devotion to a cause and a people. Throughout we find a different more playful side of Sedillo with nods, homages, reinterpretations in this collection to the works of Rulfo, Marquez, Bunuel, Gogol Varda just to name a few.

Jukebox & Perfecta (What Books Press) by Patty Seyburn

Music is the car and driver of Jukebox. These poems explore the intersection between the musicality of language and musical references as signposts of meaning. The song lyrics and instrumental riffs that take up space in our brains (where arguably classic literature should be?) infiltrate the poems and proceed to assume a prominent position. They return author and reader to the moment when first heard and people and places associated with those moments. Musical references liberally salt the book’s first section. The shorter second section addresses those singers “everyone has heard”—the birds that poets so love. The third section speaks to ideas and spaces of silence. And so a loud book goes not gentle, but quiet.

Piecework is a lively collection of intergenerational essays on how people create possibility and place through the arts, culture, and heritage. Women and children play central roles in these ethnographies and autoethnographies. Their stories and struggles, ideas and breakthroughs, affirm the exponential power of families, schools, and communities to shape their own destinies through creative action. We learn that change is a collective endeavor, shaped on the ground, with the people we know and the communities we cherish.

Beyond the Grace of God (Portable Magic Books) by Natalie Sierra

For a thousand years, Antonia and Vaslav have lived in shadow-lovers, monsters, immortals. But when Lucifer offers them sunlight in exchange for teaching him how to love, they accept, unaware of the cost. As their bond begins to fray, desire becomes dread, and memory becomes a weapon. Beyond the Grace of God is an erotic gothic horror story about devotion, betrayal, and the slow unraveling of immortality.

Anthology of Latino Plays (El Martillo Press) by Herbert Siguenza

Herbert Siguenza, a founding member of the celebrated Chicano/Latino performance troupe CULTURE CLASH, unveils his first collection of plays, crafted during his impactful tenure as a solo playwright at the San Diego Repertory Theater. Each play in this collection was fully produced, garnering acclaim for its creativity, wit, political commentary, and innovative exploration of societal and cultural themes.

Sacrament (Counterpoint) by Susan Straight

In August 2020, a group of nurses are working in the ICU at a hospital in San Bernardino at the height of a Covid surge: Larette Embers, whose husband, Grief, is an animal control officer; Cherrise Martinez, whose husband died years ago in a car crash, and whose daughter Raquel has been sent to a Coachella date farm to live with her great-aunt to avoid the virus; and Marisol Manalang, born in the Philippines but based in Sacramento. To safeguard their families, the nurses are living in a makeshift RV camp close to the hospital; they share food and cigarettes yet keep their work private. For this is a country in crisis, and they are assisting strangers at the edge of death with infinite tenderness and growing desperation.

The Calling (Daxson Publishing) by Jake Terán

The Calling is a coming-of-age novella centered on the life of Guillermo Tierra, a young Chicano man trying to turn his life around after dropping out of high school and spending time in a juvenile detention center. Determined to find purpose and redemption, Guillermo sets his sights on joining the Marine Corps as a way to reshape his future. When unexpected obstacles block his path to enlistment, he is forced to reconsider his goals and the direction of his life. The Calling is about adversity, choices to be made, and the significance of identity.

zirconium ash (What Books Press) by jimmy vega

Centered around loss and death of individuals, relationships, and ways of communicating, the poems of zirconium ash drive at intensified high speed, physically and psychically mapping the geography of the city of Los Angeles. Weaving and zigzagging, mingling grief, sorrow, and lament, the poems haunt and are haunted by the living and dead. The culture of the city and family history often blur in these poems, which can feel in conversation with themselves as well as others-fragmented ghost narratives that lyrically confront history, poetics, and the crimes and unjust actions of government.

A Shared Condition: Poetry from the Venice Collective (Moontide Press) by the Venice Collective

Sassy, sensitive, and searing poems by contemporary American poet Jan Wesley who died in 2025. These poems contain both lyric and narrative moments; feminist concerns as well as environmental. Here Wesley writes about men and women, about failed relationships, about her parents. Mostly set in Los Angeles, these are California poems in the best sense: light-filled, at times light-hearted, but, with a sniper’s aim, always pointed toward truth.

My Older Brother, A Famous Rapper (El Martillo Press) by Alyesha Wise

In this memoir in verse, Alyesha Wise explores themes of family, identity, and peace, to transform pain into resilience and fracture into unity. Structured like a mix tape, she explores these themes to illustrate what it means to be seen, erased and then resurrected.

MeXicana: poemas y más poemas (Riot of Roses Publishing House) by Diosa Xochiquetzalcóatl

MeXicana: poemas y más poemas (pronounced Me, Xicana mexicana) is Diosa Xochiquetzalcóatl’s seventh poetry collection. The author begins the entire collection with a double entendre title that perfectly encapsulates the dualistic and at times, pluralistic themes thoroughly explored throughout her poems. Themes surrounding culture, language, identity, religion, political and geographical borders, and patriarchal influences are not only explored, but dissected, and even contested.

The book is an exploration of the bilingual-binational conundrum: to be or not to be, that internal and external conflict of belonging and not belonging. Some may think that a Chicana and a Mexicana are the same, and that is simply not the case. There are many layers to these labels and lifestyles. And Diosa X, who has lived on both sides of that ridiculous man-made border as an adult, dives deep into all of the complexities of being binational and bilingual.

Nonetheless, whether juggling one or two or many hats, there is still this beauty and love and pride that is exalted within her writing. And as always, a classic characteristic of this multilingual author, be ready to learn new vocabulary and dive into the word-play that thrives within her multidimensional worlds. Diosa Xochiquetzalcóatl proudly invites readers of all ages and walks of life to join her on this fantastic and sometimes frustrating, though always phenomenal, journey of a MeXicana life.