Los Angeles Literature is an independent online magazine that covers the Greater Los Ángeles literary community—its news, history, writers and their writing through articles, book reviews, interviews, history and literary criticism. Plus, it also publishes a weekly list of literary events, in addition to pages listing local independent bookstores, open mics and its literature, etc.

Los Angeles Literature looks out from a perspective centering the city’s writers of color and its LGBTQIA writers, their events and issues and their literature—historically marginalized—and expands outward to the rest of the literary community. 

---

Los Angeles Literature was founded to shine a light on the city’s vibrant literary community, its history and literature, as it sits too often in the shadow of Hollywood, too often ignored by the city itself. That long time and even lifelong residents are unaware exist. However, Los Ángeles’ literary history stretches back more than 135 years to the publication of Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson in 1884 and beyond to the stories of its original native inhabitants. In the years since, its writers such as Raymond Chandler, John Fante, Chester Himes, John Rechy, Wanda Coleman, Charles Bukowski, to contemporary writers such as Kamau Daaaood, Luis J. Rodriguez, Nina Revyor, Mike Sonksen, Dana Johnson, traci kato-kiriyama and bridget bianca, that have continued to produce powerful and thought provoking literature.

---

Brian Dunlap (Editor-in-Chief) is a native Angeleño who still lives in Los Ángeles. He explores and captures the city’s stories that are hidden in plain sight. Dunlap is the author of the chapbook Concrete Paradise (Finishing Line Press, 2018), 14 poems exploring the intersection of race and place in Los Ángeles.

Dunlap received both his BA from UC Riverside and MFA from Fresno State in Creative Writing where he honed his love for writing about place and his hometown Los Ángeles. He is the winner of the 2018 Marvin Bell (formerly the Jeff Marks) Memorial Poetry Prize from december magazine judged by former L.A. Poet Laureate Luis J. Rodriguez. His poems, book reviews and nonfiction have been published in PacificREVIEW, California Quarterly, Lit Pub, L.A. Parent, and the anthology Reimagine America (Vagabond, 2022), among others.

Over the years, as he has learned more and more about Los Ángeles literature and its deep, long history dating back to “Ramona” by Helen Hunt Jackson in 1884, he’s wanted to share the city’s literary tradition and its current culture and scene with the world. This website is his attempt to do just that and to prove that L.A. not only has a literary culture, but that it has culture period. Contact him at: b.dunlap2@aol.com