Speakeasy/Open Mic Night
It’s the first Monday of the month, and we’ve got our open mic night happening! Come early to get a good spot in line!
Where: The Last Bookstore
Date: Monday, the 7th
Time: 7:45 pm – 10:45 pm; Sign ups 7:45
Address: 453 S. Spring St., Los Angeles, California 90815
Website: https://www.http://lastbookstorela.com/events/speakeasy-open-mic-night-2/
Continue reading “Los Angeles Literary Events 9/7/15 – 9/13/15”
by E. Tammy Kim, From http://www.america.aljazeera.com
LOS ANGELES — In this high-turnover city, the Eastside, more than the moneyed west, has
seemed to hold on to its past. There are eccentric bungalows and blanched murals, and shopping corridors with the foot traffic and feel of a village market. Neighborhoods such as Lincoln Heights, El Sereno and City Terrace have thus far escaped the peculiar affliction of the upscale coffee shop. Their residents and business owners are still predominantly Latino and Asian, and largely working class — though perhaps not for long. According to trend-spotters, East LA is the molten core of gentrification, full of hipsterpreneurs with backing from friends in venture capital.
To see the real Eastside, ask the writer and teacher Sesshu Foster to take you on a little tour. He’ll pick you up downtown in his Toyota SUV, air conditioner whooshing, a Ry Cooder track pulsing. You’ll cross the LA River — thin puddles in a long concrete ditch — and keep going down Cesar Chavez, originally named Brooklyn Avenue by Jewish émigrés. Every few blocks, you’ll glimpse a faded mural and Foster will explain the story behind each one. If there’s graffiti, he’ll denounce the taggers’ “total disregard for their grandparents’ social art” in his unhurried Angeleno drawl.
Foster, 58, the author of four award-winning books of poetry and prose, is an encyclopedist by nature, the Diderot of the neighborhood. His writing is political, experimental and consistently local, even unfashionably so. A family man and full-time public school teacher, he’s never focused on self-promotion, yet he is praised within literary circles and counts U.S. poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, novelist Karen Tei Yamashita and poets Claudia Rankine and Amy Uyematsu among his friends and peers. Herrera says Foster might be better known if not for the day-to-day “pressure [on] working-class writers, writers of color… writing for the community.”
Continue reading “A Los Angeles poet’s revolution of everyday life”
Long Beach Poets Listening Room Open Mic
Weekly open mic. Let your voice be heard. Your stories matter
. Step up to the mic. Imagine a different kind of open mic, in a listening room so you can hear the music and have your music heard.Why just imagine it? We close the front door and sign-up sheet at 7:05. After 7:05 please enter through the door down the hall and around the corner. If there is room on the list, we will reopen it during the 10 minute break beginning sometime around 8:15. We are limiting the list to 20 signups and only guaranteeing the first 17 that they will get to perform. The last three will get up if there is time. Info for performers: This is a music and poetry open mic. We have a state-of-the-art sound system with a stage monitor. We have an electronic keyboard. If you want to use a backing track, the sound system has a cable with a mini jack plug that works with almost any phone, tablet, computer or CD player. We welcome light percussion (e.g., cajon, djembe, snare with brushes) but, out of respect for our neighbors, we do not allow full drum kits. No bagpipes. Material will need to be appropriate for the audience. We don’t really expect children, but have something ready just in case.
Where: Gina M. Woodruff Gallery
Date: Monday, the 31st
Time: 7:00 pm – 9:30 pm; Sign ups 6:40
Address: 5555 E Stearns St. Suite 203, Long Beach, California 90815
Website: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ImagineAnOpenMic/
Continue reading “Los Angeles Literary Events 8/31/15 – 9/6/15”
INTERVIEW BY KARINA WILSON
From litreactor.com
Poets were once central to public life. The Ancient Greeks and Romans regarded poetry as the best way to record epoch-making events, laud emperors or deities, and map the quests completed by heroes. Wherever a city fell or a conqueror rose, a poet observed from the sidelines and would, later, carve their account into cool clean lines of dactylic hexameter. Civilization, politics, and moral principles compressed into feet and couplets; history registered as art.
Somewhere along the line since, however, poetry’s civic status faded – perhaps in the palaces of Renaissance princes, who liked to control the flow of words through bestowing, and removing, private patronage? Poetry became a luxury, a privilege reserved for residents of ivory towers, far removed from everyday discourse, reserved for the most personal expression. But, thanks to initiatives like Poetry In Motion on transport systems it didn’t disappear from public spaces entirely.
Continue reading “Words On The Streets: City Poet Steven Reigns”
Han Vance discusses and signs Golden State Misadventures
Golden State Misadventures chronicles an amusing and ultimately life-altering quest of a soon-to-be-divorced father from Atlanta as he travels turn of the millennium California, immersing himself in the urban grittiness of the Bay Area, glitzy yet morally ambiguous quirkiness of Hollywood and slow burn reclusiveness of the Emerald Triangle. Han Vance is an Atlanta-based American culture reporter: writer (author/journalist/poet/blogger).
Where: Book Soup
Date: Monday, the 24th
Time: 7:00 pm
Address: 8818 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, CA 90069
Website: http://www.booksoup.com/event/han-vance-discusses-and-signs-golden-state-misadventures
Continue reading “Los Angeles Literary Events 8/23/15-8/30/15”
IVY POCHODA
Steph Cha might be the world’s only author of Korean American feminist 
noir. That might sound overly niche, but it isn’t. Her
Juniper Song detective series featuring, you guessed it, a female Korean PI, plays by most of the conventions of the noir genre and does so with much finesse.
Juniper might idolize Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler’s great hard-boiled detective, but she more closely resembles another Los Angeles PI — Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins. Like Mosley, Cha weaves her mysteries around Los Angeles’ immigrant and outsider communities, creating a richer and more ethnically diverse (and more accurate) portrait of the city than the average detective novel.
Continue reading “Steph Cha talks about the L.A. immigrant noir of ‘Dead Soon Enough’”
Check out some great Los Angeles poets. Hear some powerful poetry. Then by Laura Davila’s chapbook from DSTLARTS.org among the others. Continue reading Poets For All Presented by Writ Large Press
Mysterious Book Club
Join the Palisades Branch of the Los Angeles Public Library for a discussion of “Before the Poison by Peter Robinson. At the outset of this haunting stand-alone from Arthur Ellis Award-winner Robinson (No Cure for Love), British film composer Chris Lowndes, a recent widower, leaves California after more than 30 years for the peace and quiet of the Yorkshire countryside. He buys isolated Kilnsgate House, which the estate agent neglects to mention was the site of a sensational crime….Robinson manages a melancholy tone without veering into the maudlin….Agent: Dominick Abel, Dominick Abel Literary Agency.
Where: Palisades Branch of LAPL
Date: Tuesday, the 18th
Time: 6:00 pm
Address: 861 Alma Real Drive, Pacific Palisades, CA 90272
Website: http://www.lapl.org/whats-on/events/mysterious-book-club-4
Continue reading “Los Angeles Literature Events 8/17/15-8/23/15”
Adventures on the Queen Mary
Author James Radford and Dave Wooders discuss and sign Adventures On the Queen Mary: Tales of a Teenage Crew Member (paperback). Take an exciting trip back in time to the Golden Age of Ocean Travel on board the world’s favorite liner — the RMS Queen Mary. Enjoy a visual feast of new and archival photographs, many never before published. At 16 years of age, in 1957, Dave Wooders worked as a bellboy on the Queen Mary! (The Perfect Page)
Where: Book Soup
Date: Monday the 10th
Time: 7:00 pm
Address: 8818 N. Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, CA 90069
Website: http://www.booksoup.com/event/james-radford-dave-wooders-discuss-and-sign-adventures-queen-mary
Continue reading “Los Angeles Literature Events 8/10/15-8/16/15”
With Fire in Her Heart
HAVING PUBLISHED two acclaimed memoirs in the space of a year, Wendy C. Ortiz is establishing herself as a powerful voice in the literary community. Her first book, Excavation, was an original narrative of sexual awakening, notable for Ortiz’s exploration of her own agency and desire as a teenager drawn to the seductive manipulations of her English teacher. The voice of the older, wiser narrator in Excavation is compassionate, balanced, firmly feminist.
It took Ortiz over a decade to write and publish Excavation. Hot on the heels of that groundbreaker comes Hollywood Notebook, a chronicle of Ortiz’s early 30s in Los Angeles, as she struggles to make a living for herself as a writer. Lifted from her journals, Hollywood Notebook reads like a behind the scenes documentary about the making of Excavation. With regular references to the writing of that memoir, Ortiz bears witness to the writerly process: the habitual return to the page, the blocked days, the boredom, the lightning flashes of inspiration, the oscillation between passion and doubt typical of any work in progress. In the midst of Ortiz’s intense hypergraphia, she wavers in her faith in the story she’s writing, not always certain it should see the light of day. Readers of Excavation will recognize the references to it and be grateful she stuck with the process.
Continue reading “Lauren Eggert-Crowe on Hollywood Notebook”
Los Angeles Literature 