Victoria Chang On The Self And Its Many Deaths
By Peter Mishler
FROM: Lit Hub
For the next installation in our interview series with contemporary poets, Peter Mishler corresponded with Victoria Chang. Victoria Chang’s books include OBIT (April 2020), Barbie Chang, The Boss, Salvinia Molesta, and Circle. Her children’s picture book, Is Mommy?, was illustrated by Marla Frazee and published by Beach Lane Books/Simon & Schuster. It was named a New York Times Notable Book. Her middle grade novel Love, Love will be published by Sterling Publishing in 2020. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, a Pushcart Prize, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and a Lannan Residency Fellowship. She lives in Los Angeles and is the program chair of Antioch’s Low-Residency MFA Program.
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The new Long Beach Youth Poet Laureate (LBYPL) program is being formed by The Long Beach Public Library and the Arts Council for Long Beach in order to provide local kids with literary arts, civic engagement and performance opportunities.
Father Gregory Boyle at Cal State University Los Angeles
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The door of Los Angeles’ newest bookstore is propped open on a quiet section of Hollywood Boulevard, the front window displaying books on a handmade wooden bookshelf. Inside the front room, you’ll find more books and merchandise below a neon light thought bubble and a sign that reads, “I still haven’t figured out all the people I am.” The staff is friendly, warm and eager to listen. In the back room, separated by curtains, art hangs on the yellow walls. The large space is waiting to be used by Not a Cult, an independent publisher turned bookstore.
Author and former Los Angeles poet laureate Luis J. Rodriguez says he’s been visiting California’s prisons for more than 40 years since leaving his own gang youth behind and losing 25 friends to drugs and street violence.
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