A few thoughts on adapting “The Courtship of María Rivera Peña” for the screen
By Daniel A. Olivas
FROM: Labloga.com
Nineteen years ago, a small independent press based in Pennsylvania—sadly now defunct—published my first book, a novella titled The Courtship of María Rivera Peña(Silver Lake Publishing). The story is loosely based on the migration of my paternal grandparents from Mexico to Los Angeles in the 1920s and follows the courtship, marriage, and family life of the cook Beto and the beautiful waitress María. Three years later, a longer, second edition was published under the same name but with a slightly different cover design. I am now exploring with a publisher whether we can publish a 20th anniversary edition that would include a scholarly introduction.
Continue reading “A few thoughts on adapting “The Courtship of María Rivera Peña” for the screen”
A is for ACTION: A Social Justice Book Club for Kids at Eagle Rock Branch Library, LAPL – Kids Event
SEVENTEEN AND HIGH, Nikki Darling swaggers down the middle of Garvey Boulevard, a busy thoroughfare in the San Gabriel Valley, as cars swerve around her: “‘Three Days’ by Jane’s Addiction is playing on my Walkman and I feel like I’m in a movie, like I’m an assassin.” She stands in the street with a cigarette hanging from her lips, with “someplace to be or maybe nowhere to go.” She taunts the cars as they pass: “Fly around me, motherfuckers! Fly around me like I’m not even here!”
Yesterday, L.A.’s Not A Cult Press announced on its Facebook page that Stories Books & Cafe has teamed up with them to sponsor their annual poetry submissions award. The award will now be called the Stories Award for Poetry. The winner gets a cash prize of $1,000 and a publishing deal with Not A Cult.
The atmosphere at the Virgil was electric. Beats from music spun by DJs filled the room with powerful comradery. L.A. writers filled the room in support of a member of the literary community from Fresno, poet Sara Borjas. The night emanated a bit of hip hop and club.
New Book Club: Spiritual Classics with Nick Shindo Street at the Last Bookstore
Arminé Iknadossian’s mother would gather olives from the trees that grew just outside of her daughter’s high school; she couldn’t imagine all of that wonderful fruit going to waste. Iknadossian has not written a poem for this image she remembers all of these years later, but perhaps all of the poems in her first collection of poetry are, in a way, an homage to her mother’s incessant olive gathering.
Arkay Artists will be publishing Salvadorian L.A. poet Ingrid M. Calderon-Collins’ memoir in the Winter of 2019. Let the Buzzards Eat Me Whole is a memoir summoned in poetic prose and poems.
Fran Wilde & Rachel Hartman at Children’s Book World – Kids & Teen Event
Los Angeles Literature 