Fingers Crossed for the Endangered Literature Class
By Megan McNaughton
FROM: The Corsair
With her long purple dress, aqua hair, and strong spirit, Professor Bridgette Robinson walks into Santa Monica College’s (SMC) Drescher Hall 212, greets her English 1 class, and begins to read along to Asha Bandele and Patrisse Cullors’ novel “When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir.” She easily commands the attention of the room; her students sit on the edge of their seats listening.
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The Free Black Women’s Library has arrived in Los Ángeles. They are the L.A. chapter of The Free Black Women’s Library, founded in Brooklyn in 2015 by Ola Ronke Akinmowo. The aim of this library is to provide “a free, feminist pop-up library and book swap with Black women writers at the center,” as their mission states.
Moon Tide Press Reading Event at Chevalier’s Bookstore 
Lucy Jane Bledso
Pasadena Native Naomi Hirahara and L.A. native Walter Mosley have both been nominated for a 2019 Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original, Hiroshima Boy, and Best Novel, Down The River Unto The Sea, respectively. For Hirahara it’s her second Edgar Award nomination, her first being for Snakeskin Shamisen, which won the 2007 Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original. Mosely has been nominated twice before for Best Novel, in 1993 for White Butterfly and in 2013 for All I did Was Shoot My Man and was nominated for Best First Novel in 1991 for Devil in a Blue Dress.
An Evening with Carl Phillips at Claremont McKenna College
Born in San Francisco and raised in Vacaville, Michelle Brittan Rosado earned an MFA in Creative Writing from California State University, Fresno, and is currently a PhD candidate in Creative Writing & Literature at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Why Can’t It Be Tenderness, which won the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018). Her chapbook, Theory on Falling into a Reef, won the inaugural Rick Campbell Prize (Anhinga Press, 2016). Her poems have been published in the Alaska Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, Poet Lore, San Francisco Chronicle’s “State Lines” column, and The New Yorker, as well as several anthologies.
NOTE: This is the third book in Los Angeles Literature’s Black History Month series highlighting the L.A. literature written by black authors.
Literary editor of of Los Ángeles based Harriet Tubman Press, Shonda Buchanan announced the release of her next book Black Indian: A Memoir, will be released by Wayne State Press in August. She is also an award-winning poet and educator. She is the author of Who’s Afraid of Black Indians? and Equipoise: Poems from Goddess Country and editor of two anthologies, Voices from Leimert Park and Voices from Leimert Park Redux.
An Evening with Joyce Carol Oates at Claremont McKenna College
