A Night In Conversation With Peter J. Harris
By Brian Dunlap
Laughter spilled from the crowd as stories and memories rose from the stage.
It was a Saturday night at the nearly full theater at Beyond Baroque. Peter J. Harris answered journalist Rex Weiner questions, recounting reading with Lucille Clifton as a young writer, writing The Black Man of Happiness as he faced foreclosure, his time spent attending the Anansi Writers Workshop at the World Stage after moving to L.A. in the early ‘90s. It was gripping, informative, accidently instructive, but most of all the talk revealed one versions of a writer’s life. It revealed a happy black man.
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Cynthia Guardado is a fierce and unapologetically brown Salvadorian American female punk rockera, poeta, activista, y profe straight from Inglewooooood, California. Her poems have been published in PALABRA, A Magazine of Chicano & Latino Literary Art; The Packing House Review; and Razorcake’s very own Puro Pinche Poetry: Gritos Del Barrio.
This year—fall 2018—marks the 30th anniversary of Santa Monica Review (SMR). The national literary arts journal published by Santa Monica College (SMC) showcases the work of established authors alongside emerging writers, with a focus on West Coast fiction and nonfiction; it happens to be the only nationally-distributed literary journal at a community college.
David Neiwert and Alt-America at Book Soup
It begins every Wednesday at 7:30 pm. Early arrivals step to the mic, sharing a poem in progress to receive much needed feedback. Then they provide feedback to others. V. Kali, author of Hymn (World Stage Press), sits next to the donation box and front entrance and welcomes attendees as they arrive. As host, V. has been a warm presence each week for years, her long beautiful natural hair a thing of legend. As the crowd grows, the list of open mic readers expands before the feature grabs everyone’s attention. Murmurs of “mmm hmm” and “that’s right” arise from the crowd. After, it’s the community-the open mic readers’-turn at the mic. It’s their chance to bring down the house.
William Glassley and A Wilder Time at the Last Bookstore
41st Annual Writers Week Conference at UC Riverside
“IT’S THE BROKEN PARTS that matter” claims Vickie Vértiz, in a note to her poem “Nahuatl — A Revenge,” which features what she calls “imperfect” translations from the indigenous Nahuatl language into English. Vértiz’s imperfect translations recall what theorists Emily Apter and Jacques Lezra, following Walter Benjamin, call “untranslatables”: philosophical concepts that both invite and prevent transfer between languages, words that call out to be reinvented in their new language context precisely by resisting translation. In Vértiz’s poems, Latinxs living in California share “untranslatable” experiences that take place between English and Spanish. Her poems transform displacement and a polluted cityscape into sources of resistance and aesthetic restructuring. The visually and sonically rich setting of these poems may be polluted — by toxic air, water, and soil; toxic masculinity and white supremacy — but Vértiz celebrates what her community grows in this toxic ground and voices their untranslatable experiences.
Los Angeles Literature 