By Steve Salvidar
FROM: Los Angeles Times
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.
Continue reading “Luis J. Rodriguez On Changing Lives Through Poetry”
By Patrick J. Kiger
FROM: L.A. Times
Most mornings, poet, memoirist and essayist Luis J. Rodriguez gets up around 5 a.m. at his San Fernando Valley home, reads for a few minutes for inspiration and then quickly goes to his computer to start writing. “I read, and then it’s, hey, man, I’ve got to do something!” he says. “If I can get a couple of hours in the morning, then I’m happy.”
Continue reading “Why Luis J. Rodriguez is Perpetually on the Run”
By Dorany Pineda
FROM: L.A. Times
Long before Jeanine Cummins’ highly contentious “American Dirt” was published by Flatiron Books, the novel was raising red flags internally, according to Myriam Gurba.
By Brian Dunlap
Los Nietos Press is small. Last year they published Long Beach poet Thomas R. Thomas’ latest poetry collection Star Chasing, a poetic memoir about his life growing up in a Southern California tract-house through his adulthood living in the Southland. In 2018, they published San Bernardino native and Long Beach resident liz gonzález’ first full length poetry collection Dancing in the Santa Ana Winds: Poems y Cuentos New and Selected.
By Candice Yacono
FROM: Orange County Register
On any given day, you might find Susan Straight walking along the Santa Ana River or throwing darts at the local Elks lodge.
Continue reading “How Riverside Author Susan Straight Enbraced Family History For Latest Book”
By Jessica
Virtual Velocity by Anthony Mora is the story of the curious creation of pop phenomena, Jake Jenkins, America’s most renowned and successful literary novelist. Spanning six decades, through three interconnected stories, Virtual Velocity follows Jake from a sixteen-year-old learning about literature and women, to frenetic rock journalist, to struggling literary novelist, to world-famous author. Journeying through L.Á.’s rock and literary worlds, it is also an homage to the city, tracking its internal and external changing landscape and its cultural shape shifting.
By Brian Dunlap As 2019 comes to a close, it’s clear that Los Ángeles writers explore a diverse range of topics, themes, and ideas. As the months went by, writers published novels, essay collections, poetry collections/chapbooks or announced their books had been accepted for publication in 2020. Their writing ranged from exploration of children lost too soon, to a celebration Los Ángeles, to the love … Continue reading Los Ángeles Writers Publish in 2019
By Dana Isokawa
FROM: Poets & Writers
For our fifteenth annual look at debut poetry, we chose ten poets whose first books struck us with their formal imagination, distinctive language, and deep attention to the world. The books, all published in 2019, inhabit a range of poetic modes. There is Keith S. Wilson’s reimagining of traditional forms in Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love, and Maya Phillips’s modern epic, Erou. There is Maya C. Popa’s lyric investigations in American Faith, Marwa Helal’s subversive documentary poems in Invasive species, and Yanyi’s series of prose poems in The Year of Blue Water. The ten collections clarify and play with all kinds of language—the language of the news, of love, of politics, of philosophy, of family, of place—and, as Popa says, they “slow and suspend the moment, allowing a more nuanced examination of what otherwise flows through us quickly.”
Continue reading “Poetic Lenses: Our Fifteenth Annual Look at Debut Poetry”
By Frank Shyong
FROM: L.A. TimesL.A. Times
It’s hard for poet Daniel Morales Leon, 38, who works as a cook at a coffee shop in the Arts District, to think of himself as an artist with a capital A.
By Victoria Chang
FROM: The Normal School
Dear Daughter,
Sometimes I wish I didn’t try and fix everything from your childhood. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t tried so hard to help you memorize your math facts when you weren’t ready. Sometimes I wonder how many mistakes I am making now that will become clearer only later.
Continue reading “Dear Daughters, Dear Linda: Essays From ‘Terrible Crystals’”
Los Angeles Literature 