By Inside CSUSB
Through various events, journals and workshops, the creative writing team in the Cal State San Bernardino Department of English works hard to highlight and celebrate the diverse voices of the campus community.
Continue reading “CSUSB Creative Writing Team Explores Unique, Diverse Voices”
Amazon and rising rents killed the old Bohemia of the Beach Cities, but the spirit of the old Santa Monica survives at Angel City Books.
BY MAX BELL FROM: TheLAnd
If you want to understand the ceaseless gentrification of Santa Monica, just walk down Main Street.
By Mike Sonksen
FROM: Entropy
Documenting literary Los Angeles is my lifelong project. It started early in my childhood. I grew up going to bookstores across Los Angeles. From the early 1980s, I remember my dad driving us to the Bodhi Tree on Melrose. I remember going to Acres of Books in Long Beach and many other Used Bookstores now long gone. Most of them have been gone so long that I cannot even remember their names. (I still go to the Iliad in North Hollywood.)
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.
Continue reading “Fingers Crossed for the Endangered Literature Class”
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.
Continue reading “The Free Black Women’s Library Comes To L.A.”
By Brian Dunlap
Lucy Jane Bledsoe’s The Evolution of Love, published by L.A. based Rare Bird Books, has been named a finalist for the 2019 Lambda Literary Awards in the category of Lesbian Fiction. Finalists will be celebrated and winners will be announced at the Awards Ceremony and Gala the evening of Monday, June 3, 2019 in New York City.
By Brian Dunlap
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.
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.
Continue reading “Black Indian: A Memoir by Shonda Buchanan”
By Tracy Lehr
FROM: KEYT
Oxnard-born poet and writer Michele Serros left some of her prized possession to California State University, Channel Islands. They went on display on Valentine’s Day, her favorite holiday.
by ASTRID
FROM: LA Taco
Mangoes fill Yesika Salgado’s poetry in the same way Jacaranda trees blossom throughout her hometown in Silver Lake. She is a poet and activist emerging as the Sentimental Boss Bitch many have come to know and adore for gaslighting toxic masculinity on Instagram with heartfelt poems and screenshots.
Continue reading “Fall In Love With Yesika Salgado: Silver Lake’s Fat, Fly, Salvadoran Poet”
Los Angeles Literature 