Dryland Call For Submissions
By Brian Dunlap
Dryland, a literary journal based in South Central Los Ángeles, is currently open to submissions. The deadline is March 4, 2019.
Category: Articles
Vanessa Angélica Villarreal Is A Finalist
By Brian Dunlap
Vanessa Angélica Villarreal is the author of Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, 2017) a poetry collection that confronts and refutes the violence of erasure and assimilation, rooted in the borderlands of her birth. This violence and erasure is a physical space where “the speaker confronts her life in the eternal hallway of the subconscious,” as poet Sara Borjas says in her review of the book. For this confrontation and refutation Villarreal’s poetry collection was named, earlier this month, as a finalist for the 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, which recognizes the work of a poet of promise with $10,000.
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The Tomorrow Prize
By Brian Dunlap
The Tomorrow Prize for short science fiction is a competition by Los Angeles County high school students that inspires them to explore their present through speculating about their future and to excel in the art of storytelling.
Los Lobos’ Louie Perez Talks Musical Memoir ‘Good Morning Aztlan’: Exclusive
The band’s founding member reflects on growing up Chicano & being an artist.
by Catalina Maria Johnson
From: Billboard
About 40 years ago, four musicians in a high school rock band decided to learn the Mexican standard “Las Mañanitas” to regale one of the band member’s moms on her birthday. Daunted by how difficult that proved to be — they had underestimated the complexity of their musical culture — the young East LA born-and-bred Chicanos decided to frame their Mexican roots music in rock ‘n’ roll and R&B grooves. And so, the iconic, multi-Grammy-winning band Los Lobos was born.
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Letters To My City
Mike Sonsken has been a fixture in the Los Angeles Literary community for two decades. He burst on the scene spitting spoken word verse late into the night, at many venues, events, and open mics, some that no longer exist. During the course of these two decades he’s traveled to Echo Park and Sylmar, Venice and the Eastside, Downtown and Torrance, and everywhere in-between, performing poems laced with the city’s stories and history, hosting open mics and readings, being a tour guide to its streets, teaching students poetry and encouraging them to explore who and what Los Ángeles is.
Los Ángeles Writers Publish in 2018
As 2018 draws to a close, it’s been another year of publishing success for Los Ángeles writers and the Los Angeles literary community. As the months went by, writers published novels, essay collections, poetry collections, edited anthologies or announced their books had been accepted for publication in 2019 and even 2020. Congratulations to all these scribes and for penning important works. Some of these books, such as Erica Ayón’s Orange Lady, which recounts the author’s experience as an immigrant growing up in South Central Los Angeles, where her family sold oranges on the street in order to survive, and Lynell George’s essay collection After/Image: Los Angeles Outside the Frame, focused on Los Angeles beneath-the-surface, both the past and the here-and-now, explores who and what L.A. is from different personal lived experiences. Showing how the political is personal.
Kima Jones, the Founder of Jack Jones Literary Arts, Is Taking the Publishing Industry by Storm
By Lovia Gyarkye
From: New York Times
When Kima Jones, an independent publicist based in Los Angeles, agreed to help the poet Tyehimba Jess with his publicity campaign for his second collection, “Olio,” she knew it would be a breakout work.
“I was still a baby publicist. I did not have a long list of clients. I didn’t have a long list of contacts,” Jones said. “But I believed in the book from the beginning and what I really believed in was that it was genre-defying poetry.” In 2017, “Olio” won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.
‘The Poet Laureate of The Struggle: Why Matt Sedillo is Considered One of the Best Political Poets in America
by Astrid
From: L.A. Taco
Matt Sedillo is a Chicano poet, writer, creative director, and public intellectual called “the poet laureate of the struggle” by Dr. Paul Ortiz and “the best political poet in America” by investigative journalist Greg Palast. He has been featured in over 80 colleges and universities and various media outlets including All Def Digital, Los Angeles Times, and C-SPAN.
Accolades for Long Beach Poet Michelle Brittan Rosado
by Brian Dunlap
Michelle Brittan Rosado is a poet from Vacaville, CA who now lives in Long Beach. Her first full-length collection of poetry Why Can’t It Be Tenderness was published last month by the University of Wisconsin Press. In this collection she explores the themes of coming-of-age, mixed-race identity, diaspora, and cultural inheritance. However, Brittan Rosado has also recently received good news about her next collection of poetry.
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Why the Los Angeles Public Library’s ALOUD Program Has to Change
By Kenneth Brecher
From: Los Angeles Times
If you believe recent reports, the Library Foundation of Los Angeles’ ALOUD program, where literati come to see important authors interviewed about their works, is doomed.
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