By Bethanne Patrick
FROM: L.A. Times
Christina Hammonds Reed vividly remembers witnessing the unrest in her city in 1992 after the acquittal of four LAPD officers in the arrest and beating of Rodney King — on television. She was only 8, after all, and the violence in South L.A. felt far away. She grew up in the comfortable suburb of Hacienda Heights.
Local muralist Judith Baca’s magnum opus, is the 2,800-foot-long mural, Great Wall of Los Angeles. The following seven books help one to understand the mural and L.Á. itself. Continue reading
“Glorious Boy” is a tale of war and devotion, longing and loss, and the power of love to prevail. Historical fiction set as WW II intensifies. Continue reading Glorious Boy Amiee Liu
A new volume of quintessential L.Á. poet Wanda Coleman’s poetry, “Wicked Enchantment” and eidted by poet Terrance Hayes, has brought the Watts born poet into the spotlight. Continue reading Literary History: The Fearless Invention of One of L.A.’s Greatest Poets
“In certain parts of South L.A., ‘wild’ was a power flex, a way to self-name. As writer and photographer Walter Thompson-Hernández illuminates in his ambitious new book, ‘The Compton Cowboys.'” Continue reading Review: The Cowboys of Compton, First a Curiosity and Then a Legacy
“Slouching Towards Los Angeles” is a collection about Joan Didion’s claim on California and its writers. 20 of the books 25 contributors are women. Continue reading Review: Writing in Didion’s Honor — And Her Shadow
A review of Lee Goldberg’s “Lost Hills,” a mystery about a tough as nails L.A. County Sheriff Dectective, Eve Ronin, assigned to solve a tripple murder. Continue reading Book Review: Lost Hills By Lee Goldberg
Distinguished Mexican American writer, Luis J. Rodriguez, meditates on the place of Xicanx culture in what he sees as a sick and increasingly fragmented global society. Continue reading FROM OUR LAND TO OUR LAND
By Scott Neuffer
FROM: Trampset
My wife tells me not to talk about it: her trauma. She survived the dirty wars in Peru. If you talk, you die, she tells me. People don’t talk about it. The dead are dead. The living go on. Sorry, it’s not my place, I say. But these ghosts. I can feel them.
Continue reading “Book Review: Let the Buzzards Eat Me Whole”
By Eisa Nefertari Ulen
FROM: LARB
Award-winning poet Shonda Buchanan honors multiple literary traditions in her breathtaking new memoir, Black Indian. An educator, freelance writer, and literary editor, Buchanan is a culture worker with deep, decades-long engagement in communities of color. Her work honors the complexity and diversity of these Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities. At once Indigenous, Black Female, Speculative, Feminist, Womanist, Urban, Southern Gothic, and counter to the Tragic Mulatto stereotype in American literature, stage, and film, Black Indian is a quintessentially American narrative.
Continue reading “Locs in the Sweat Lodge: On Shonda Buchanan’s “Black Indian””
