F. Douglas Brown on The Chill at Wills Podcast
by Brian Dunlap
F. Douglas Brown is equally a poet and educator, teaching English and African American poetry at Loyola High School in Los Ángeles. He pushes his students to think critically about the themes and ideas found in the literature he assigns and how they relate to issues relevant to their lives. Brown has even created a Pedagogy of Protest Reading List that includes The Souls of Black Folks by W.E.B. Dubois, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison and any of the Black Arts Movement poets like Amiri Baraka and Gwendolyn Brooks, to connect how literature is used to connect the personal with the political as seen in African American literature and in Black lives.
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Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier’s explosive debut novel, everything changes on a Wednesday afternoon at 4:30 p.m. Our nameless narrator is eighteen, pregnant, and feeling adrift as she stumbles through her days as a Los Angeles pizza delivery driver, all the while grieving the death of her alcoholic father and avoiding the smothering ministrations of her loving mother and boyfriend. When a suburban housewife named Jenny Hauser calls in with a peculiar order for a pepperoni and pickle pizza, Pizza Girl’s collision with Jenny sends her tailspinning into a psychosexual obsession with dangerous consequences.
Genevieve Kaplan: I met Michelle Brittan Rosado’s poems when she read from her just-released chapbook, Theory on Falling into a Reef (Anhinga Press, 2016), and I remember being so captivated by her work, which is precise, narrative, and moving as well as inventive and musical. Michelle’s poems tend to feel very located in our shared landscape of California, they make keen observations, and they speak to directly readers. When her full-length book, Why Can’t It Be Tenderness, was selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil for the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry and published by University of Wisconsin Press, of course I wanted to talk with her more about it! Happily, Michelle, the PR poetry judge this year, agreed to offer insights into her poetic process and attentions. Read on:
When it comes to submitting work to literary magazines for publication consideration, there are two strategies: 
Chicano revolutionary poet Matt Sedillo met up with Viva Padilla (proper masks were worn) in El Sereno this past weekend to catch up and talk about his newest poetry collection Mowing Leaves of Grass (published by 
It was approximately 7:00pm on February 27th, 2020 when I sat down with poet Luivette Resto in the small courtyard of Woodbury University’s campus library, empty and silent in the late-night hour. As a slight chill settled in the air, we chatted to the soothing patter of the courtyard fountain, occasionally pausing our conversation as we listened to the droning roar of an airplane flying overhead, courtesy of the nearby Burbank airport. Illuminated by the soft yellow glow of the lights strung above us, we talked about Luivette’s work, her inspiration, goals, and her commitment to living an “unapologetic” life.
Today we’d like to introduce you to Juan Cardenas.
Los Angeles Literature 