Los Angeles Literature Events 4/11/17 –4/16/17
Lunchtime Writing at Grand Park LA
Join us every Tuesday through May 10 for a free spring Lunchtime Writers’ Meetup with food trucks, and feed your spirit with writing exercises, guest speakers, and advice from Grand park’s Writer-in-Residence Traci Kato-Kiriyama.
Themes this year will include love, healing, power, quirks, city and maps, home, dreams, vision, food and nourishment, and many more. Special guests to support and cultivate new writings or nurture existing works. Writing materials will be provided.
Where: Grand Park LA
Date: Tuesday the 11th
Time: 12:15 pm – 1:15 pm
Address: 200 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90012
Website: http://grandparkla.org/event/lunchtime-writers-meetup/?instance_id=93755
Continue reading “Los Angeles Literature Events 4/11/17 –4/16/17”
April it’s National Poetry month. Around the country the literary community emphasizes poets and poems that too often get left in the shadows of the literary world in favor of novels and memoirs or just narrative writing in general. Here at Los Angeles Literature, I’ve highlighted some talented Angeleño poets for Black History Month, National Hispanic Heritage Month, Asian Pacific American Heritage Months, etc. along with talented narrative writers.
In honor of 
Perhaps the great (however obvious) lesson of the last several years — the waves of police violence against black men, the bitter and hate-fueled rise of Trump and worldwide xenophobia — is that we have not transcended and learned from history nearly as well as we might have thought. Maybe we need reminding. In two recent books, “Map to the Stars” by Adrian Matejka and “Voyage of the Sable Venus,” the 2015 debut by Robin Coste Lewis, black poets jog our collective memories, facing the distant and recent history of black Americans, asking us to try to see ourselves in their mirrors.
Phenomena, with Annie Jacobsen at Santa Monica Library 
When Morris Bernstein ’47 and his wife, Lillian, opened Caravan Book Store on downtown Los Angeles’ Grand Avenue in 1954, he had no idea how much impact he’d have on the local community. At a time when the streetcar was the main source of transportation and people dressed up to go downtown, Caravan — once adjacent to the former “Bookseller’s Row” — was the place to go. To book lovers, it was Disneyland, a place where you could find old, rare and curious manuscripts you couldn’t get anywhere else.
Between 2004 and 2015, I was the curator and host of the Rhapsodomancy Reading Series in Los Angeles. For the first two years I shared this role with Andrea Quaid, until she moved away; after that, I counted on my romantic partner-turned-roadie and the loyal audience members I had to keep the series afloat.
Ocean Vuong at ALOUD Reading Series, Central Library 
Los Angeles Literature 