Mike Sonksen and Joe Gardner at Fox Coffee House

The 2^nd Mondays Poetry Party features two street smart poets, Mike Sonksen and Joe Gardner, who will tell you stories of identity and growing up in Southern California. Join us at Fox Coffee House at 7:00 pm, with open reading sign-ups starting at 6:45 pm. Hosted by G. Murray Thomas and Sarah Thursday.

Mike Sonksen is a 3^rd-generation Los Angeles native who has published over 500 essays and poems with publications and websites such as KCET, Poets & Writers Magazine, Wax Poetics, Southern California Quarterly, LA Weekly, OC Weekly, Los Angeles Review of Books and many others. His column “L.A. Letters” has appeared on KCET’s website for four years, and celebrates bright moments from L.A. literary history. He has been published in two anthologies, and his next book, Poetics of Location, is forthcoming from Writ Large Press.

Joe Gardner s a 2^nd generation American drifter and writer, whose full-length collection, In the Shadow of the Bomb, was released in 2015. He is the Founder and hired gun for Working Class Production, as well as creator and co-producer of The Last Sunday, An Evening of Poetry and Art. His work has appeared in The Modern Drunkard Magazine, The San Gabriel Valley Poetry Quarterly, Cadence Collective, Spilt ink Poetry, as well as in several anthologies.

Where: Fox Coffee House

Date: Monday, the 14^th

Time: 7 pm – 9:30 pm

Address: 437 W. Willow St., Long Beach, CA  90806

Website: http://www.localendar.com/public/CadenceCollective

Continue reading “Los Angeles Literature Events 3/14/16 – 3/20/16”

Writ Large Press x Gerren Kelsaw present The Word at Large literary podcast.
Bringing you readings & interviews & all things Lit L.A 2 times a month. Subscribe on Itunes @ https://itun.es/us/To47ab.c

Continue reading “New L.A. Lit Podcast”

Jess Castillo is the host of this bookfest in Glendale tomorrow. On Facebook she said about the event: “tomorrow night i will be hosting POPUP! Bookfest Fundraiser + Art & Music, an in-store & online fundraiser for Glendale’s first annual multilingual literary event series launched by Glendale Arts (my job) in partnership with Writ Large Press! there will be music by dublab, free art workshops, … Continue reading Pop up! Bookfest

by Daniela Gerson

From: The L.A. Times

Mria Onate had not read a book until her son started high school.

Her illiterate parents ended her schooling when she was 15, informing her that she had to get ready for marriage and work to help support the family in their rancho in Puebla, Mexico.

More than two decades later, she was shocked when the parent center coordinators at her son’s new high school, Bravo Medical Magnet, suggested she join a book club. She was there for her child’s education. She thought it was too late for her own.

“I hated to read,” Onate, 44, said in Spanish. “I read in elementary school, but I never read on my own.”

Continue reading “Book club helps immigrant mothers find joy in reading and support their kids’ education”

Pen Emerging Voices Author Evenings: Henri Cole and Amy Gerstler at Chevalier’s

This event is part of the Emerging Voices Author Evening Series to benefit PEN Center’s Freedom to Write Programs. Free to PEN Center USA members. Tickets available to the public.

Henri Cole is the author of nine collections of poetry, including Middle Earth, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. He has received many awards for his work, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and most recently a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard. His ninth collection, Nothing to Declare, was published last spring. He teaches at Claremont McKenna College.

Amy Gerstler is a writer of poetry, nonfiction and journalism. Scattered at Sea, a book of her poems was published in June 2015, and longlisted for the National Book Award. She was 2010 guest editor of the yearly anthology Best American Poetry. Her work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, and she has taught writing and/or visual art at numerous institutions. She currently teaches in the MFA Writing Program at University of California at Irvine.

Where: Chevalier’s Books

Date: Monday the 7^th

Time: 7 pm

Address: 126 N. Larchmont Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90004

Website: http://chevaliersbooks.com/ or http://penusa.org/author-evenings

Continue reading “Los Angeles Literature Events 3/7/16 – 3/13/16”

by Mike Sonksen

From: entropymag.org

Douglas Brown is a poet at the intersection of the avant-garde and tradition. Mixing experimental work with formalism, his work tackles three generations of his family history from his mother and father, his own rite of passage, and episodes with his son and daughter.

His award-winning book, Zero to Three is a tome of 32 poems about fatherhood, love, loss, American pop culture and the roller coaster range of emotions that are all a part of what it means to exist in the 21^st Century. Published by the University of Georgia Press, this volume was the winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize in 2013. The poems utilize formal structures like ghazals, sonnets, catalogues and segmented cantos with more experimental styles like stream of consciousness and prose poems.

Continue reading “Douglas Brown: The Bridge between the Avant-Garde and Formalism”

Issue 2 was amazing and they can’t wait to make issue 3 (To be released at the end of June) even better! Submissions are now open from until March 31st 2016.

Continue reading “Submissions Call for Angel City Review”

Los Angeles journalist Erin Aubry Kaplan has just released her second book “I Heart Obama,” on February 9. The following is about the book:

In his nearly two terms as president, Barack Obama has solidified his status as something black people haven’t had for fifty years: a folk hero. The 1960s delivered Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, forever twinned as larger-than-life outsiders and truth tellers who took on racism and died in the process. Obama is different: Not an outsider but president, head of the most powerful state in the world; a centrist Democrat, not the face of a movement. Yet he is every bit a folk hero, doing battle with the beast of a system created to keep people like him on the margins. He is unique among presidents and entirely unique among black people, who never expected to have a president so soon.

Continue reading “Palmetto Mornings: 2/16/16 Erin Aubry Kaplan – Author, “I Heart Obama””