By Eve Hill

The literary life of Los Angeles is thriving, and a free celebration is afoot! On October 21st, 2015, LitCrawl L.A. returns to North Hollywood with a walkable menu of literary offerings. Feed both your literary and literal appetite as over 200 Los Angeles writers descend upon NoHo’s assorted coffee shops and restaurants to read from their latest works. Start your personal literary lovefest now by curling up with a sampling of the authors described below.

Continue reading “LitCrawl L.A.: Los Angeles’ Literary Lovefest Returns To North Hollywood”

By Cynthia Guardado

In March, I began attending a women’s writing circle called Las Lunas Locas in El Sereno, Ca. The women’s circle was started by Karineh Mahdessian and Sophia Rivera, with the intention of creating a safe space for women to write in communion. Each Monday night we meet at 7:30pm and begin our journey for that evening. We sit in a circle inside Here & Now a beautiful space that provides reiki, herbal workshops & community events.

As a poet, a mujer, I noticed that the manuscript I have been developing for 5 years is extremely feminine. This was somewhat of a surprise to me, but I’m not sure why it wasn’t obvious since I am a woman who writes about herself and other woman. Perhaps it was because no one has ever taken the time to acknowledge me and say you are a women, you write from your own perspective, and then follow that with encouraging words that made me feel comfortable writing from my femininity.

Continue reading “Convivir: Las Lunas Locas a Way for Women to Write”

Los Angeles poet Chiwan Choi has published another section from his current poetry project “If 100, Then 150,” this time in Twelfth House. As Choi said on his blog in July about this project, “as some of you know, I’ve been working on a poem (or the poem’s been working me) in the last month or so…The poem started out as a shorter piece called ‘if 100, then 150,’ I wrote it to read at the Machine Dreams robot symposium at UCLA on June 11. While I liked the piece enough when I read it, it didn’t feel finished at all. So when I had a chance to read again 10 days later…I edited it and read it again. It felt much better…but still not done…The editing ‘solution’ I found became a bigger problem. Ok. Not problem, but definitely bigger. I realized the poem, still called “if 100, then 150,” needed to be a 100 part piece.”

Continue reading “Chiwan Choi in the Fall Issue of Twelfth House”

Erica Jong on “Fear of Dying”

Four decades ago, Erica Jong revolutionized the way we look at love, marriage and sex. Her world-wide bestseller,” Fear of Flying” opened the doors for writers from Jennifer Weiner to Lena Dunham. Now she does it again by giving us powerful, new perspective on the next phase of women’s lives. Full of the sly humor, deep wisdom and poignancy we know from her poetry, fiction and essays, she delivers the novel women everywhere have been waiting for… “Fear of Dying.”

Where: Vroman’s Bookstore

Date: Monday, the 21^st

Time: 7 pm

Address: 695 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, California 91101

Website: https://www.vromansbookstore.com/erica-jong-sept-2015

Continue reading “Los Angeles Literature Events 9/21/2015 – 9/27/15”

NOTE: A touching essay about the intersection of race and love, by one solid native Angeleno journalist and essayist Erin Abury Kaplan.

By Erin Aubry Kaplan

Fourteen years ago I wrote an article for Salon.com published for Valentine’s Day about how I met my husband, Alan Kaplan. I ended the article on a cautionary note: our hugely improbable, racially romantic story did not mean that we’d solved the problems of the color line. Far from it. Strip away the circumstances that I was a reporter and he was the reluctant subject of an interview for a story I was writing at the time, and we were merely a black woman and a Jewish man from different parts of L.A. who shared the same politics and bottomless outrage about the historic effects of that color line. He taught about it–for 33 years at Hamilton High School’s humanities magnet–I wrote about it. That was the most obvious thing we shared in common, but there were other things too, ordinary couple things like a complicated love of the Dodgers, eating out (neither of one us cooked), movies, sifting through stories in the latest issue of the New Yorker or the Atlantic Monthly. A few years into the marriage we discovered that we both loved dogs, and rescuing dogs; we adopted one post-Hurricane Katrina and eventually accumulated a whole houseful.

Continue reading “Love Across the Color Line: Remembering Alan Kaplan”

Evan Thomas on “Being Nixon”

Noted author Evan Thomas discusses and signs “Being Nixon: A Man Divided” in which he peels away the layers of a complex, confounding figure and examines the gaping character flaws that would drive him from office and forever taint his presidency and legacy.

Where: Vroman’s Bookstore

Date: Monday, the 14^th

Time: 7 pm

Address: 695 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, California 91101

Website: https://vromansbookstore.com/evan-thomas-sept-2015

Continue reading “Los Angeles Literary Events 9/14/15 – 9/20/15”

NOTE: The following is an interview conducted by one of Los Angeles’ great journalists and native Angelenos Lynell George.

On the American “stage” — within mainstream media and in public discourse — the discussion of race and racism is often defined by spectacle: an event that we can collectively point to that plays out on our screens, large and small. It might be the grievous roll call of black lives cut short by raw acts of violence; or it might take shape in next week’s headlines — a bungled arrest or denial of dignity — that eerily mirrors incidents of three generations ago.

While those high-profile, super-charged moments are indeed odious and shameful, they are indicative of a deeper malady affecting the American psyche, writer Claudia Rankine argues in her most recent book, “Citizen: An American Lyric.”

Continue reading “Writer Claudia Rankine On White Blindness, The Black Body, and the Freedom to Live”

Speakeasy/Open Mic Night

It’s the first Monday of the month, and we’ve got our open mic night happening! Come early to get a good spot in line!

Where: The Last Bookstore

Date: Monday, the 7th

Time: 7:45 pm – 10:45 pm; Sign ups 7:45

Address: 453 S. Spring St., Los Angeles, California 90815

Website: https://www.http://lastbookstorela.com/events/speakeasy-open-mic-night-2/

Continue reading “Los Angeles Literary Events 9/7/15 – 9/13/15”

by E. Tammy Kim, From http://www.america.aljazeera.com

As gentrification sweeps the city, Sesshu Foster has quietly become the poet laureate of a vanishing neighborhood

LOS ANGELES — In this high-turnover city, the Eastside, more than the moneyed west, has
seemed to hold on to its past. There are eccentric bungalows and blanched murals, and shopping corridors with the foot traffic and feel of a village market. Neighborhoods such as Lincoln Heights, El Sereno and City Terrace have thus far escaped the peculiar affliction of the upscale coffee shop. Their residents and business owners are still predominantly Latino and Asian, and largely working class — though perhaps not for long. According to trend-spotters, East LA is the molten core of gentrification, full of hipsterpreneurs with backing from friends in venture capital.

To see the real Eastside, ask the writer and teacher Sesshu Foster to take you on a little tour. He’ll pick you up downtown in his Toyota SUV, air conditioner whooshing, a Ry Cooder track pulsing. You’ll cross the LA River — thin puddles in a long concrete ditch — and keep going down Cesar Chavez, originally named Brooklyn Avenue by Jewish émigrés. Every few blocks, you’ll glimpse a faded mural and Foster will explain the story behind each one. If there’s graffiti, he’ll denounce the taggers’ “total disregard for their grandparents’ social art” in his unhurried Angeleno drawl.

Foster, 58, the author of four award-winning books of poetry and prose, is an encyclopedist by nature, the Diderot of the neighborhood. His writing is political, experimental and consistently local, even unfashionably so. A family man and full-time public school teacher, he’s never focused on self-promotion, yet he is praised within literary circles and counts U.S. poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, novelist Karen Tei Yamashita and poets Claudia Rankine and Amy Uyematsu among his friends and peers. Herrera says Foster might be better known if not for the day-to-day “pressure [on] working-class writers, writers of color… writing for the community.”

Continue reading “A Los Angeles poet’s revolution of everyday life”

Long Beach Poets Listening Room Open Mic

Weekly open mic. Let your voice be heard. Your stories matter. Step up to the mic. Imagine a different kind of open mic, in a listening room so you can hear the music and have your music heard.Why just imagine it? We close the front door and sign-up sheet at 7:05. After 7:05 please enter through the door down the hall and around the corner. If there is room on the list, we will reopen it during the 10 minute break beginning sometime around 8:15. We are limiting the list to 20 signups and only guaranteeing the first 17 that they will get to perform. The last three will get up if there is time. Info for performers: This is a music and poetry open mic. We have a state-of-the-art sound system with a stage monitor. We have an electronic keyboard. If you want to use a backing track, the sound system has a cable with a mini jack plug that works with almost any phone, tablet, computer or CD player. We welcome light percussion (e.g., cajon, djembe, snare with brushes) but, out of respect for our neighbors, we do not allow full drum kits. No bagpipes. Material will need to be appropriate for the audience. We don’t really expect children, but have something ready just in case.

Where: Gina M. Woodruff Gallery

Date: Monday, the 31st

Time: 7:00 pm – 9:30 pm; Sign ups 6:40

Address: 5555 E Stearns St. Suite 203, Long Beach, California 90815

Website: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ImagineAnOpenMic/

Continue reading “Los Angeles Literary Events 8/31/15 – 9/6/15”