A new literary journal debuted a week and a half ago at Avenue 50 Studios. Angel C
ity Review is it’s name. I’ll let Founding Editor Zachary Jensen, tell you in his own words, from the Forward to Issue One:
Continue reading “A New Literary Journal Debuts, Emphasis on Los Angeles Writers”
By Brian Dunlap
Los Angele
s literature has deep roots. It essentially began in 1884 with Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson. Visiting writers like Truman Capote, F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner, have attempted to explain this sprawling metropolis. To criticize it because the city didn’t conform to the places they were from or couldn’t see Los Angeles beyond the confines of Hollywood. Other writers have moved to L.A. like Mona Simpson and Attica Locke and have made a life here, writing about the city or being too intimidated to try. But Los Angeles literature has increasingly become a literature written by its natives, shifting it from a literature of exile to a literature of belonging. Writers from Boyle Heights/East L.A., like Los Angeles Poet Laureate Luis Rodríguez; Watts like Kamau Daáood and Wanda Coleman; Leimert Park like A.K. Toney; the Westside like 2014 Los Angeles Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman; the young adult fiction of Francesca Lia Block; to Alex Espinoza, Amy Uyematsu, Naomi Hirahara, Helena María Viramontes and Steve Erickson are desperate to communicate their experience and tell us what they mean. To these writers Los Angeles is fundamentally home.
Like all culture in Los Angeles, L.A. Literature just happens. Gallery openings occur, theater productions open, literary reading and open mics take place, all with virtually no media attention. That’s the problem with L.A.; culture happens and no one knows about it. The L.A. Times virtually ignores its city’s lit scene except when the occasional book set in L.A. comes across their desk to review or it’s April and the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books occurs. The L.A. Weekly only mentions the city’s literature in best of articles (best independent bookstores, best L.A. writers, best novels written about L.A.) Other than the occasional, maybe even rare, story about an author, etc., in a community paper and the L.A. Review of Books doing a good job publishing Los Angeles Writers and a decent job reviewing its literature, the only regular source of coverage for the Los Angeles literary scene is done by Mike “The Poet” Sonksen with his KCET.org column “L.A. Letters.”
by Alexandrina Jordan
From the blog Asphalt and Glitter
I am calling this the first Weetzie Bat post, because knowing myself, I am fairly positive there will be many posts about Weetzie Bat. Weetzie Bat by Francesca Lis Block is hands down my favorite novel. Weetzie’s cultural impact has been recognized widely recently; she was name dropped in the last season of Girls, and the staff at Rookie Mag created a “Hanging Out with Weetzie Bat” playlist earlier this year. After being translated into seven different languages and ruling the young adult genre for 25 years it is finally being turned into a movie directed by Elgin James.
Weetzie Bat is, without a doubt, the novel that had the most personal impact on me. I first readViolet and Claire by Francesca Lia Block in middle school and I was absolutely floored by Block’s way with words; her writing is visceral. It was the first book that made me feel like I could be a character in it; it was set in Los Angeles, the titular characters were both outcasts in their way, and it was one of the first books I ever ready that frankly talked about sex and was still sexy. I bought Weetzie Bat on a whim a few years later, just because it was the same writer. Weetzie changed EVERYTHING.
Author at Skylight Books
Author Louisa Hall discusses her new novel Speak with Ivy Pachoda. This thoughtful, poignant novel explores the creation of Artificial Intelligence—Illuminating the very human need for communication, connection, and understanding. In a narrative that spans geography and time, from the Atlantic Ocean in the seventeenth century, to a correctional institute in Texas in the near future, this series of stories is told from the perspectives of five very different characters, in a structure reminiscent of David Mitchell. Speak considers what it means to be human, and what it means to be less than fully alive.
Louisa Hall holds a PhD in literature from the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches literature and creative writing, and supervises a poetry workshop at the Austin State Psychiatric Hospital. She is the author of the novel The Carriage House and her poems have been published in numerous journals.
Ivy Pochado is the author of Visitation Street and The Art of Disappearing. She has A BA from Harvard and a MFA in fiction from Bennington College.
Where: Skylight Books
Date: Monday the 20th
Time: 7:30 pm
Address: 1818 N. Vermont Blvd., Los Feliz, CA 90027
Website: http://www.skylightbooks.com/event/louisa-hall-discusses-her-new-novel-speak-together-ivy-pochoda
Continue reading “Los Angeles Literary Events 7/20/15-7/26/15”
by Melissa Sanvicente, Tia Chucha.org
Funds will allow Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore to extend the reach of the arts to those with limited access
SYLMAR, CA – The California Arts Council announced it plans to award $11,640 to Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore as part of its Local Impact program.
The Local Impact program fosters equity, access, and opportunity by providing project and partnership support for small arts organizations reaching underserved communities. All projects must extend the reach of the arts to underserved populations that have limited access to the arts.
By LILA NORDSTROM, Bustle.com
First off, did you know that there are more than eight bookstores in L.A.? Given how most of my friends back east talk, it seems like that probably needs to be clarified before we can continue. Sure, we’re a city famous for living in an airheaded, laid-back, tabloid-driven bubble, but Los Angeles is actually a surprisingly great city for readers — there many wonderful bookstores here, enough so that I had to pare down my list of favorites in order to write something of readable length.
Continue reading “The 8 Best Bookstores in Los Angeles, Because, Yes, People Do Read Out West”
PAULA L. WOODS, Los Angeles Times
Crime writing is not easy, as Raymond Chandler noted some 60 years ago when reflecting on his early days writing pulp fiction: “[T]he demand was for constant action and if you stopped to think you were lost. When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.”
Phoef Sutton certainly knows the demands of the genre. A film and television writer (“Cheers,” “Terriers”) who has lately penned crime novels with Lee Goldberg and Janet Evanovich, Sutton goes it alone in “Crush,” the first of what appears to be a series.
Poetry Workshop
Join the Westwood Branch library for a poetry workshop. Bring at least one poem you have written and one poem you really like.
Where: Westwood Branch of the Los Angeles Public Library
Date: Tuesday the 14th
Time: 6:30 pm – 8 pm
Address: 1246 Glendon Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90024
Website: http://www.lapl.org/whats-on/events/poetry-workshop-1 Continue reading “Los Angeles Literary Events 7/13/15-7/19/15”
“I grew up in El Monte being half white and [half] brown, half happy, half sad, half in trouble half the time, and half searching, but always curious…”
–Benita Bishop, from “Lost Girl from El Monte”
Having narrowly escaped death, what Benita had to say couldn’t wait. The day she found her old journal in a taped-up box in her father’s garage, she hurried home to type up the sweet, unfiltered diary of an El Monte high school girl. Continue reading “Lost Girl: Tales about Loving and Leaving 1970s El Monte”
Stephen Gutierrez writes about the facts of freeways and being a troubled kid, the studious type derailed by sickness in the family. In his latest book, “The Mexican in His Backyard,” the people and places of southeast Los Angeles — his eternal backyard — come through with heat and lyric: the bare truth of the everyday.
Continue reading “A Man in His Backyard: City of Commerce Sightseeing with Author Stephen Gutierrez”
Los Angeles Literature 