African American Angeleño Authors
by Brian Dunlap
In honor of Black History month (a few days late, I know), I am highlighting many of the powerful African American authors of Los Angeles literature. Their voices tap into a Los Angeles rarely portrayed, much less portrayed honestly. Nonetheless they tape in to an essential Los Angeles of a good, strong community struggling to survive among the racist realities of the LAPD and redlining that relegated most of them to the South Central/Watts neighborhoods of Los Angeles. In their writing you can hear the ancestral griot, telling their collective stories, as Kamau Kaaood has done for decades with his spoken word poetry. You can experience their witnessing that such writers as Michael Datcher in his Memoir Raising Fences does, when he first moves with his family from Indiana to South Central Los Angeles in 1977 at 10. Here he witnesses and experiences police brutality against Blacks. He was “returning from Gaffey Street Pool” with his cousin Jeff and two friends. “A white man leaped out [of the cop car], clutching a gun in both hands, arms stretched out forward and stiff…he had to squat down to line up the bridge of my nose.”
Los Angeles Literature Events 3/06/17 –3/12/17
LAMBDA LIT FEST Los Angeles to be held at Various Locations, March 6-12, All Week (see below)
The First Annual LAMBDA Literary Festival, a celebration of contemporary voices honoring and expanding on the rich, diverse tradition of LGBTQ writers and letters in the Southland will be held from March 6-12, 2017. All events are FREE and open to the public! No reservations are required, but tickets for some events are available through Eventbrite via website.
Learn more at www.LambdaLitFest.org and below at each event’s individual listing.
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MAKING SPACE, HOLDING SPACE: #90X90 AND LITERATURE AS RESISTANCE
By
From: Cultural Weekly
There haven’t been many weeks since the summer of 2014 ended in which I haven’t thought about or someone hasn’t reminded me of #90for90, that time we did 90 events over 90 days in a train station bar. When it ended, it felt like those corny movies where our characters have a terrifying, exciting, overwhelming, but ultimately unforgettable summers that forever change them. In many ways, none of us—Jessica, Peter, Judeth or myself—have recovered from it.
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Black Bubblegum and William Gonzalez’s Los Angeles
by Mike Sonksen
From: Angel City Review
Salvadoran-American poet William Gonzalez is intimately connected to the streets of Los Angeles. A product of the MacArthur Park, Pico-Union neighborhood, the man is an award-winning author, son, father and friend to all. Born at County USC-General Hospital, Gonzalez is Los Angeles as it gets. His first two books, Black Bubblegum and Blue Bubblegum are innovative works that peer behind the glossy facade of Los Angeles to reveal the blood and bones of the city. His newest book, Red Bubblegum, is set to be published in late Spring 2017.
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Los Angeles Literature Events 2/27/17 –3/05/17
Clownfish Blues at Book Soup
Please join us to hear Tim Dorsey discuss and sign Clownfish Blues, a funny novel about a loud and proud Floridian Serge A. Storms, who decides to shoot episodes of his favorite classic TV show Route 66 to follow up on his very own remake of Easy Rider. But his adventure traveling the byways of the Sunshine State’s underbelly is about to take a detour into deadly territory.
Where: Book Soup
Date: Monday the 27th
Time: 7 pm
Address: 8818 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, CA 90069
Website: http://www.booksoup.com/event/tim-dorsey-discusses-and-signs-clownfish-blues
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Next Week a New List of Events
This past Sunday I got food poisoning. The good news is I’m all better and next week there will be a new list of events. Continue reading Next Week a New List of Events
CalArts launches L.A.’s newest, nonconformist literary magazine
by Agatha French
From: L.A. Times
At times it seems that for every reader, there is born a literary magazine. There are venerated old guards such as Harper’s and the New Yorker, established university journals including Prairie Schooner and Agni, and scores of online-only upstarts with names like Animal and the Boiler. But with the sheer volume of literary magazines perpetually pushing past overload, and with, happily, no end to the new stories, essays and poetry being published in sight, how does anyone decide what to actually read?
One approach: start local.
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Two fathers use poems to teach their kids about growing up black in America
by ELIZABETH FLOCK
From: PBS Newshour
When poets Geffrey Davis and F. Douglas Brown first met at a poetry retreat in 2012, they instantly connected in discussing fatherhood and the poetry that sprang from that experience. Over time, that relationship grew, and they began writing poetry that came directly out of their conversations. Soon, they were even borrowing each other’s lines or writing stanzas or whole poems back and forth, as a kind of call and response.
And in November, they published their first series of co-written poems, in a chapbook called “Begotten,” which was published by Upper Rubber books. These poems explore with tenderness and anxiety the joys and perils of being a father — especially a black father — and how to escape the mistakes of past generations.
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Review America is disintegrating, reality is fracturing, all to a classic soundtrack in Steve Erickson’s ‘Shadowbahn’
by Scott Bradfield
From: Los Angeles Times
Steve Erickson was post-millennial long before the millennium ever got here. Like those of a Southern California Ballard or Beckett, his novels are filled with a wide variety of end of time-like calamities, both personal and political: suicide cults, alternate-history Hitlers, urban conflagrations, unpredictable weather storms and — most terrifying of all — the endlessly recurring (and continually unbelievable) presidential election cycle. Over several decades of feverish literary production (his first novel, the absorbingly recursive “Days Between Stations,” was published in 1985), he has written consistently and obsessively about people seeking a way out of their own cultural history. Sometimes they’re successful; sometimes they’re not. But one way or another, as soon as they wake up the next morning, they’re lost.
Los Angeles Literature Events 2/13/17 –2/19/17
Stephen Kinzer at Vroman’s Bookstore
Join us as author Stephen Kinzer discusses and signs The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of the American Empire. The bestselling author of Overthrow and The Brothers brings to life the forgotten political debate that set America’s interventionist course in the world for the twentieth century and beyond. Kinzer examines the period when Americans first found their country able to dominate faraway lands, and the brilliant debates that followed this change. The words of the titans who faced off in this epic confrontation are amazingly current, and every argument in the world grows from this one. It all starts here.
Where: Vroman’s Bookstore
Date: Monday the 13th
Time: 7 pm
Address: 695 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, CA 91101
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Los Angeles Literature 