Los Angeles Literature 11/1/15 – 11/7/15
Yumi Sakugawa with “There Is No Right Way to Meditate”
In “There Is No Right Way to Meditate,” award-winning artist Yumi Sakugawa helps you tap into your inner self and finally find the peace that you’ve been seeking. Each page offers a unique perspective on how to lead a more mindful life, with captivating ink illustrations and encouraging words like, “it’s okay if the only thing you did today was breathe.” From simple ways to get rid of a bad mood to instructions for making your intentions come true, her lessons will inspire you to become more aware of the present moment and find stillness no matter where you go.
Yumi Sakugawa is an Ignatz Awards nominated comic book artist and the author of I Think I Am in Friend-Love With You and Your Illustrated Guide to Becoming One With The Universe. Her comics have also appeared in The Believer, Bitch, the Best American NonRequired Reading 2014, The Rumpus, Folio, Fjords Review, and other publications. A graduate from the fine art program of University of California, Los Angeles, she lives in Los Angeles.
Where: Skylight Books
Date: Monday, the 2nd
Time: 7:30 pm
Address: 1818 N. Vermont Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90027
Website: https://www.skylightbooks.com/event/yumi-sakugawa-discusses-her-new-book-there-no-right-way-meditate
Triple Features For October La Palabra Reading Series at Avenue 50 Studio
From: La Bloga
Ninety-degree weather at the end of October is a normal California Fall. Almost as normal, it was the fourth Sunday of the month, and that normally means a La Palabra Hosted by Karineh Mahdessian celebration at Northeast Los Angeles’ cultural soul, Avenue 50 Studio.
Mahdessian, victim of a roller skating mishap, worked the house irrepressibly despite the clunky black boot walking cast that slowed the popular emcee’s gait but not her spirit.
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Los Angeles Literary Events 10/26/15 – 1/1/15
John Freeman and Daniel Galera in
Conversation
John Freeman, editor of “Freeman’s : Arrival: The Best New Writing on Arrival,” the first issue of his spectacular new biannual anthology, is in conversation with Brazilian author Daniel Galera, of “Blood-Drenched Beard.”.
In this inaugural edition of unpublished writing, former Granta editor and NBCC president John Freeman brings together the best new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Daniel Galera is a Brazilian writer, translator and editor, and is one of the founders of the publishing house Livros do Mal.
Where: Chevalier’s Books
Date: Monday the 26th
Time: 7 pm
Address: 126 N. Larchmont Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90004
Website: http://www.chevalier’s.com/events/
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Interview with 2015 American Book Award Winner, Peter J. Harris
By Geosi Gyasi
From: Geosi Reads
Brief Biography:
Peter J. Harris is the author of Bless the Ashes, poetry (Tia Chucha Press), winner of the 2015 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and The Black Man of Happiness: In Pursuit of My ‘Unalienable Right,’ a book of personal essays, winner of a 2015 American Book Award. www.blackmanofhappiness.com/shop. Harris has published his work in a wide variety of publications since the 1970s. Since 1992, he’s been a member of the Anansi Writers Workshop at the World Stage, in LA’s Leimert Park.
Geosi Gyasi: You’re the founding director of “The Black Man of Happiness Project”. Could you tell us how you started this project?
Peter J. Harris: The project grows from my deep curiosity about an elemental question: What is a happy Black man?www.blackmanofhappiness.com
As I’ve matured as a writer and thinker and cultural worker, as a man, this question has become a powerful prompt to explore manhood and masculinity through the lives of African American men, who obviously exist within historical crosshairs. Taboo. Fetish. Threat. Sexual Predator. Sexual Symbol. Prey. In my research, I’ve never found one mention or index item in which Black men and happiness have been connected. So on Juneteenth 2010, I invited a variety of men to attend a video shoot at the Ebony Repertory Theatre in Los Angeles. I wanted them to answer on camera the question, What is a happy Black man? Some 20 men answered the question in a variety of ways, as I hoped they would. I was confident that each man would have his own richly individual answer, which is a major goal of the Project: to explore the individuality of Black men’s testimonies about their joy. Since 2010, I’ve created a website, through which you can view the videos, like our Facebook page, purchase the two published books, and otherwise be inspired to search for your own answer. Goals for 2016 include setting up more video shoots, launching a new blog in which I write about what I call ‘wreaking happiness,’ and raise the profile on the books, especially my book of personal essays, The Black Man of Happiness: In Pursuit of My ‘Unalienable Right,’ which was chosen in July 2015 for one of 15 American Book Awards, which have been awarded for 36 years by the Before Columbus Foundation. http://www.beforecolumbusfoundation.com/foundation-news/2015-american-book-awards/
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50th Anniversary, Watts Writers Workshop
A Catalyst for Change
From: http://www4.csudh.edu/watts/index
In 1965, the Watts Rebellion devastated a community and awakened the nation, bringing longstanding grievances and inequalities into the spotlight. California leaders placed their hopes on an institution of higher education as a catalyst for change, and decided to build a new state college close to the communities impacted by the rebellion.
A transformation was needed. And they got one.
Fifty years later, California State University, Dominguez Hills boasts over 90,000 alumni, with over 65 percent of our alumni living within 25 miles of the campus.
The university changes lives each and every day through the transformative power of education.
Los Angeles Literature Events 10/19/15 – 10/25/15
Lillian Faderman & Roberta Kaplan at Aloud
“Then Comes Marriage: United States v. Windsor and the Defeat of DOMA,” features renowned litigator Roberta Kaplan and scholar Lillian Faderman in conversation with LA Times columnist and author Patt Morrison. Kaplan takes us behind the scenes of this gripping legal journey in her new book, Then Comes Marriage. Award-winning activist and author Lillian Faderman’s latest book, The Gay Revolution, begins in the 1950s, when the law classified gays and lesbians as criminals, then moves to the present to offer a sweeping account of the modern struggle for gay, lesbian, and trans rights. Following this summer’s landmark Supreme Court decision supporting gay marriage, hear from two of today’s most influential champions for equality.
Where: Downtown LA Central Library, Taper Auditorium
Date: Monday the 19th
Time: 7 pm
Address: 630 West 5th St., Los Angeles, CA 90071
Website: http://www.lfla.org/event/then-comes-marriage-united-states-v-windsor-and-the-defeat-of-doma/
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“Put Your Name On It”: Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo on Writing, Submitting, and Honoring Our Creative Work
by Olga García Echeverría
Upon Celebrating America’s Birthday
In the morning, I explore the yellow hills
of Chavez Ravine and collect trinkets for my desk:
a hawk feather, a sun-bleached snail shell,
a rusted nail sitting within the brick base
ruins of a house. I imagine great-aunt Susana
collecting herbs from the hills hugging Teocaltiche.
In the afternoon, Uncle Manny recalls remedies
she concocted and the tiny quail eggs she fried
for breakfast with handmade tortillas the shape of boats.
My finicky father never ate from her table,
but Uncle Manny has had too many Budweisers
and is spilling memories of his favorite tia this 4th of July.
“She used to put me on her shoulders and carry me
across the river,” he says dreamily. This was before L.A.,
hair products, Ford cars, and the church youth group
where he met my aunt, and my dad met my mother.
By dusk, tears dig into the creases of his face
like a stone creek. He hushes only to watch my cousins
launch bottle rockets from the street. Smoke tails up
and sparks shoot out over our heads. Colors flash bright
and disappear into the air like my uncle’s sobriety,
like Tia Susana, like the houses of Chavez Ravine.
—Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo
If you’re an Angelino with your eye on the literary scene, then most likely you’ve heard of Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo. She’s shared her award-winning poetry with audiences throughout LA and beyond. She is the creator and curated of the quarterly reading series HITCHED, formerly held at Beyond Baroque and now being hosted at Holy Grounds.
Another important and exciting LA-based literary project is Women Who Submit, which Bermejo co-founded. This group encourages and supports women writers in the submission process for publication. When Xochitl isn’t organizing, submitting her work or encouraging others to submit, she’s teaching, grading, and reading articles on the pedagogy of working with English language learners.
Triggers. Memories. A long [non-linear] time ago.
by Jessica Ceballos
From: Medium.com
It’s a beautiful morning in Los Angeles, but since last night my head has been stuck in 1999. And I know where my heart is, but pieces of memory are tugging at anything that might be a little loose.
How does someone survive through so much heartache. The NBA draft, the fame, the money, the championships, the wedding to pretend that love makes everything better, the hope that everything will be made better. None of thatcan make a deep dark sad better. Especially when that sad started at birth. And the world kept trying to crush him, and so he self-medicates though the crushing, through the depression, through everything. And then it becomes too heavy and something makes the sadness stop…for just a second…and that second becomes everything in the world. And it’s okay to be happy for just one second. But that’s only on the outside.
Continue reading “Triggers. Memories. A long [non-linear] time ago.”
Last Week In Los Angeles Literature
Last week in Los Angeles Literature on Tuesday the 6th, Los Angeles Times Book Critic David L. Ulin dropped his new book Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles at Skylight Books in Los Feliz. Sidewalking offers a compelling inquiry into the evolving landscape of Los Angeles. Part personal narrative, part investigation of the city as both idea and environment, Sidewalking is many things: a discussion of Los Angeles as urban space, a history of the city’s built environment, a meditation on the author’s relationship to the city, and a rumination on the art of urban walking. Exploring Los Angeles through the soles of his feet, Ulin gets at the experience of its street life, drawing from urban theory, pop culture, and literature. For readers interested in the culture of Los Angeles, this book offers a pointed look beneath the surface in order to see, and engage with, the city on its own terms.
On Wednesday the 7th, Book Show Books was honored to host the release party reading for the publication of Jessica Wilson’s first book of poetry, Serious Longing, published by Swan World Press out of Paris, France. Patrice Kanozsai says of the collection, “Deep and whole poetry about origins, ancestors, childhood with real efficient poetic words…Sometimes amazing…Sometimes funny… Always relevant. Jessica will take us with Jim Morrison in a rabid hole…”
Review ‘Sidewalking’ author David Ulin jumps feet first into trying to understand Los Angeles
By Geoff Manaugh
Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles” arrives at a particularly heady moment for rethinking the identity of the city. From the promise of new Metro lines and the possibility of the 2024 Olympics to architect Michael Maltzan’s provocative idea that the city has hit its outermost limit and must now splash back on itself, talking about L.A. seems far more popular than walking in it.
For Times book critic David Ulin, Los Angeles contains multitudes. Indeed, the peculiar magic of L.A., his book convincingly suggests, is that other cities, both real and imagined, are always coming into blurred focus on the edges of its existing streets and buildings. Whether this is because of a particular L.A. street standing in for Manhattan in every car commercial or if it’s because of the city’s infamous postmodernity — L.A.’s architecture mimicking, perhaps mocking, any style, anywhere — the result is the same. Los Angeles is a kind of urban zip file inside of which every other city has been compressed.
Los Angeles Literature 