By Brian Dunlap As 2019 comes to a close, it’s clear that Los Ángeles writers explore a diverse range of topics, themes, and ideas. As the months went by, writers published novels, essay collections, poetry collections/chapbooks or announced their books had been accepted for publication in 2020. Their writing ranged from exploration of children lost too soon, to a celebration Los Ángeles, to the love … Continue reading Los Ángeles Writers Publish in 2019
By Dana Isokawa
FROM: Poets & Writers
For our fifteenth annual look at debut poetry, we chose ten poets whose first books struck us with their formal imagination, distinctive language, and deep attention to the world. The books, all published in 2019, inhabit a range of poetic modes. There is Keith S. Wilson’s reimagining of traditional forms in Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love, and Maya Phillips’s modern epic, Erou. There is Maya C. Popa’s lyric investigations in American Faith, Marwa Helal’s subversive documentary poems in Invasive species, and Yanyi’s series of prose poems in The Year of Blue Water. The ten collections clarify and play with all kinds of language—the language of the news, of love, of politics, of philosophy, of family, of place—and, as Popa says, they “slow and suspend the moment, allowing a more nuanced examination of what otherwise flows through us quickly.”
Continue reading “Poetic Lenses: Our Fifteenth Annual Look at Debut Poetry”
By Brian Dunlap
Yesterday, L.A.’s Not A Cult Press announced on its Facebook page that Stories Books & Cafe has teamed up with them to sponsor their annual poetry submissions award. The award will now be called the Stories Award for Poetry. The winner gets a cash prize of $1,000 and a publishing deal with Not A Cult.
Continue reading “L.A.’s Not A Cult Press Teams Up With Echo Park’s Stories Books & Cafe”
By Brian Dunlap
FROM: Arkay Artists
Arkay Artists will be publishing Salvadorian L.A. poet Ingrid M. Calderon-Collins’ memoir in the Winter of 2019. Let the Buzzards Eat Me Whole is a memoir summoned in poetic prose and poems.
By Brian Dunlap
Lucy Jane Bledsoe’s The Evolution of Love, published by L.A. based Rare Bird Books, has been named a finalist for the 2019 Lambda Literary Awards in the category of Lesbian Fiction. Finalists will be celebrated and winners will be announced at the Awards Ceremony and Gala the evening of Monday, June 3, 2019 in New York City.
By Brian Dunlap
Pasadena Native Naomi Hirahara and L.A. native Walter Mosley have both been nominated for a 2019 Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original, Hiroshima Boy, and Best Novel, Down The River Unto The Sea, respectively. For Hirahara it’s her second Edgar Award nomination, her first being for Snakeskin Shamisen, which won the 2007 Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original. Mosely has been nominated twice before for Best Novel, in 1993 for White Butterfly and in 2013 for All I did Was Shoot My Man and was nominated for Best First Novel in 1991 for Devil in a Blue Dress.
Literary editor of of Los Ángeles based Harriet Tubman Press, Shonda Buchanan announced the release of her next book Black Indian: A Memoir, will be released by Wayne State Press in August. She is also an award-winning poet and educator. She is the author of Who’s Afraid of Black Indians? and Equipoise: Poems from Goddess Country and editor of two anthologies, Voices from Leimert Park and Voices from Leimert Park Redux.
Continue reading “Black Indian: A Memoir by Shonda Buchanan”
By Brian Dunlap
Vanessa Angélica Villarreal is the author of Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, 2017) a poetry collection that confronts and refutes the violence of erasure and assimilation, rooted in the borderlands of her birth. This violence and erasure is a physical space where “the speaker confronts her life in the eternal hallway of the subconscious,” as poet Sara Borjas says in her review of the book. For this confrontation and refutation Villarreal’s poetry collection was named, earlier this month, as a finalist for the 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, which recognizes the work of a poet of promise with $10,000.
Continue reading “Vanessa Angélica Villarreal Is A Finalist”
Mike Sonsken has been a fixture in the Los Angeles Literary community for two decades. He burst on the scene spitting spoken word verse late into the night, at many venues, events, and open mics, some that no longer exist. During the course of these two decades he’s traveled to Echo Park and Sylmar, Venice and the Eastside, Downtown and Torrance, and everywhere in-between, performing poems laced with the city’s stories and history, hosting open mics and readings, being a tour guide to its streets, teaching students poetry and encouraging them to explore who and what Los Ángeles is.
by Brian Dunlap
Michelle Brittan Rosado is a poet from Vacaville, CA who now lives in Long Beach. Her first full-length collection of poetry Why Can’t It Be Tenderness was published last month by the University of Wisconsin Press. In this collection she explores the themes of coming-of-age, mixed-race identity, diaspora, and cultural inheritance. However, Brittan Rosado has also recently received good news about her next collection of poetry.
Continue reading “Accolades for Long Beach Poet Michelle Brittan Rosado”
Los Angeles Literature 