On March 2nd the 8th Annunal Boca de Oro Festival took place in Downtown Santa Ana, where Santa Ana School District students danced, played music and in the basement of the historic Santora Arts Building, local poets came together to speak important truths to a crowded room. Continue reading Boca de Oro 2024
In June Santa Calrita native, poet and community builder Alma Rosa Rivera, along with her husband Rich, opened a community space in Downtown San Bernardino for art, poetry and culture called Barrio Fuerza. Brian Dunlap interviewed Rivera about Barrio Fuerza and how Rosa and Rich are using it to build creative community in San Bernardino. Continue reading A New Poetry and Arts Space Opens in San Bernardino
Hispanic Heritage Month celebrates the diverse contributions of the US’s Latinx population. With Southern California’s deep Chicanx and Latinx roots, Los Angeles Literature is highlighting many of the city and region’s powerful and diverse Latinx writers. Continue reading Latinx Literature of Los Ángeles and Southern California
Luivette Resto discusses her recently released third book of poetry “Living on Islands Not Found on Maps,” that “traces Resto’s Puerto-Rican roots to her upbringing in The Bronx.” Continue reading Luivette Resto Releases Her New Third Book of Poetry
By Brian Dunlap
Latinx Poets and Writers of the World Stage Press descended on Village Well Books and Coffee in Culver City last week. The evening was cool and the restaurants in downtown were crowded with dates, families and friends, conversations rising on top of each other, out over the sidewalk. Inside the bookstore, six authors—Lisbeth Coiman, Cynthia Guardado, Alex Petunia, Poet Astrid, Carolina Rivera Escimilla and Andy Sanchez—graced the mic. Six Latinx writers. Six distinct voices. No monolith here.
Continue reading “Latinx Poets of the World Stage Press”
By Brian Dunlap
L.Á. native, high school English teacher and poet Alex Hohmann is passionate about her students. She’s always looking for ways to turn them into natural critical thinkers, citizens who evaluate and sort through the barrage of info society overwhelms them with, to understand the topic or issues at hand, to make informed decisions. To be able to understand themselves better.
Continue reading “L.Á. Poet and Teacher Nurtures Young Artists”By Dorany Pineda
FROM: L.A. Times
Long before Jeanine Cummins’ highly contentious “American Dirt” was published by Flatiron Books, the novel was raising red flags internally, according to Myriam Gurba.
By Scott Neuffer
FROM: Trampset
My wife tells me not to talk about it: her trauma. She survived the dirty wars in Peru. If you talk, you die, she tells me. People don’t talk about it. The dead are dead. The living go on. Sorry, it’s not my place, I say. But these ghosts. I can feel them.
Continue reading “Book Review: Let the Buzzards Eat Me Whole”
By Michael Nava
FROM: Los Angeles Review of Books
Cherríe Moraga has been an iconic figure in queer and Latinx literature since the 1981 publication of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, an anthology she edited with the late Gloria Anzaldúa. Bridge was among the first explorations of how people and communities with multiple social identities — queer women of color, for example — are subject to intersecting discriminations that create complex and profound forms of oppression — what we now call intersectionality. In the decades since Bridge, Moraga has produced fiction, poetry, and plays, received awards and fellowships, and taught at Stanford University and the University of California at Santa Barbara. Even with these credentials, she, like other queer writers of color, has been patronized by a largely white, straight literary establishment, which often dismisses work like hers as special interest pleading, while hailing the work of straight, white writers for its universality.
By Astrid
FROM: LA Taco
Alma Rosa Rivera is a bespeckled, Mexican American poet, mom, and wife who says she doesn’t like to “water down” her brownness. From the hot deserts in Santa Clarita to heavy smog and neon signs in Koreatown, Alma is representing brownness in all its glory.
Los Angeles Literature 