The Passing of Larry Colker
by Brian Dunlap
NOTE: Initially I didn’t post anything on Los Angeles Literature about Larry Colker’s passing last month from cancer because I never met him and I didn’t know him as a writer. However, seeing that Beyond Baroque is celebrating his life, the life of an L.A. poet and friend, on Saturday, and the fact that Los Angeles Literature is a news, history and information site covering the Los Angeles literary community, I feel obligated to post a brief article about him.
Los Ángeles poet Irene Monica Sanchez has won the 2018 Joe Hill Labor Poetry Award.
A lot has happened in Los Ángeles Literature in May. Writers were running workshops for the community and they all came together on the 19th and 20th in Pasadena’s Theater District for the 7th Annual LitFest Pasadena, celebrating local writers and presses. Plus, as many L.A. writers teach at local high schools, community colleges and universities and as the school year ends, they’ve been reflecting on the impact they’ve had on their students. One has been recognized for his teaching with an award.
It began 12 years ago, the concept for my poetry collection Orange Lady. It was 2006, that summer I had gone to VONA (Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation) in San Francisco, where I had taken a writing workshop with Chris Abani. At VONA, I connected with writers who also lived in Los Angeles, and upon my return, through them, I learned about Ruth Forman
Earlier this week three L.A. poets, Irene Monica Sanchez, Angelina Sáenz and T. Sarmina got accepted into the prestigious VONA/Voices of Our Nation summer workshop at Realm Academy in Berkeley. The workshop is for emerging poets and prose writers-of-Color.
Cynthia Guardado is a fierce and unapologetically brown Salvadorian American female punk rockera, poeta, activista, y profe straight from Inglewooooood, California. Her poems have been published in PALABRA, A Magazine of Chicano & Latino Literary Art; The Packing House Review; and Razorcake’s very own Puro Pinche Poetry: Gritos Del Barrio.
“IT’S THE BROKEN PARTS that matter” claims Vickie Vértiz, in a note to her poem “Nahuatl — A Revenge,” which features what she calls “imperfect” translations from the indigenous Nahuatl language into English. Vértiz’s imperfect translations recall what theorists Emily Apter and Jacques Lezra, following Walter Benjamin, call “untranslatables”: philosophical concepts that both invite and prevent transfer between languages, words that call out to be reinvented in their new language context precisely by resisting translation. In Vértiz’s poems, Latinxs living in California share “untranslatable” experiences that take place between English and Spanish. Her poems transform displacement and a polluted cityscape into sources of resistance and aesthetic restructuring. The visually and sonically rich setting of these poems may be polluted — by toxic air, water, and soil; toxic masculinity and white supremacy — but Vértiz celebrates what her community grows in this toxic ground and voices their untranslatable experiences.
Congratulations goes out to Los Ángeles poet Vickie Vértiz. Her poem “Already My Lips Were Luminous” has been published in the 
Los Angeles – Several hundred people gathering in Leimert Park Village in front of the iconic Vision Theater, Saturday, October 14, 2017.
Los Angeles Literature 