Youth Poet Laurate Amanda Gorman Offers Words of Hope Amind Coronavirous Pandemic
By Brian Dunlap
Los Ángeles native Amanda Gorman, the U.S.’s inaugural youth poet laureate, is offering Americans some words of inspiration to help get through this stressful time. Her words, like all poetry, helps people understand the world around them, to help contextualize and organize discordant aspects of our lives. Former Poet Laureate of Los Ángeles Luis J. Rodriguez says, “Her poetry draws on deep ideas, images, stories and concerns. She exudes confidence in her voice, her presentation and in the social issues she considers paramount.”
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Most mornings, poet, memoirist and essayist Luis J. Rodriguez gets up around 5 a.m. at his San Fernando Valley home, reads for a few minutes for inspiration and then quickly goes to his computer to start writing. “I read, and then it’s, hey, man, I’ve got to do something!” he says. “If I can get a couple of hours in the morning, then I’m happy.”
Earlier this month, Compton poet Jenise Miller hosted the release party for her debut chapbook The Blvd. (DSTL Arts, 2019) at a packed Patria Coffee. The audience connected with her poems that depicted and celebrated the vibrant Compton community she grew up in. The book centers around the apartment complex she lived in called The Blvd. and depicts in part, her black Panamanian heritage.
Virtual Velocity by Anthony Mora is the story of the curious creation of pop phenomena, Jake Jenkins, America’s most renowned and successful literary novelist. Spanning six decades, through three interconnected stories, Virtual Velocity follows Jake from a sixteen-year-old learning about literature and women, to frenetic rock journalist, to struggling literary novelist, to world-famous author. Journeying through L.Á.’s rock and literary worlds, it is also an homage to the city, tracking its internal and external changing landscape and its cultural shape shifting.
As it’s the thick of the holiday season, Los Angeles Literature is taking this week and next week off from from compiling it’s weekly list of events as the literary community has gone dark to celebrate good times with loving family, no matter what form family may take. The list will return on January 5th with events for the week of the 6th-12th.
Los Angeles Literature 