“ladybug” is the new memoir written by San Bernardino native Nikia Chaney, about how her mother and daughter are afflicted by schizophrenia. It opens with a child speaking in second person “as she observes her mother dissociate.” Continue reading ladybug: We Can Inherit Experiences
By Camylle Fleming
Author Heather Haldeman’s debut memoir Kids & Cocktails Don’t Mix (Apprentice House Press, June 2021) explores machinations of gender and power dynamics in the 1960s and ’70s as Heather comes of age and must decide how she wants her own life to look.
Continue reading “Former Governor of CA’s Granddaughter Writes Memoir of Riches to Rags”
Another busy week of literary events in L.Á. Workshops, open mics, book clubs, readings, a kids events or two. catch Tod Goldberg discusses his new book of short stories The Low Desert: Gangster Stories via Skylight or poet Kevin Young via USC Visions and Voices. Or read a poem or two at the Definitive Soapbox and other open mics this week. Get to your computer L.Á. and support your local literary community. #losangelesliterature Continue reading Los Angeles Literature Events: 02/22/21 – 02/28/21
Interview by Yayett Peralta
Lisbeth Coimen is a L.Á. writer who has wandered the immigration path from her native Venezuela, to Canada, to USA, leaving pieces of her heart scattered in the places she’s lived.
Continue reading “Extraordinarios con Lisbeth Carolina Coimen”
By J.T. The L.A. Storyteller
FROM: Medium
To come to terms with one’s status as a survivor is to relive the moments that nearly ended one’s life. To collect those moments and offer them to the world is to relieve their weight on one’s mind so new possibilities in one’s life may take shape. Lisbeth Coiman, an Afro-Venezuelan poet and writer, has embarked on this process in a particularly relevant reading journey for working-class people in cities like Los Angeles, especially for migrants from Latin America.
By Brian Dunlap
Los Nietos Press is small. Last year they published Long Beach poet Thomas R. Thomas’ latest poetry collection Star Chasing, a poetic memoir about his life growing up in a Southern California tract-house through his adulthood living in the Southland. In 2018, they published San Bernardino native and Long Beach resident liz gonzález’ first full length poetry collection Dancing in the Santa Ana Winds: Poems y Cuentos New and Selected.
By Candice Yacono
FROM: Orange County Register
On any given day, you might find Susan Straight walking along the Santa Ana River or throwing darts at the local Elks lodge.
Continue reading “How Riverside Author Susan Straight Enbraced Family History For Latest Book”
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 Carolyn Neuhausen
FROM: The Argonaut
Loyola Marymount University writing instructor and rhetorical arts fellow Shonda Buchanan understands how abuse and self-hatred — the kind that ripples through families for generations — can set the tone for interpersonal relationships for decades, if not centuries.
Continue reading “LMU’S SHONDA BUCHANAN TELLS TRUER TALES OF AMERICAN HISTORY”
By Eisa Nefertari Ulen
FROM: LARB
Award-winning poet Shonda Buchanan honors multiple literary traditions in her breathtaking new memoir, Black Indian. An educator, freelance writer, and literary editor, Buchanan is a culture worker with deep, decades-long engagement in communities of color. Her work honors the complexity and diversity of these Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities. At once Indigenous, Black Female, Speculative, Feminist, Womanist, Urban, Southern Gothic, and counter to the Tragic Mulatto stereotype in American literature, stage, and film, Black Indian is a quintessentially American narrative.
Continue reading “Locs in the Sweat Lodge: On Shonda Buchanan’s “Black Indian””
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