Los Angeles Literature Events 7/29/19 – 8/04/19
Your Author Series: Rilla Alexander at Arroyo Seco Regional Library, LAPL – Kids Event
Please join us as Your Author Series welcomes children’s author and illustrator Rilla Alexander, as part of our Summer Author Program and Summer Reading challenge. The author will be reading her books, Swarm of Bees and A Bear Sat on My Porch. She is an internationally acclaimed designer and illustrator, and she has worked with such brands as Puma, Volkswagen, and Nokia.
Where: Arroyo Seco Regional Library, LAPL
Date: Monday the 29th
Time: 4 pm – 5 pm
Address: 6145 N. Figueroa St., Los Angeles, CA 90042
Website: http://www.lapl.org/whats-on/events/your-author-series-starring-rilla-alexander
Continue reading “Los Angeles Literature Events 7/29/19 – 8/04/19”

Sara Borjas is the guest on the latest episode of
As the president issues the first veto of his tenure after Congress rejected his declaration of a national emergency to fund his wall, it’s hard to imagine that the dynamics along the U.S.-Mexico border were once different, when people shuttled back and forth between the two nations. Facundo Bernal marks such a moment in “Palos de Ciego,” his manuscript of poetry translated to English for the first time by Anthony Seidman as “A Stab in the Dark” for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
The poet Mike Sonksen knows more about Los Ángeles than almost anyone. It began when he was a kid, his father and both grandfathers introducing him to the sprawling city by taking him on destination drives. Due to his father’s love of architecture, having, “taught me about…Frank Lloyd Write from an early age,” Sonksen “had a natural interest in maps and geography.” Those drives fostered that interest, dipping in and out of distinctly planned and inhabited neighborhoods that made up the patchwork quilt of, not only the city, but Los Ángeles County.
Your Author Series: Robin Benway at El Sereno Branch Library, LAPL – Teens Event
Believing in fate is a foundational part of my life, so when I was perusing my list of books to indulge in next, something called me to John Brantingham’s The Green of Sunset. For starters, I think it was the title. I hear sunsets get called everything but green, and this had me seeking out the elements of a sunset often unseen, like reading between the rays of a departing sun, and that’s something I needed this week.
Like a hurricane of images, or a tsunami of grief, Sweeny’s lines strain against a background of stability and coherence that barely holds together. The book is an elegy not only because the title tells us so, but because it performs its elegiac ritual without the filter of conventional form or syntactical coherence. If grief is inchoate, the poet asks, what language is sufficient to the duty it is called upon to perform? The answer is a language suddenly released from its duties to inform or to persuade—functions of containment, framing, and interpretation—a non-syntax left to its singular capacity to conjure the ineffable, to bring it into being.
Arminé Iknadossian’s mother would gather olives from the trees that grew just outside of her daughter’s high school; she couldn’t imagine all of that wonderful fruit going to waste. Iknadossian has not written a poem for this image she remembers all of these years later, but perhaps all of the poems in her first collection of poetry are, in a way, an homage to her mother’s incessant olive gathering.
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.