Since the last community news in October a lot has happened the literary community. Book release parties, a new bookstore opens, Tia Chucha’s Press expands, local poets hold fundraisers for Gaza and more. Continue reading Community News
Editor-in-Chief Brian Dunlap’s unpublished book review on Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo’s debut poetry collection “Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge,” originally written in 2017. “In poems of her family living in Boyle Heights and her Chavez Ravine poems, Bermejo brings this true Chicanx L.Á.—away from the overused tropes of a lack of history, of being without, of L.Á. is Hollywood—to the fore.” Continue reading Posada: Finding Home
“Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo will be one of the featured authors at the Los Angeles Libros Festival, a free bilingual book festival for the whole family,” on September 23rd at the Central Library. Check out her interview. Continue reading L.A. Libros Fest: Interview With Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo
By Thea Prieto
FROM: Poets & Writers
For the past decade an international community of women and nonbinary writers have been working to claim space for themselves in an industry historically dominated by men. Known as Women Who Submit (WWS), the group supports and empowers its members to submit their work in spite of publishing’s inequities. Their achievements have been extraordinary: This July, the organization celebrates its tenth year, with twenty-seven chapters across the United States and Mexico, more than one hundred fifty successful book and magazine publication credits by its members in 2020, and a devoted community of writers, editors, and publishers.
Continue reading “A Decade of Women Who Submit”By Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo
FROM: LARB
SEVENTEEN AND HIGH, Nikki Darling swaggers down the middle of Garvey Boulevard, a busy thoroughfare in the San Gabriel Valley, as cars swerve around her: “‘Three Days’ by Jane’s Addiction is playing on my Walkman and I feel like I’m in a movie, like I’m an assassin.” She stands in the street with a cigarette hanging from her lips, with “someplace to be or maybe nowhere to go.” She taunts the cars as they pass: “Fly around me, motherfuckers! Fly around me like I’m not even here!”
Continue reading “Invisible No More: How “Fade Into You” Reflects the L.A. Chicanx Experience”
Kenji Liu Is Using Frankenstein As A Metaphor For Toxic Masculinity
by Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo
FROM: Bitch Media
Kenji Liu and I enter a tea shop on Las Tunas Drive in an area that feels like the epicenter of the boba tea shop movement in Southern California’s San Gabriel Valley. K-pop plays over the speakers while a worker noisily fixes a hole in the ceiling, and Liu and I have to raise our voices in order to discuss Monsters I Have Been, his new collection of sci-fi–inspired poems that uses the figure of Frankenstein’s monster as a way to reflect on toxic masculinity. But though our location isn’t an ideal place to record an interview, after immersing myself in Monsters’ mix of languages, pop-culture references, and chopped-up texts, I wanted to meet in a location that has a similarly busy vibrance.
By Brian Dunlap
A bustling York Blvd., with mouth-watering smells wafting in the air from food trucks parked curbside. Near the corner of York and Avenue 50 is Pop-Hop Books, one of L.A.’s many independent bookstores.
Continue reading “Highland Park on Thursday night in January”
From: THE SUNDRESS BLOG
Anna: Can you tell me a little bit about Antígona González?
Xochitl: Antígona González is a book of poetry from Mexican poet Sara Uribe and translated by John Pluecher that uses the classic Greek tragedy, Antigone by Sophocles, as a container to speak about the disappeared of Mexico. In the classic, Antigone is a princess that breaks her uncle’s edict in order to bury her brother Polynices after he has been declared a traitor and his dead body abandoned in the desert. In Antígona González, “Polynices is identified with the marginalized and disappeared,” while Antígona represents the sisters searching for their disappeared brothers: “I didn’t want to be Antigone / but it happened to me.”
Continue reading “Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo Reads“Antígona González” By Sara Uribe”
From: Blog Talk Radio
In this Podcast From Blog Talk Radio Los Angeles poet Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo talks about an exciting new adventure she is undertaking taking this month. Bermejo was selected for the first ever National Parks Poetry Residency in partnership with National Parks Arts Foundation, Poetry Foundation, and Gettysburg National Military Park. Starting September 15th she’ll be living in a log cabin in Gettysburg for three weeks writing resistance poetry.
Continue reading “Big Blend Radio: A Toast to The Arts – Poetry & Art, Music & Entertainment”
Los Angeles Literature 