Below are YouTube videos of some of the most important writers and poets in Los Ángeles literary history reading or discussing their work. Some of the poetry, especially, is best to hear performed (Wanda Coleman, Kamau Daáood, etc.) Most of these videos show writers exploring, honestly, a city and region too often stereotyped.

 

A Day of Poetry in Los Angeles

On August 13, 2022, former Los Angeles Poet Laureate Lynne Thompson and former Anaheim Poet Laureate Grant Hier hosted A” Day of Poetry in Los Angeles” that included readings by former Los Angeles Poet Laureate, Luis J. Rodriguez, and former Los Angeles County Youth Poet Laureate, Salome Agbaroji, as well as sixty other local poets.

Wanda Coleman

Decades before Los Ángeles had an official Poet Laureate, Wanda Coleman was known as “The Unofficial Poet Laureate of Los Angeles.” Within her writing, whether it be fiction, essays, or poetry, Coleman introduces and develops characters whose lives bring to light the social inequalities of Blacks in America, but specifically, in the Watts and South Central neighborhoods of Los Ángeles where she grew up and spent so much of her early adulthood.

Kamau Daaood

Kamau Daáood, member of the famed Watts Writers Workshop born out of the 1965 Watts Rebellion and founder of the World Stage, performs with music students from Bordeaux University on the occasion of the pubication of the bilingual edition of his collections of poems The Language of Saxophones. March 26th 2012.

Francesca Lia Block

Francesca Lia Block was born and raised in Hollywood and writes young adult literature and poetry. She is most famous for her book Weetzie Bat (HarperCollins,1989), about Weetzie and her best friend Dirk, as well as their friends and relations. After being granted three wishes by a genie, Weetzie discovers that there are unexpected ramifications. The story is set in an almost dream-like, heightened version of Los Ángeles, in an indefinite time period evoking both the 1980s punk craze and the sophisticated glamor of 1950s Hollywood. Block describes issues such as blended families, premarital sex, homosexuality, and AIDS. In this video, Block reads an excerpt from her novel Love in the Time of Global Warming (Henery Holt, 2013), about seventeen-year-old Penelope (Pen) who sets out into the wasteland, after the Earth Shaker, which all but destroyed Los Angeles, in search of her family, her journey guided by a tattered copy of Homer’s Odyssey.

Michael C. Ford

Poet, playwright, editor and recording artist Michael C. Ford grew up in Los Ángeles in the 1940s and 1950s. He was influenced by Poet Kenneth Patchen in terms of integrating the spoken word with Jazz. His debut spoken word record Language Commando earned a Grammy nomination in 1986. Ford is associated with Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Venice, which opened in 1968, dedicated to expanding the public’s knowledge of poetry, literature and art through cultural events and community interaction. In this video, Ford performs “After Monk,” his tribute to the music of Thelonious Monk, at Beyond Baroque’s The Scott Wannberg Bookstore and Poetry Lounge.

Susan Straight

Susan Straight was born and raised in Riverside, where she still lives and teaches in the Creative Writing Department at UC Riverside. Her novels, short stories and nonfiction are set in the Inland Empire region of Southern California, out to Palm Springs and in places in between. In this video Straight discusses why she tells stories.

Amy Uyematsu

Amy Uyematsu was born and raised in Pasadena. Uyematsu became active in Asian American Studies in the late sixties. As a college senior, she penned the essay “The Emergence of Yellow Power in America, an assertion of Asian American identity influenced by the consciousness-raising theories of the Black Power movement. That same year she joined the staff of the newly formed UCLA Asian American Studies Center, where she co-edited the widely-used anthology Roots: An Asian American Reader (1971). In this video, Uyematsu reads her poem “Three” at Beyond Baroque.

Dana Johnson

Dana Johnson was born in Los Ángeles and is an Associate Professor at the University of Southern California. Johnson’s works are partly based on her own experiences with living in different parts of Los Angeles and its surrounding areas. With her works, she wants to show the varied sides of Los Ángeles that are not usually given attention. Race, class consciousness and gender are major themes in her works. In this video, Johnson reads from and discusses her novel Elsewhere California (Counterpoint, 2012), about a young girl, Avery, who escapes the violent streets of Los Ángeles to a more gentrified existence in suburban West Covina. But this new life, filled with school, visits to 7–Eleven to gawk at Tiger Beat magazine, and outings to Dodger Stadium, is soon interrupted by a reminder of the past in the form of her violent cousin Keith.

Iris de Anda 

A Guanaca Tapatia poet, speaker & musician born on L.Á.’s Eastside, Iris De Anda has been featured with KPFK & KPFA Pacifica Radio, organized with Academy of American Poets, performed at Los Angeles Latino Book Festival, Feria del Libro Tijuana, Mexico, Casa de las Americas in Havana, Cuba and is named one of Today’s Revolutionary Women of Color. In this video, Iris De Anda reads from her deubut poetry collection CodeSwitch: Fires from my Corazon, at her book launch.

Bridgette Bianca

bridgette bianca is a poet and professor from South Central Los Ángeles. Her debut book of poetry, be/trouble (Writ Large Projects, 2020), is, in many respects, a love letter to Los Ángeles. Even when the city isn’t formally mentioned, it is always in the backdrop, always present, and we are always aware that Los AÁngeles offers as much danger as it does glamour as much grit as beauty. This is the Los Angeles not shown on television and movies: the everyday minituatea of Black Angeleño life. In this video, bianca reads from her debut collection.

Steph Cha and Joe Ide

Authors Steph Cha and Joe Ide joined Times reporter Maria L. LaGanga for an evening of new L.Á. noir, streamed live. Steph Cha is a native of the San Fernando Valley. She is the author of the Juniper Song Los Ángeles crime trilogy, staring Private Detective Juniper Song and author of Your House Will Pay, about racial tensions in LÁ, following two families—one Korean-American, one African-American—grappling with the effects of a decades-old crime. Joe Ide grew up in South Central Los Ángeles, which he used as the setting for a series of crime novels that feature his recurring young Sherlockian protagonist, Isaiah Quintabe.

Cory “BessKepp” Cofer

Cory “Besskepp” Cofer is a quick-witted-beatnik60’s-hiphop80’s performance poet raised on Langston Hughes and Public Enemy. Everything he has experienced has been documented through poems, journal entries and monologues. He tackles socio-political and racial issues with an animated grace. He is the co-founder of the SoCal open mic “A Mic and Dim Lights.” His book of poems Dreaming Under Polka-Dot Stars is published by L.Á. based World Stage Press.

Joseph Hanson

Joseph Hansen was best known as the writer of the groundbreaking David Brandstetter mysteries featuring a homosexual detective insurance investigator who still embodied the tough, no-nonsense personality of the classic hardboiled private investigator protagonist. He was also a remarkable poet, teacher, and activist instrumental in the establishment of the Pride Parade in West Hollywood. Join Bill Mohr (publisher, poet, and educator) and Michael Nava (author of the Henry Rios novels) for a discussion of the remarkable life and continuing influence of Joseph Hansen.

Michelle T. Clinton

Spoken word artist Michelle T. Clinton was born in 1955 and grew up in a socio-economically challenged South Central Los Ángeles family. She said about being drawn to writing, “I don’t think the writing saved me, but I think being dedicated to the writing helped me save myself.” Clinton described her work as “an attempt to assimilate the racist & sexist violence in my body. The poems struggle to answer the question: How does the individual/community survive and continue to function in the face of systematic atrocity?”

Marisela Norte

Marisela Norte is an American writer, poet and artist from Los Ángeles. She is known for her poetry that explores the unseen Los Ángeles. Norte was part of the Los Angeles Latino Writers Workshop in the 1980s, which was part of the emerging Chicano/a literary community that began on The Eastside. She said in an interview with Sophie Rachmuhl in the late 1980s, “the poetry scene has grown…it only seems to be growing on [the Westside] of the L.Á. River. I don’t know why things start and stop and matter once they’re safely over that side of the bridge. There’s a lot of territory here.”