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In this Poetry.LA interview, host Luivette Resto speaks with poet Amy Shimshon-Santo about her new collection, Random Experiments in Bioluminescence (FlowerSong Press, 2024), and the themes within the book which deal with how to live in a time of great suffering and disorientation, and “somehow have the experience of finding your own light.”
In this Poetry.LA video, Lynne Thompson, author most recently of Blue on a Blue Palette (BOA Editions, 2024), and Séamus Isaac Fey, author of the debut collection, decompose (Not a Cult, 2024), read from their work and speak about playing with poetic form and organizing poetry manuscripts.
In this Poetry.LA interview, Lee Herrick speaks with Lynne Thompson about his appointment as California’s tenth poet laureate and reads a selection of poems from his books, including his latest collection, Scar and Flower (Word Poetry Press, 2019).
“I am so happy to tell people, and to have learned myself, that a passion for the writing is all you really need.” Patricia Smith reads from her new collection, Unshuttered (TriQuarterly Books, 2023), and speaks about continuing to challenge herself with her writing for this Poetry.LA interview with host and poet Lynne Thompson. For more on Smith, read “Unshuttered: Patricia Smith’s Journey Into the Aperture of History” by Tyehimba Jess in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“This name— / branded on my family—rises out of / the ashes in the wind. I can trace each syllable / back to our cantón: Buena Vista.” Cynthia Guardado reads from her collection Cenizas (University of Arizona Press, 2022) and speaks about ancestry, names, and family stories in this Poetry.LA interview with poet Douglas Manuel.
Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, director of the organization Women Who Submit, reads from her collection Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge (Sundress Publications, 2016) and speaks about writing family stories as a first-generation Chicana in this interview with Mariano Zaro for the Poetry.LA series.
“[The Congo] is the heartbeat of the world, and it’s never recognized as a central heartbeat,” says Will Alexander about the focus of his most recent collection, Refractive Africa (New Directions, 2021), a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, in this Poetry.LA interview with Douglas Manuel about the intuition he follows for his writing. “I’m not colonized by cognitive expertise,” says Alexander.
In this Poetry.LA conversation, Ramón García, author of The Chronicles (Red Hen Press, 2015), and Anthony Seidman, author of Cosmic Weather (Spuyten Duyvil Publishing, 2020), read their poems and talk about their origin stories as poets, poetry in translation, and the many writers throughout history who have influenced their writing.
“Instead begin with the body—itself a kind / of ending.” In this Poetry.LA video, torrin a. greathouse reads from their debut collection, Wound From the Mouth of a Wound (Milkweed Editions, 2020), and speaks to Mariano Zaro about writing through multiple identities and connecting trauma, disability, and transness.
“Poetry gave me a way to express myself in a language that was very difficult for me initially.” In this Poetry.LA interview with Mariano Zaro, poet Teresa Mei Chuc, author of Red Thread (Fithian Press, 2012) and Keeper of the Winds (FootHills Publishing, 2014), speaks about her family’s experience as Vietnamese refugees and how encountering poetry offered a freedom to express herself through the English language.
