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“I consider myself essentially a storyteller who’s chosen the genre of poetry.” Lynne Thompson, author of Start With a Small Guitar (What Books Press, 2013) and Beg No Pardon (Perugia Press, 2007), speaks about family stories and how she came to poetry after a career in law with Mariano Zaro for the Poetry.LA interview series. Thompson is the 2021 poet laureate of Los Angeles.
“Wouldn’t care how they dressed me as long as I was cleaned and touched with love before I was put away to rot.” Douglas Manuel reads “Knee Deep” and “Bad Son” from his debut poetry collection, Testify (Red Hen Press, 2017), and discusses his work with Poetry.LA host Lisa Grove.
“It was almost effortless. It was an amazing experience because it was as though the poems were writing me.” In this Poetry.LA interview from 2013, the late Wanda Coleman speaks about the moment she felt like a poet, her career as a soap opera writer, and how she finds enjoyment in writing. Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems (Black Sparrow Press, 2020), a new collection of Coleman’s poetry edited by Joshua Bodwell and Terrance Hayes, is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“We are all writing about each other // in chorus, an out loud wince...” Maggie Glover reads poems from her debut collection, How I Went Red (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2014), and speaks about her writing in this interview with Lisa Grove for Poetry.LA.
“Instead of scanning newspaper headlines, / I spend the morning reading names / of flowers and trees in the botanical garden.” Harryette Mullen reads a selection of poems from her collection Urban Tumbleweed: Notes From a Tanka Diary (Graywolf Press, 2013) at Beyond Baroque in this Poetry.LA video.
“Even a baby is / a paper cut theater, / a necklace of incisions strung together / into a country.” In this Poetry.LA video, Kenji C. Liu reads poems from his collections Map of an Onion (Inlandia Institute, 2016) and Monsters I Have Been (Alice James Books, 2019) at the Writers for Migrant Justice reading in Los Angeles.
“Let’s be resentful about how / we didn’t have a quinceañera and forget / that we never wanted one...” In this Poetry.LA video, Sara Borjas reads “Pocha Café” from her debut collection, Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff (Noemi Press, 2019), at the Writers for Migrant Justice reading in Los Angeles.
“When I did begin to make connections with poets, everything opened up for me,” says the late Holly Prado in this Poetry.LA video interviewing noted Southern California poets, including William Archila, Chiwan Choi, Marcia de la O, and Douglas Kearney, on how they got started in their writing careers. Prado died at the age of eighty-one on June 14, 2019.
“Still under construction, the kiss as thunderclouds in summer sky that sometimes means lightning, as the smell of after rain.” In this Poetry.LA video, Keegan Lester reads from his debut collection, this shouldn't be beautiful but it was & it was all i had so i drew it (Slope Editions, 2017), and speaks with Lisa Grove about nostalgia, Bob Dylan, and the themes and influences behind his work.
“Living in this world where everything is social media, we’ve lost the art of being completely vulnerable and honest with our thoughts and our feelings. It’s exactly what poetry is, it’s about vulnerability.” In this Poetry.LA interview, Eric Morago, author of the collection Feasting on Sky (Paper Plane Pilot Publishing, 2016), reads from his work and talks about what brought him to poetry.
