Poets & Writers Theater

“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.

“I would read out loud and tried to check in my own breath, in my own body how the sentence was feeling and what kind of experience it was giving me as the first reader.” Marci Vogel reads from her books At the Border of Wilshire & Nobody (Howling Bird Press, 2015) and Death and Other Holidays (Melville House, 2018) and discusses her writing process both with poetry and prose in this Poetry.LA interview with Mariano Zaro.

“Let us bridge the generations and remind all who will listen that it only takes one woman sitting on a bus to inspire hundreds…” Amy Uyematsu, the author most recently of Basic Vocabulary (Red Hen Press, 2016), reads her poem “As American As” at the third annual Writers Resist Los Angeles reading at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Venice, California.

“I’ve claimed these lives, I’ve claimed these fables, but I made them into my own.” Carly Joy Miller reads from her poetry collection, Ceremonial (Orison Books, 2018), and speaks with Lisa Grove about the use of persona in her work for this Poetry.LA interview.

“Until I discovered poetry, I didn’t think I would ever be able to express my life.” In this Poetry.LA interview, Chiwan Choi, cofounder of Writ Large Press, reads poems from his collection The Yellow House (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2017) and speaks about how his experiences as an immigrant have influenced his writing.

“Perhaps the butterflies are mute because / no one would believe their terrible stories.” In this interview for the Poetry.LA series, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo speaks about late night talk shows, immigration interviews, the PechaKucha format, and reads from his debut poetry collection, Cenzontle (BOA Editions, 2018), which won the 2017 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize.

Ramón García, author of the poetry collections The Chronicles (Red Hen Press, 2015) and Other Countries (What Books Press, 2010), reads his poems and speaks with Mariano Zaro for the Poetry.LA series about how his suburban childhood in Modesto, California has influenced his writing.

“Eternity opens with the dark back / of a jazz pianist hunched inside himself...” For the Poetry.LA series, Angela Peñaredondo reads and discusses poems from her debut collection, All Things Lose Thousands of Times, which was the inaugural regional winner of Inlandia Institute’s Hillary Gravendyk Prize.

“The best kind of fire that we can hope to be able to spark is one that creates light and also creates heat.” In this interview with Mariano Zaro for the Poetry.LA series, Douglas Kearney discusses performative typography, his play with language and sound, and how he came to poetry.

“Still winter. Snowing, still. Can it even be called action, this / patience…” Chen Chen reads from his debut poetry collection, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017), and discusses his writing with Lisa Grove for the Poetry.LA series. Chen is featured in “The Whole Self: Our Thirteenth Annual Look at Debut Poets” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.