Kate Gale, co-founder and Managing Editor of Red Hen Press, talks about her publishing philosophy, the Ruskin reading series, and her writing.
Redondo Poets hosts (L. to R.) Jim Doane, Stephany Prodromides and Larry Colker talk about their long- running reading series at Coffee Cartel in Redondo Beach.
Open mic M.C. Conney Williams (L.) and Anansi Writers Workshop Coordinator Jawansa Dumisani (R.) discuss the workings of The World Stage poetry program.
Veteran poetry hosts James "Boomer" Maverick (L.) and Rafael F.J. Alvarado (R.), sit down at one of their venues, Mama's Hot Tamales Cafe in L.A.'s Westlake District, to discuss readings, poetry and how they got started in both.
Rick Lupert, Cobalt Poets' host since 1994, talks about the weekly readings at the Canoga Park venue and its tradition of publishing broadsides for featured poets. He also discusses his own poetry.
Elena Karina Byrne, Literary Programs Director of The Ruskin Art Club, describes how an historic cultural venue is serving today's L.A. literary scene and discusses her poetry.
Village Books, Pacific Palisades, is home to the Moonday poetry series founded in 2003. (Left to right) store owner Katie O'Laughlin and co-hosts Lois P. Jones and Alice Pero (series founder) discuss the series and Village Books' support of new poetry.
Casa Romantica Reading Series co-founders (left to right) Elisa Pulido, Lorene Delany-Ullman, and Michelle Mitchell-Foust discuss the six-year program that featured nationally recognized and emerging poets at a picturesque San Clemente, CA, landmark. The series ended in Jan., 2010.
The Organic Soul Movement reading and performance series, renamed Natural Mystic in 2008, is discussed by founders (left to right) Sarah Cruse and DJ Melaaza (Monica Ortiz) at the their venue, Industrial Cafe & Jazz, in Culver City, in 2007.
RD Armstrong ("Raindog"), founder and editor of Lummox Press, discusses his poetry and publishing ventures which includeThe Lummox Journal, the Little Red Book series, and various poetry collections.
A.K. Toney is a poet and educator. His "Reading Is Poetry" program uses the poetry workshop model to help children, teens, and adults gain reading fluency and develop their own poet voices. It operates in the L.A. Unified School District and the wider community.
(Left to right) Mariano Zaro talks with Gale Wronsky and Molly Bendall about their 2009 collaboration, Bling & Fringe (The L.A. Poems) . Watch them perform excerpts from the book here.
A 2009 interview with the then director of Beyond Baroque Literary / Arts Center, Fred Dewey, in which he describes the Venice-based organization's impact on the L.A. poetry and cultural scene since the late 1960s.
Suzanne Lummis, LA poet icon, poetry educator/instigator, and co-founder of the L.A. Poetry Festival, discusses her work, poetry craft, and the L.A. poetry monde (as she prefers to call it).
Mariano Zaro (left) interviews Sarah Maclay, artistic director of The 3rd Area reading series at PHARMAKA, a Downtown L.A. art gallery. They are joined by PHARMAKA's Christopher Monger. UPDATE: In 2010, the series moved to Frank Pictures Gallery, Bergamot Station arts complex, Santa Monica, CA.
Phil Taggart, Askew Poetry Journal co-founder/editor, with Marsha de la O, discusses the journal, the Ventura County poetry community, and his own poetry.
Beyond Baroque 2011 Poetry Contest winners read their poems and talk about their work. Included are 1st place winner Michelle Bitting, 2nd place winner Beth Ruscio, and runner up Scott T. Starbuck.
Cheryl Klein, director of Poets & Writers California office, discusses P&W's activities, the L.A. literary community, and her own writing.
Brendan Constantine, author of "Calamity Joe" (Red Hen Press, 2012), "Birthday Girl with Possum" (Write Bloody Publishing, 2011), and "Letters to Guns" (Red Hen Press, 2009), discusses his work with Mariano Zaro.
Wanda Coleman (1946-2013) was called the "unofficial poet laureate of L.A." with a literary career that spanned over 30 years. Her numerous volumes of poetry and fiction include Jazz & Twelve O'clock Tales (Godine/Black Sparrow Books, 2008) and The World Falls Apart (Pitt Poetry Series, 2011). In this interview from May, 2013, she discusses her life and work with Mariano Zaro.
Tony Barnstone's several collections of poetry include "Tongue of War" (BkMk Press, 2009) winner of the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry, selected by B.H. Fairchild, "The Golem of Los Angeles" (Red Hen Press, 2007), winner of the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award."
Holly Prado's books include, "From One to the Next" (2008),"These Mirrors Prove It" (2006) and "Esperanza: Poems for Orpheus" (1998) from Cahuenga Press. Her work has appeared in a hundred publications and a dozen anthologies, both national and international. She discusses her life and process as a poet with Mariano Zaro as part of the Poetry.LA interview series.
Timothy Green is the author of American Fractal (Red Hen Press, 2008) and editor of the poetry journal RATTLE. His poems have appeared in many journals, including The Connecticut Review, Fugue, Mid-American Review, and Nimrod International Journal. In this Poetry.LA interview, he discusses his work, creative process, the current role of poetry, and other topics.
William Archila was born in El Salvador, in 1968, and migrated to the U.S. with his family to escape the civil war. His first poetry collection, "The Art of Exile" (Bilingual Press, 2009), reflecting on that experience, won the Emerging Writer Fellowship Award from the Writer's Center. His work has appeared in numerous journals. He discusses with Mariano Zaro the evolution of his work and his writing process.
Ellyn Maybe has authored several poetry collections and performed her work at venues across the U.S. and Europe, including poetry slams and readings in Munich, Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Stuttgart. She opened the MTV Spoken Word Tour in LA and often performs with the The Ellyn Maybe Band which recently released the CD Rodeo for the Sheepish and performed at the Glastonbury Music Festival. Writer's Digest named her one of ten poets to watch in the new millennium.
Willis Barnstone, prolific poet, translator, scholar, and memoirist has authored, edited, or contributed to countless volumes over six decades. In this conversation with Mariano Zaro, he talks about his development as a poet and the work of some poets he has translated and admires.
Laurel Ann Bogen's poetry career was launched in the late 1960s when she won an Academy of American Poets' award as a freshman at USC. Today, she is the author of 10 books of poetry; her work has appeared in over 100 journals and collections; and, since 1990, she has taught poetry and performance for the UCLA Extension Writers' Program, receiving the Outstanding Instructor of the Year award in 2008. Known for her dramatic performance style, she has appeared at many A-list art and literary venues across the country. However, as she tells host Mariano Zaro in this interview, there were tough challenges along the way.
Douglas Kearney -- dynamic on stage, innovative on the page -- describes his evolution in both areas and discusses his hallmark "performative typography." Kearney's poetry collections include Patter (2014), The Black Automaton (2009), chosen for the National Poetry Series, and Fear, Some (2006).Named a Notable New American Poet by the Poetry Society of America, his other honors include a Whiting Writers' Award and commissions for new work from Minneapolis's Weisman Art Museum and New York's Studio Museum. Kearney, who is also an opera librettist, teaches at CalArts.
Sholeh Wolpé is an Iranian-born poet, writer, editor, and literary translator, now living in LA. Her work has been lauded by Billy Collins, Alicia Ostriker, and Chris Abani, among others. She has authored three poetry collections, Keeping Time With Blue Hyacinths (Univ. of Arkansas, 2013), Rooftops of Tehran (Red Hen Press, 2008), and The Scar Saloon (Red Hen Press, 2004). Her translation of iconic Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad's selected work, Sin (Univ. of Arkansas Press), won the Lois Roth Persian Translation Award in 2010. Her anthologies include The Forbidden: Poems from Iran and Its Exiles (Michigan State Univ. Press, 2012).
B.H. Fairchild is one of SoCal's most nationally recognized poets. His poetry explores working class lives in the small towns in Texas and Kansas where he grew up. His collections include The Blue Buick: New and Selected Poems (W.W. Norton, 2014), Usher: Poems (W.W. Norton, 2009), Local Knowledge (W.W. Norton, 2005), Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest (W.W. Norton, 2003), and The Art of the Lathe (Univ. of Maine, 1998). Fairchild received the William Carlos Williams Award, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Aiken Taylor Award, the Arthur Rense Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among many other honors.
Marsha de la O's new collection, Antidote for Night. winner of the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, will be published by BOA Editions in 2015. Her first collection, Black Hope, won the New Issues Press Poetry Prize and Small Press Editor's Choice Award. Her work is included in the anthologies Intimate Nature (Ballantine Books, 1998) and Beyond the Valley (Sacred Beverage Press, 1998). She and Phil Taggart co-founded and edit the Askew Poetry Journal. They also founded the annual Ventura Erotic Poetry reading, a popular SoCal literary event.
The poetry of Nikola Madzirov has been translated into over 30 languages. A native of Macedonia, he won the Hubert Burda Prize for young East European poets for his collection Relocated Stone (2007), and has received several international awards and fellowships, including the International Writing Program (IWP) at the University of Iowa (2008) and Literarisches Tandem in Berlin (2009). A selection of his poetry, Remnants of Another Age, was published by BOA Editions in 2011 with a foreword by Carolyn Forché. He is one of the coordinators of the world poetry network Lyrikline.
Stephanie Brown has authored two collections, Domestic Interior (Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 2008) and Allegory of the Supermarket (Univ. of Georgia Press, 1999). Her poems have appeared in six editions of the annual anthology, The Best American Poetry (Scribner's), and her poetry and essays have been anthologized in Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (Scribner's, 2003), The Grand Permission: New Writing about Motherhood and Poetics (Wesleyan Univ. Press, 2003), and others. She was awarded the Margaret Bridgman Fellowship in Poetry at the Breadloaf Writers' Conference in 2009.
David St. John is a prominent national poet, scholar, and mentor to many SoCal poets. He has been honored with many of the most significant poetry prizes, including the Rome fellowship and the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He has authored ten collections including The Window (Arctos Press, 2014) and The Auroras: New Poems (Harper, 2012). With Cole Swenson, he co-edited American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry (W.W. Norton, 2009). In 2014, he became Chair of the USC English Dept.
