Book Launch: Angel City Review Ten Years of Poetry in L.A.

Since 2014 Angel City Review has published the work of new and established writers from Los Angeles and beyond, with a focus on sharing the many diverse voices that the medium has to offer. Oftentimes this meant fighting against the single story fallacy that often exists to highlight singular style, movement, or group of people.

Angel City Review's Ten Years of Poetry in L.A. anthology brings together 44 Los Angeles-based and connected poets that have been in the journal over the past decade serving both as a best of poetry collection as well as a focused survey of the city's poetry in the last decade.

Contributors to the anthology will read their texts in The Wanda Coleman Theater, including Teka Lark, Sesshu Foster, Douglas Manuel, Marcus Clayton, & Lizeth De La Luz, hosted by Managing Editor Zachary C. Jensen.

A complimentary copy of the anthology is included with your ticket purchase, including Beyond Baroque members!

Doors Open: 6:30 PM I Readings: 7:00 PM

Zachary C. Jensen is a writer, journalist, sometimes translator, and educator from Los Angeles, CA. He currently teaches English at various colleges across LA. His work has appeared in LA Record, Cultural Daily, Entropy, Pank, Art Memo, Dispatches From The Poetry Wars, Alligator Zine and other places. He is the Managing and founding Editor of Angel City Review and the editor for the Animals Chapbook Series at Business Bear Press.

Sesshu Foster is author of many books including City of the Future (Kaya Press, 2018) winner of the CLMP Firecracker Award, and ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines (City Lights, 2021), a novel co-authored with artist Arturo Ernesto Romo.

Douglas Manuel was born in Anderson, Indiana and now resides in Long Beach, California. He received a BA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University, an MFA in poetry from Butler University, and a PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Testify (2017) and Trouble Funk (2023). His poems and essays can be found in numerous literary journals, magazines, and websites, most recently Zyzzyva, Pleiades, and the New Orleans Review. A recipient of the Dana Gioia Poetry Award and a fellowship from the Borchard Foundation Center on Literary Arts, he is an assistant professor of English at Whittier College and teaches at Spalding University’s low-res MFA program.

Teka Lark is a cli-fi writer, visual artist, essayist, and poet. As a 14th generation African American her work is greatly influenced by the struggle of double consciousness. In 2015, inspired by the Anarchist Book Fair, she founded the Blk Grrrl Book Fair. Her writing has appeared in the LA Weekly, LA Times, Anarres Project for Alternative Futures, Ebony, Counterpunch, Truth Dig, Time, KCET, and Zocalo. Her book Queen of Inglewood (Word Palace Press, 2017) explores capitalism and place through dramatic monologue and satire.

Marcus Clayton is a multigenre Afrolatino writer from South Gate, CA, with an M.F.A. in Poetry from CSU Long Beach. Currently, he pursues a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California, focusing on the intersections between Latinx literature, Black literature, Decolonization, and Punk Rock. He has an inter-genre book of prose titled ¡PÓNK! with Nightboat Books.

Lizeth De La Luz is a poet, writer, editor, and teaching artist from Southern California. She writes about the frustration of language barriers, learned barriers, and the anxieties of living/loving/grieving in a Mexican body in the United States. Her work has been published in Latin@ Literatures, Acentos Review, and Stonecoast Review among other publications. Find her work at lizethdelaluz.com.

Ticket purchase is required. No one will be turned away for lack of funds! Tickets will be available at the Beyond Baroque bookstore on the day of the event, but we recommend registering in advance through Eventbrite. Masks are encouraged while inside our center.

Livestream: If you can’t join us in-person the event will be livestreamed on at the scheduled time of the event.

Host or Publisher Beyond Baroque Literary | Arts Center