What Books Press & Giant Claw Press Launch

Join us for the launch of What Books Press and Giant Claw Press' fall slate!

Authors will join to read from their work and engage in scintillating conversation!

About the authors:

Jimmy Vega is the child of Mexican immigrants, a Chicano Los Angeles poet, educator, and interdisciplinary artist. Vega is the author of zirconium ash (What Books Press, 2025). He holds a BA from UCLA in English and an MFA in Creative Writing from CalArts. Vega's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Diode, Dunce Codex, Maintenant, and elsewhere. Vega is currently the Associate Director of Beyond Baroque Literary / Arts Center. He lives and works in Los Angeles. More @jimmyyvega or jimmy-vega.com.

Erik Manuel Soto is a Mexican-American writer from California. His poems have appeared in Volt, Huizache, Sonora Review, and other magazines and publications. Winner of the inaugural Gronk Nicandro first book prize for poetry, Erik debuts his full-length poetry collection, Inside the Umber Iris, in Fall 2025.

Judith Pacht’s book Summer Hunger won the 2011 PEN Southwest Book Award for Poetry. Her books include Infirmary for a Private Soul and five chapbooks. A three-time Pushcart nominee, Pacht was first place winner in the Georgia Poetry Society’s Edgar Bowers competition. Her work appears in numerous anthologies and journals such as Ploughshares, Runes, Nimrod and Phoebe. Her poems have been translated into Russian where they were published in Foreign Literature (Moscow, Russia).

John Colburn is the author of four previous books, most recently unabandonment (Spuyten Duyvil, 2021). He lives in St. Paul, MN and is one of the publishers/editors in the Spout Press collective.

About the featured titles:

zirconium ash:

Centered around loss and death of individuals, relationships, and ways of communicating, the poems of zirconium ash drive at intensified high speed, physically and psychically mapping the geography of the city of Los Angeles. Weaving and zigzagging, mingling grief, sorrow, and lament, the poems haunt and are haunted by the living and dead. The culture of the city and family history often blur in these poems, which can feel in conversation with themselves as well as others—fragmented ghost narratives that lyrically confront history, poetics, and the crimes and unjust actions of government.

Inside the Umber Iris:

Eric Soto’s Inside the Umber Iris, is a collection of poems that traverses the realm of the subconscious and mythology, tying a lyrical and surrealist style with themes of generational trauma and folkloric genealogy to create an odyssey of high emotional stakes. Pain and passion are continuously guiding each stanza, each line.

Precarious:

Pretend you are the copywriter for the jacket and catalog copy for your book. If you weren't the author, what would make you consider purchasing this book. Here are some areas to consider: Consider our own personal struggles with morality, to respect the traffic light’s turn from red to green, whether or not to flaunt the law. At every turn we face challenges inside, outside. Many are precarious.

The Persistence:

In The Persistence, the force beneath creation surfaces in ten linked stories that twist through numerous realities. Characters return or depart across a boundary that barely holds back possibilities for the monstrous. In the patch of feral woods in which these stories are set, the covering over the generative void is exceptionally thin, allowing the poetry of being to appear in bizarre ways. Each story in The Persistence invents its own logic, adapting the old need for enchantment to a modern world of fragmentation and grotesque flowering.

Host or Publisher Village Well Books & Coffee