|
|
|
Sunday, October 28, 2012 starting at 2:00 pm
Sunday, October 21, 2012 starting at 2:00 pm
WOVEN VOICES: THREE GENERATIONS OF PUERTORRIQUEÑA POETS LOOK AT THEIR AMERICAN LIVES, an anthology
Featuring Anita Vélez-Mitchell Gloria Vando, and Anika Paris
Poet and critic Rigoberto González describes it as “a book in which three poets who happen to be grandmother, mother, and granddaughter, situates writing as artistic legacy, a most fitting symbol for the life-blood that unites three distinct imaginations.”
Macarthur Fellow Ruth Behar notes how the contributors “share family ties, a common Puero Rican history, and the twists and turns of a diasporic journey…a world of beauty and truth.”
WOVEN VOICES organizes the poems into conversations around the topics of home, mothers and daughters, family, love, and telling stories. “The music of these three voices singing, sometimes in harmony, sometimes in counterpoint, creates a dramatic story that draws in the reader and enriches and enlarges the reader’s world,” writes editor Linda Rodriguez in the introduction.
Born in Vieques, Puerto Rico, in 1916, Anita Vélez-Mitchell is a poet, writer, and performer. Her writing awards include Puerto Rico’s Julia de Burgos Poetry Prize for her bilingual book-length poem, Primavida: Calendar of Love (1986 Mairena Press); Association of Puerto Rican Poets and Writers Award; University Press Award; Center of Ibero-American Poets and Writers Awards in four separate categories (short story, poetry, essay, and drama); as well as many other awards and fellowships. As a dancer and actress, Anita Vélez-Mitchell has performed in many shows on and off Broadway from Mexican Hayride (1944) to The Ballad of Eddie and Jo (2006), including as Anita in West Side Story on Broadway, returning in 1972 as dance coach for the Lincoln Center revival. The subject of two film documentaries, Vélez-Mitchell has addressed the United Nations General Assembly on the plight of her native Vieques, Puerto Rico; won the 2010 Outstanding Woman Award from El Diario newspaper; and received a proclamation from Mayor Blumberg and the City of New York City, declaring it Anita Vélez-Mitchell Day. Her musical drama, Temple of the Souls, premiered in NYC in December 2011.
Newyorican poet Gloria Vando is the author of Shadows and Supposes, winner of the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award (Poetry Society of America) and the Poetry Book Award (Latino Literary Hall of Fame) and Promesas: Geography of the Impossible (winner of the Thorpe Menn Award and a Walt Whitman finalist), both from Arte Público Press. Her poems have appeared in many magazines and anthologies and on the Grammy-nominated Poetry on Record: 98 Poets Read Their Work 1888-2006. She is the recipient of the first KS Arts Commission Poetry Fellowship, River Styx International Poetry Award (Philip Levine, judge), 2009 Poetry Award from El Instituto de Puerto Rico, and others. She is founding publisher/editor of Helicon Nine Editions, the award-winning 35-year-old nonprofit small press, for which she received the Governors Arts Award (KS) and CLMP’s Editor’s Grant. She is also a contributing editor to the North American Review. In 1992 she and her husband, Bill Hickok, founded The Writers Place, a literary center/library/art gallery in Kansas City. They now live in Los Angeles, where they serve on the boards of Beyond Baroque and the Venice Arts Council.
Texas-born Anika Paris is a singer/songwriter and recipient of ASCAP’s Abe Oleman Scholarship (Songwriters Hall of Fame), Nashville’s City Song Festival, and ASCAP’s Pop Plus Award. A published songwriter with Universal Polygram and Warner Chappell, her songs are featured in major motions pictures and on soundtracks. She has released three solo CD’s and is the only female composer for WB Telepictures with songs on such popular shows as Ellen DeGeneres, TMZ, Oprah, American Idol, Sex in the City, and many more. She has taught performance and songwriting at the Musicians Institute in Los Angeles for the past eleven years. She is the author of Making Your Mark in Music: Stage Performance Secrets: Behind the Scenes of Artistic Development (Hal Leonard, 2011). Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines, periodicals, and anthologies, including The Kansas City Star, Spillway, Poetic Voices Without Borders (Gival Press), Soft Blow Poetry, Chance of a Ghost, The Mom Egg (Half Shell Press), and others. She composed the music for Off-Broadway’s The Judas Tree and, with writing partner Dean Landon, for Temple of the Souls, the musical drama written by Vélez-Mitchell.
Woven Voices is 178 pages, $15.95 in trade paper, ISBN 9780979129148 and is available through Baker & Taylor and Amazon.com, as well as through the publisher. Contact Ben Furnish at Scapegoat Press for more information.
Scapegoat Press has won three International Latino Book Awards for its original editions of the Latino Writers Collective anthologies Primera Página: Poetry from the Latino Heartland and Cuentos del Centro: Stories from the Latino Heartland and Francisco Aragón’s poetry collection Glow of Our Sweat.
Scapegoat Press • P.O. Box 410962 • Kansas City, Missouri 64141 www.scapegoat-press / info@scapegoat-press.com / (816) 824-6138
Friday, October 19, 2012, starting at 8:00 Avenue 50 Studio in collaboration with Brooklyn & Boyle proudly present a Poesia Para la Gente poetic intervention Trapos Sucios/Dirty Laundry A poetic purification, erotic & otherwise
Featuring Will Alexander Friday, October 19, 2012, starting at 8:00 At Coin Laundry/Lavanderia Poesia Para la Gente is a poetic program under the Avenue 50 Studio’s monthly La Palabra Poetry. Poesia Para la Gente, brought to you by a grant from The James Irvine Foundation, performs in non-traditional public spaces.
Sunday, September 23, 2012 starting at 2:00 pm
Sunday, August 26, 2012 starting at 2:00 pm
Sunday, August 12, 2012 starting at 2:00 pm
presents THE BLUEBIRD READING hosted by Jessica Ceballos featuring
Avenue 50 Studio
Sunday, July 1, 2012, 2-4 PM
Avenue 50 Studio, Inc. and PEN Center USA present
May 26, 2012 from 5:30 pm-7pm
Join us for our next Poesia Para La Gente poetry event featuring the Taco Shop Poets, brought to you by The James Irvine Foundation
April 15, 2012 starting at 2:00 pm
H.I.P., Hollywood Institute of Poetics presents Paloma Room poets
Hosted By Rolando Ortiz
Featuring: Joan E.Bauer Billy Burgos Jessica Ceballos Cassandra Love Bryan Sanders
at Avenue 50 131 N. Avenue 50 Highland Park
Sunday, April 15 at 2 pm
open reading sign up at 2 pm One 3 minute poem, or 3 minutes of multiple poems
Joan E. Bauer is the author of The Almost Sound of Drowning (Main Street Rag, 2008). She has worked as an English teacher, poetry editor, educational counselor and (volunteer) non-profit fundraiser. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including 5 AM, The New Renaissance, Poet Lore, Quarterly West, and more than a dozen anthologies, among them, Along These RiversPoetry and Photography from Pittsburgh (Quadrant, 2008), Imagine Peace: Come Together (Bottom Dog Press, 2008), Blue Arc West: An Anthology of California Poets (Tebot Bach, 2006), and Only the Sea Keeps: Poetry of theTsunami (Bayeux Arts, 2005) which she co-edited with Judith Robinson and Sankar Roy. In 2007, she won the Earl Birney Poetry Prize from Prism International, and her poetry has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She divides her time between Venice, CA. and Pittsburgh, PA. where she curates the Hemingway Summer Poetry Series with Jimmy Cvetic. For more on her poetry, go to: www.mainstreetrag.com/JBauer.html
Jessica Ceballos has been writing for over 13 years but has begun taking it seriously over the last two. Her work has appeared in Centre Review and you can find her in the upcoming Hinchas de Poesia Issue #6. Her studies have varied from English to Religion to Interior Design, which along with her world traveling, have been the inspiration behind her photography. Though she was born and raised in Los Angeles, you will always find her with a camera searching through its many cracks and hidden layers. Her various works can be found at: http://foundsideoflost.tumblr.com/
Cassandra Love is a 2008 PEN USA Emerging Voices Fellow. Swagger is a Woman is her first book of poetry and is available through Mouthfeel Press. Her poems have been featured in journals and anthologies, some of which include: Forth Magazine, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, and Mezcla. She hosted the radio show “For the Love of Poetry” on BlogTalkRadio and interviewed poetry greats such as Nikki Giovanni, Dorianne Laux, and Kim Addonizio. Cassandra studied literature and played basketball at Yale.With a mother who emigrated to LA from Manila, and a father from North Dakota, Cassandra finds truth in fluidity, ambiguity, and the space between spaces. She lives with her daughter, Lua, and partner, Guilherme, in Los Angeles.
The World Wide Word Radio Network Shows The Moe Green Discussion OnWord The Nebraska Girl Lit Hour The Blood Jet Writing Hour Cerebral Meditation Word Ballast The Reading is Poetry Review Writers' Sanctuary SpokenHeard An Affirmining Flame Translated By http://www.blogtalkradio.com/onword 4039 Marcasel Los Angeles Ca 90039 213 590 6995
"Tell me whom you haunt and I’ll tell you who you are.” André Breton
April 22, 2012 starting at 2:00 pm
March 25, 2012 starting at 2:00 pm
March 11, 2012 starting at 2:00 pm
H.I.P., Hollywood Institute of Poetics presents Paloma Room poets
Hosted By Rolando Ortiz
Featuring:
Jawanza Dumisani Abraham Greatons Jessica Houston Ana Reyes Jeffrey Alan Rochlin
Sunday, March 11 at 2 pm
open reading sign up at 2 pm 2 poems or 5 minutes
Avenue 50 Studio 131 North Avenue 50 Highland Park
Jawanza Dumisani is a PEN Fellow and recipient of a 2005 PEN AWARD. He was selected by Beyond Baroque as an up and coming in the 2003 Los Angeles Poetry Festival. Jawanza is also the recipient of the 2002 The World Stage scholarship to UCLA Extension where he studied with Suzanne Lummis. His first collection Stoetry; a chapbook published on FarStarFire Press, 2003. His first full-length collection will be published on Tsehai Press in Fall 2009. His poems appear in a number of journals in and outside of CA, both print and online. He is the current Director of Literary Programming for The World Stage in Leimert Park Village in Los Angeles.
lord Abraham Greatson (deG.R.E.A.T) is from Galveston, TX and has been writing poetry since 1996. Since his childhood years, instructors have encouraged Abraham to write and pursue it moreso wholeheartedly. He didn't dedicate himself to sharing his poetry, through performance, until 2001 when approached by good friend and mentor, Matthew Stanford. At this point poetry began to take place once a month at the non-profit organization known as St. Vincent's House, in his hometown of Galveston, TX, in which Abraham was co-producer and one of the feature house poets. He is co-founder and co-owner of the Galveston Poetry Group, Apotheosis Epidemic. He thanks the Amighty I AM for his imagination and gift of creativity and is looking forward to be more proactive on the local and National Poetry/ Spoken Word scene.
Jessica Houston. Two lifetimes ago, Jessica was a budding playwright in Toronto. One lifetime ago, she was a musician’s wife and muse making records around the Ontario countryside and Montreal. Then, circumstance dropped in her in Los Angeles with nothin’ but her soul and her skin so she finally started to write poems in May, 2010.
Ana Reyes is a writer living in Los Angeles. Her poetry has appeared in online and print journals like Foliate Oak, Danse Macabre and The San Gabriel Valley Poetry Quarterly and she has been a featured poet at Southern California venues Ave. 50, Stories Bookstore, The Ugly Mug and Beyond Baroque.
Jeffrey Alan Rochlin: recording artist, poet, lyricist, author, spoken word performer Born in Chicago moved to California on my 9lth birthday. Attended Grandview Elementary Graduated from Venice High Majored in speech at Pierce College in Woodland Hills Graduated from the Kiss Broadcasting Workshop 1976 Did late night live dj internship at Kiss Fm Started performing live spoken word with Artist Salon Group around the Valley and La scene in the 90's Director Valley Contemporary Poets for the past 3 years Currently studying poetry in Laurel Ann Bogen's Master Writing class on Thursday evenings. Published and wrote a spoken word music cd 'N'DANGER SPECIES ON THE ROAD TO CAMP FREEDOM Have completed manuscript ELDER ABUSE A DAY IN THE LIFE nonfiction story of my sisters heinous abuse in my mother's last days of living hell Can find me most nights and weekends writing and performing at venues throughout the Los Angeles poetry scene Member ASCAP published on 2 cds UNSUNG on SHATTERED MUSIC AND BETTER DAYS out of New Orleans on ALTERED RECORDS. Worked with Mick Taylor, Patrick Moraz, Brian Auger, Robbie Kreiger, Ray Manzarick in studio and in live shows stage production and live sound around town roadie.
February 26, 2012 starting at 2:00 pm
-M.F.K Fisher, American food writer, 1924, The First Oyster
January 22, 2012 starting at 2:00 pm
Featuring: Luis J. Rodriguez reading from his book: It Calls You Back: An Odyssey through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing
Book Description: Hundreds of thousands of readers came to know Luis J. RodrÍguez through his fearless classic, Always Running, which chronicled his early life as a young Chicano gang member surviving the dangerous streets of East Los Angeles. The long awaited follow-up, It Calls You Back, is the equally harrowing story of RodrÍguez starting over, at age eighteen, after leaving gang life—the only life he really knew.
When his oldest son is sent to prison for attempted murder, RodrÍguez is forced to confront his shortcomings as a father and to acknowledge how and why his own history is repeating itself, right before his eyes. Deeply insightful and beautifully written, It Calls You Back is an odyssey through love, addiction, revolutions, and healing.
We encourage you to buy this book
Cover Image by CiCi Segura
http://www.sergiotroncoso.com
Crossing Borders: Personal Essays by Sergio Troncoso
Crossing Borders: Personal Essays By Sergio Troncoso Arte Público Press Publication Date: September 30, 2011 A thought-provoking collection of essays about transcending cultural borders “On good days I feel I am a bridge. On bad days I just feel alone,” Sergio Troncoso writes in this riveting collection of sixteen personal essays in which he seeks to connect the humanity of his Mexican family to people he meets on the East Coast, including his wife’s Jewish kin. Raised in a home steps from the Mexican border in El Paso, Texas, Troncoso crossed what seemed an even more imposing border when he left home to attend Harvard College. Initially, “outsider status” was thrust upon him; later, he adopted it willingly, writing about the Southwest and Chicanos in an effort to communicate who he was and where he came from to those unfamiliar with his childhood world. He wrote to maintain his ties to his parents and his abuelita, and to fight against the elitism he experienced at an Ivy League school. “I was torn,” he writes, “between the people I loved at home and the ideas I devoured away from home.” Troncoso writes to preserve his connections to the past, but he puts pen to paper just as much for the future. In his three-part essay entitled “Letter to My Young Sons,” he documents the terror of his wife’s breast cancer diagnosis and the ups and downs of her surgery and treatment. Other essays convey the joys and frustrations of fatherhood, his uneasy relationship with his elderly father, and the impact his wife’s Jewish heritage and religion have on his Mexican-American identity. Crossing Borders: Personal Essays reveals a writer, father and husband who has crossed linguistic, cultural and intellectual borders to provoke debate about contemporary Mexican-American identity. Challenging assumptions about literature, the role of writers in America, fatherhood and family, these essays bridge the chasm between the poverty of the border region and the highest echelons of success in America. Troncoso writes with the deepest faith in humanity about sacrifice, commitment and honesty. Book Reviews: “Engrossing and revealing.”---Daniel Olivas for The El Paso Times “Troncoso is an elegant writer whose work will make readers grateful that he writes his life down.”---The Hispanic Reader “These very personal essays cross several borders: cultural, historical, and self-imposed....We owe it to ourselves to read, savor and read them again.”---Manuel Ramos for The El Paso Times “It is these details that fill the simple and accessible prose of these essays with life, demonstrating how from such personal experiences emanate a universal message about what unifies us, despite our many differences.”---Spanish News Agency EFE Advance praise for Crossing Borders: Personal Essays: “Sergio Troncoso takes us on his journey from El Paso to New York, from child to husband, and student to father. He describes the solitary struggle of the writer, and the social and political hurdles overcome. Troncoso understands that in emerging from his chrysalis, he can never go back – nor does he want to. But the lesson is clear: You give something up to gain something else. As they say in the mercado in Chihuahua, 'What will you take for it?' Troncoso paid quite a lot, and it is worth our while to witness this journey from native son to the bloody birth of a public intellectual.”—Kathleen Alcalá, author of The Desert Remembers My Name “Touching and intelligent, this book shows what it’s like growing up an intellectual on the border of the US and Mexico. It’s often painful, often funny, but always precise in expressing how rich and challenging life can be, how sometimes moving away from home can bring you even closer to your family and heritage.”—Daniel Chacón, author of and the shadows took him and Unending Rooms “In this collection of essays Sergio Troncoso takes the reader on an intensely personal look at his musings…the inner workings of his mind as he seeks his truth, his reality through reflection. Sergio draws the reader into his exploration of the meaning of truth through relationships: with his wife and cancer, his sons, his parents, his grandmother, his culture, with his ivy-league colleagues and much more. These unadulterated reflections look at the emotions of fear, anger, disappointment, love and self-realization. His self-questioning commentary and analysis invite the reader into an intense and emotive dialog with her own reality again and again…long past the initial reading. I loved the work.”—Nora Comstock, President and CEO of Las Comadres para Las Americas “Border-crossings is a metaphor for the experience of Hispanic American professionals traversing America’s ‘borders’ on their way to making a better life for self, family and country. Troncoso’s use of short stories as if entries in a personal diary captures important life-impacting times along his journey from barrio through elite higher education to a life as a caring father and husband even while continuing to navigate the nearly always invisible barriers of exclusion. Readers interested in modern day acculturation will want to read and reflect on this rare opportunity to crawl into the mind of a talented Latino author who writes about a common Latino professionals story, and draw from his openness lessons intended to make us all better people.”—Frank Alvarez, President and CEO of the Hispanic Scholarship Fund
Avenue 50 Studio is supported in part by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission; the California Community Foundation; the Department of Cultural Affairs; and The James Irvine Foundation
Avenue 50 Studio, Inc., a 501(c)(3) non-profit art gallery, 131 N. Avenue 50, Highland Park, CA 90042 |
|
was also critically acclaimed and was the recipient of a 2010 International Latino Book Awards. Both novels have been read widely in schools across the country and have been very popular with book clubs. Across a Hundred Mountains and Dancing with Butterflies have been published in Norway, with upcoming publication in South Korea. The Distance Between Us, Grande’s memoir about her childhood in Mexico and her young adulthood in the United States, is scheduled to be published by Atria Books on August 28, 2012. Reyna was a PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellow In 2003.
Felicia Luna Lemus is the author of two novels: Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties and Like Son. 
Lemus's writing has also appeared in anthologies such as Lengua Fresca: Latinos Writing on the Edge and Fifteen Candles: 15 Tales of Taffeta, Hairspray, Drunk Uncles, and other Quinceañera Stories, and in magazines including BOMB and Latina. This coming academic year, Lemus will teach Creative Writing at Pitzer College. She has also taught at Antioch University’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program, The New School, the UCLA Writers’ Program, and as a kindergarten teacher in urban Los Angeles. She has been a featured speaker at Stanford, Yale, Cornell and Harvard, and she has been a Fiction Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. 
In 2007, award-winning Australian journalist and author Stephanie Dale walked across Italy, through the Balkans and into the Middle East with her adult son, Ben. Ben was on a pilgrimage, a 7000 km epic journey from Canterbury to Jerusalem. Stephanie flew to Rome to join him for the middle leg of his journey, with the intention of walking with him to Istanbul. 
My Pilgrim's Heart is the story of that journey. Stephanie Dale has been awarded the Australian Journalist Association Prodi Award for best feature in 1990, the Sir Harry Budd Memorial Award in 1992, and a gold medal IPPY award for Hymn for the Wounded Man for best fiction in 2011. To learn more about Stephanie’s journey, visit: 
Avenue 50 Studio, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) non-profit arts presentation organization grounded in Latin@ Chican@ culture. Avenue 50 Studio is a center for cultural activities with workshops in art, spoken word and other creative forms of expression. 
