Readings & Conversation
Join us for another lovely afternoon of poetry from a slate of poets that includes current Los Angles Poet Laureate Lynne Thompson on Saturday, June 19, at 3:00 p.m. via Zoom.
[About the Poets]
Neil Aitken, writer, editor, and translator, is the author of Babbage’s Dream and The Lost Country of Sight, winner of the 2007 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. His work has appeared in Adroit Journal, Crab Orchard Review, Ninth Letter, Southern Poetry Review, Thrush, and elsewhere. The founding editor of Boxcar Poetry Review and a former computer games programmer, he holds both an MFA from UC Riverside and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing & Literature from USC. He now lives in Canada and works as a creative writing coach and manuscript consultant.
Neil Aitken, writer, editor, and translator, is the author of Babbage’s Dream and The Lost Country of Sight, winner of the 2007 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. His work has appeared in Adroit Journal, Crab Orchard Review, Ninth Letter, Southern Poetry Review, Thrush, and elsewhere. The founding editor of Boxcar Poetry Review and a former computer games programmer, he holds both an MFA from UC Riverside and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing & Literature from USC. He now lives in Canada and works as a creative writing coach and manuscript consultant.
Lois P. Jones, who for many years has hosted Poets' Cafe for KPFK FM Radio, was the shortlist prize winner in the Terraine Poetry Contest judged by Jane Hirshfield (2018). Her first collection, Night Ladder, was listed for the Julie Suk Award and shortlisted for the Lascaux Poetry Book Award. She's been anthologized in New Voices: Contemporary Writers Confronting the Holocaust, The Poet's Quest for God, and Wide Awake Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond. Lois is also Poetry Editor of Kyoto Journal and co-hosts the long-running Moonday Poetry Series at Flintridge Bookstore.
Eric Morago received his MFA from CSU Long Beach and now serves as editor of Moon Tide Press. His poetry appears in Multiverse: Anthology of Superhero Poetry and Beside the City of Angeles: an Anthology of Long Beach Poetry, as well as other anthologies. He's published the collections What We Ache For: Poems and Prose and Here for the Fiction, and the chapbooks First Kill and Secret Origin. Charles Harper Webb has described him this way: "Eric Morago's poetry brews the energy of performance art with the craft of mainstream poetry into a blend, which is his alone."
Lynne Thompson. This year, Lynne Thompson was appointed Poet Laureate of Los Angeles. Her book, Beg No Pardon won the Perugia Press Prize in 2007 and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award in 2008. She followed with the collections Start with a Small Guitar and Fretwork, winner of the Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize. Individual poems appear in Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond, The Coiled Serpent, and Best American Poetry 2020. Thompson serves on the boards of Cave Canem and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and is Chair of the Board of Trustees, Scripps College.
