Join us Saturday, June 21 at 11 AM for Poetry and Memory: a generative poetry workshop with Kim Dower (@kimdowerpoetry) ! “This workshop provides an opportunity to mine our memories to awaken new, startling poems. We will explore the rich territory of ideas, people, places, and emotions from our past, and examine how memory can inform and affect our writing. Students will learn how to dig into memories from the span of their lives and will see how uncovering one memory often leads to another and another, creating fresh, imaginative work that surprises both the writer and reader. The 3-hour workshop will be a mixture of lecture, reading contemporary poetry based on poets’ memories, and practicing “fever writing” or “automatic writing,” tapping into our memories and the subconscious and reading aloud to the class. Although geared for poets and writers, this workshop will also be of value to non-writers, particularly those interested in psychology, by showing how we can capture and utilize details from our memories to use as inspiration no matter what our discipline. Participants will leave with a wealth of ideas for poems and stories and will feel energized by the notion that memory matters!” - Kim Dower RSVP at the link in bio! (fb)

We’ve had a busy spring so we thought we’d give you all a recap! Last weekend we hosted a night of poetry in Spanish with long-time Beyond Baroque friend Vigo Mortensen, who read alongside Margarita Pintado Burgos and Omar Pimienta. We hosted a community reading with Writers Against The War on Gaza and the weekend prior we had an amazing booth at the LA Times Festival of Books, complete with author signings from Gail Wronsky and Gronk, Lory Bedikian, Cindy Juyoung Ok, and other beloved poets! We traveled to Avenue 50’s new location in Highland Park to host a reading with Salvadoran authors William Archila Janel Pineda, and Cynthia Guardado! For the fourth year in a row, the International Poetry Film Festival took place at our space in Venice! Check out the photos from some of our other events too, including Somos Xicanas, the celebration of Nikki Ochoa as the new Linda J Albertano fellow, Poet Film Stage, Angel City Review’s Ten Years in LA Anthology launch, a conversation with artist Ansel Krut, and so much more! Thank you all for a great spring as we continue our mission to support artists and writers of Los Angeles and beyond! We invite you to visit our website for upcoming events, become a member, sign up to our workshops, and get involved! (fb)