Los Angeles Independent Publishing

Beach=Culture: Poetry by the Sea

Description:

Join Red Hen Press in celebrating poetry and culture at the historic Annenberg Beach House, a gold coast gem that overlooks the ocean and once housed the stars of the golden era of Hollywood. Readers for the evening will be celebrated Red Hen authors Brendan Constantine, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, Lynnell Edwards, and Nicelle Davis, with moderator Eric Morago. For more information, please email publicity@redhen.org. To reserve a seat for this event, visit www.annenbergbeachhouse.com/cultural-programs.

Featured readers:

Brendan Constantine was born in 1967, the second child of two working actors. He is an ardent supporter of Southern California’s poetry communities and one of its most recognized poets. His work has appeared in numerous journals, most notably Ploughshares, The Cortland Review, RUNES, and The Underground Guide to Los Angeles. He released his first collection, Letters to Guns, in 2009 (Red Hen Press). He is currently poet-in-residence at the Windward School in West Los Angeles and Loyola Marymount University Extension. He is also currently working with The Alzheimer’s Poetry Project, bringing poetry workshops to Alzheimer’s patients. He holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and lives in Hollywood at Bela Lugosi’s last address. Red Hen Press released his third collection, Calamity Joe, in March 2012.

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram has been a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference work-study scholar, a writer-in-residence at the Montana Artists Refuge, and is a Cave Canem alumna. Her poetry has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Harvard Review, Subtropics, and other journals. She won the 2011 Summer Literary Seminars poetry contest and the Gulf Coast Magazine Donald Barthelme Prize for Short Prose, and received second place in Narrative Magazine’s poetry contest. She is a graduate of the writing programs at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She was a Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow at Williams College, where she taught creative writing and literature. Her first book, But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise (Red Hen Press, 2012), won the 2010 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award, judged by Claudia Rankine.

Lynnell Edwards is the author of three collections of poetry, Covet (2011), The Highwayman’s Wife (2007), and The Farmer’s Daughter (2003), all from Red Hen Press. Her book reviews and short fiction have been published nationally in such journals as Pleiades, The Hollins Critic, Connecticut Review, American Book Review, and New Madrid. She is Associate Professor of English at Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky. She also writes a books column for Louisville Magazine and is a Board member of InKY, inc., sponsor of the monthly literary reading series InKY, which she co-produces.

Originally from Utah, Nicelle Davis now resides in Lancaster, California, with her son J.J. She has taught poetry at Youth for Positive Change, an organization that promotes success for youth in secondary schools, and with Volunteers of America in their Homeless Youth Center. Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from The Beloit Poetry Journal, The New York Quarterly, SLAB Magazine, and others. Her first collection of poems, Circe, was released by Lowbrow Press in 2011. She has two forthcoming collections of poetry, In the Circus of You (Rose Metal Press, 2014) and Becoming Judas (Red Hen Press, 2013). You can read her e-chapbooks at Gold Wake Press and Whale Sound. She is an assistant poetry editor for Connotation Press and runs a free online poetry workshop at The Bees’ Knees Blog.

Moderator:

Eric Morago is a Pushcart Prize nominated poet who holds an MFA from California State University, Long Beach. He is an associate reviewer for Poetix.net, poet-in-residence with California Workforce Association, and teaches workshops for Red Hen’s Writing in the Schools program. In addition to releasing his first full-length collection, What We Ache For (Moon Tide Press, 2010), he has also teamed with Melody Maker Productions to release I Don’t Like Straws, a spoken word album with music by David Gielan. He is the poetry curator for Half Off Books in Whittier, CA, and runs a quarterly reading series at Vinatero Wine Shop.

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