Read Local SoCal đź“šđź“š April 2025 National Poetry Month

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Join us in reading local in April! For National Poetry Month, we selected fiction and poetry to awaken the soul. Our picks appear below. 

You can meet the poets on April 16 during the WeHo Reads: Richard Blanco and Kim Dower in Conversation During National Poetry Month event.

We’re also running a book giveaway! Attendees on April 16 will be chosen at random to receive a free book from one of the participating authors. We’re giving away one copy of each of the books marked with the book icon đź“– below to give away.  See official sweepstakes rules for more information. 

Richard Blanco

Kim Dower

  • đź“– Obsessive love has never been so much fun! What She Wants: Poems on Obsession, Desire, Despair, Euphoria is a powerful tribute to the intensity of obsessive love, told through the trademark humor and heartbreak of bestselling poet Kim Dower. | Available from Bookshop.org and Amazon.
  • đź“– I Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom: A rich, complex, heartbreaking, and funny anthology of poems on motherhood—being one and having one. | Available from Bookshop.org, Amazon, and the Los Angeles Public Library.

21 Lynne Thompson interview

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Lynne Thompson, Fourth Poet Laureate of Los Angeles, joins host Cody Sisco in conversation about her most recent collection of poetry, Blue on a Blue Palette. They discuss taking inspiration from the world, how women are both elevated and denigrated, palm trees, Black lives, poetic forms, and being a good poetry citizen. And Lynne reads three of her poems for us.

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Lynne Thompson was the 4th Poet Laureate for the City of Los Angeles. The daughter of Caribbean immigrants, her poetry collections include Beg No Pardon (2007), winner of the Perugia Press Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award; Start With A Small Guitar (2013), from What Books Press; and Fretwork (2019), winner of the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize. Thompson’s honors include the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award (poetry) and the Stephen Dunn Prize for Poetry as well as fellowships from the City of Los Angeles, Vermont Studio Center, and the Summer Literary Series in Kenya. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry, Poem-A-Day (Academy of American Poets), New England Review, Colorado Review, Pleiades, Ecotone, and Best American Poetry, to name a few.

A lawyer by training, Thompson sits on the boards of the Los Angeles Review of Books and Cave Canem and is the Chair of the Board of Trustees at Scripps College, her alma mater. She facilitates private workshops, most recently for Beyond Baroque, Poetry By the Sea Conference, Moorpark College Writers Festival, and Central Coast Writers’ Conference. Thompson is a native of Los Angeles, California, where she resides.

Find out more: https://www.lynnethompson.us/

Olga García Echeverría’s Falling Angels and Dead Cockroaches: a BookSwell Read Local Preview from Lisbeth Coiman 

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With Falling Angels, Olga GarcĂ­a EcheverrĂ­a delights us with urban tales and poems of characters who sound like real people on a street in Whittier, CA. This brief collection honors the linguistic heritage of East LA, where bilingualism means not only navigating between two languages but also refers to the capacity to code-switch and coexist between two cultures that are not always in sync.

Olga GarcĂ­a EcheverrĂ­a (OGE), East LA Chicanx writer and professor, digs into the city’s consciousness to create stories and poems that are as colorful as they are political. Like a wordsmith, a food truck vendor entertains his clients by spinning the sweet word “donut” with dexterity into jokes and metaphors, while the author makes a profound political statement on police brutality. A conversation between two dead cockroaches—with all the difficult visual images that go into this amusing chat—reveals a profound knowledge of bilingualism in our urban culture. A beautiful coming-of-age story, speaks loudly of identity while the reader smiles at the innocence of two girls going through puberty. A prayer in the mouth of a 17-year-old girl reflecting on her living conditions creates the imagery of slum housing, where numbers and flying cockroach wings scurry between verses.

García Echeverría’s urban characters and setting are centered in hyperreality where politics of class, race, and immigration intersect. They hit the reader with humor and witty wisdom to leave us speechless at the truths revealed.

The brief and impactful stories will linger for a while, calling on the reader to continue exploring OGE’s fabulous website with curiosity. Those who do will discover an online jewel where academic research, curiosity, and creativity explode in color to gift us a glossary of idiomatic expressions in Spanish, an article on the use of cardboard, a reflection on adjunct teaching, and a homage to public libraries, plus literary resources for Latinx writers and readers. In all her writing, OGE’s writing drips with humor and sharp wit, both in Spanish and English.

Falling Angels is a true joy to read. I invite all of you to read this collection. Flip the with the right arrow, or move between stories by scrolling up and down, even if you have to move quickly through the images to avoid the cockroach like I did. 

You’ll laugh.

About the Contributor

Lisbeth Coiman is a bilingual author and an avid reader. Her debut book, I Asked the Blue Heron: A Memoir (2017), explores the intersection between immigration and mental health. Her poetry collection, Uprising / Alzamiento (Finishing Line Press, 2021), raises awareness of the humanitarian crisis in her homeland. Her book reviews have been published in the New York Journal of Books, Citron Review, The Compulsive Reader, LibroMobile, and Cultural Daily, to name a few. She lives in Los Angeles, where she works and hikes.

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