Tag: Nonfiction

How To Exi(s)t: Truong Tran & Mimi Tempestt at Beyond Baroque

A neurodivergent gay war refugee navigates academia, racism, and indeed life itself as a poet, artist, and teacher

How to Exi(s)t: A Poet’s Memoir is an experiment in nonlinear autobiography by the author of the American Book Award-winning Book of the Other, Truong Tran. Poet and scholar Mimi Tempestt will join the author for a reading & conversation in The Wanda Coleman Theater.

Beginning in the present–at a writing residency in the aftermath of this success–How to Exi(s)t moves back and forth in time, in bursts of brief poetic essays grouped by theme. The duality of the title thematizes a dilemma at the heart of the book: how does a poet separate himself from the academic career to which he’s devoted his professional life and what does being a teacher mean outside of it?

Unpeeling the layers between present and past, Tran proceeds in reverse as he explores crucial events and figures in his life, including the reaction to the publication of Book of the Other, the dynamics of whiteness and power framing his repeated rejection for a tenure track position, the profound effect of his dyslexia on his evolution as a writer and artist, the repercussions of being outed by a newspaper after winning an undergrad poetry prize, traumatic episodes growing up in the Vietnamese diaspora in San Jose, and complicated relationships with both his family and his chosen family. Attempting to fathom these experiences and connect them to his present self, Tran examines and reexamines key details rather than dispensing with them in neat anecdotes, reflecting the volatile process of imagination and memory.

Unsparing, even caustic in its instance on racism as a dominant note of American life, but marked by surprising tenderness and humor, How to Exi(s)t is a compelling portrayal of Tran’s pedagogical philosophy as well as an interrogation of a poetic language that conceals as much as it reveals.

About the authors

Truong Tran is a poet, visual artist, and teacher born in Saigon, Vietnam. His book-length poetry project Book of the Other: Small in Comparison (2021) received an American Book Award in 2022. He is the author of seven other collections, The Book of Perceptions, Placing the Accents, Dust and Conscience, Within the Margins, Four Letter Words, 100 words (with Damon Potter), and Looking and Seeing/Seeing and Looking (with Damon Potter). He has also written the children’s book Going Home Coming Home and an artist monograph, I Meant To Say Please Past the Sugar. His poems and books have been translated into Spanish, French, and Dutch. He is the recipient of the Poetry Center Prize, the Fund for Poetry Grant, the California Arts Council Grant, and numerous San Francisco Arts Commission Grants. Truong is also a visual artist who believes that art, be it poetry, cooking, sculpting, and even gardening, are his ways of thinking through the conscious of the times we live in. Truong lives in San Francisco and currently teaches at Northeastern University, Oakland.

Mimi Tempestt (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and daughter of California. She has a M.A. in Literature from Mills College, and a Ph.D in Literature & Creative/Critical Writing from UC Santa Cruz. Her first book, the monumental misrememberings, is published with Co-Conspirator Press (2020). Her second book, The Delicacy of Embracing Spirals, is published with City Lights (2023). She is currently finishing an essay collection, Wanda, Why Aren’ t You Dead?, on the Los Angeles literary icon Wanda Coleman. Her works can be found in Foglifter, The Brooklyn Rail, and at The Studio Museum in Harlem.

About Beyond Baroque

Beyond Baroque is one of the United States’ leading independent Literary | Arts Centers and public spaces dedicated to expanding the public’s knowledge of poetry, literature and art through cultural events and community interaction. Founded in 1968 as an experimental literary magazine, Beyond Baroque is based out of the original City Hall building in Venice, California. The Center offers a diverse variety of literary and arts programming including readings and workshops. The building also houses a bookstore with a large collection of new poetry books for sale.

Livestream: If you can’t join us in person the event will be livestreamed on Beyond Baroque’s YouTube channel at the scheduled time of the event. If you are tuning in this way, no ticket purchase is necessary.

If you are attending in person, ticket purchase is required. Tickets will be available at the Beyond Baroque bookstore on the day of the event, but we recommend registering in advance through Eventbrite. Masks are encouraged while inside our center. Please arrive early.

Event attendees are expected to behave in a respectful and considerate manner while in our space. Beyond Baroque reserves the right to remove individuals from our events, virtual or otherwise, if they are not respecting the space, staff, fellow attendees, or performers.

Book Soup Presents: Susan Orlean discusses & signs Joyride: A Memoir

Join Susan Orlean and Patton Oswalt at the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles for a discussion and signing of her novel Joyride!

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR, TIME, OPRAH DAILY, GOODREADS, AND MORE

“Brilliant…A high-spirited, exhilarating memoir.” –The Wall Street Journal – “In Joyride, the takeaway often has as much to do with the art of living as the art of writing.” –Elle – “Wise and exuberant… It’s funny, as well. Just masterful.” –David Sedaris – “Superbly good…Ebullient, frank, moving, and inspiring.” — Booklist (starred review)

From Susan Orlean, the beloved New Yorker writer and bestselling author of The Orchid Thief and The Library Book who has been hailed as “a national treasure” by The Washington Post, comes a masterful memoir of finding her creative calling and purpose that invites us to approach life with wonder, curiosity, and an irrepressible sense of delight.

“The story of my life is the story of my stories,” writes Susan Orlean in this extraordinary, era-defining memoir from one of the greatest practitioners of narrative nonfiction of our time. Joyride is a magic carpet ride through Orlean’s life and career, where every day is an opportunity for discovery and every moment holds the potential for wonder. Throughout her storied career, her curiosity has drawn her to explore the most ordinary and extraordinary of places, from going deep inside the head of a regular ten-year-old boy for a legendary profile (“The American Man Age Ten”) to reporting on a woman who owns twenty-seven tigers, from capturing the routine magic of Saturday night to climbing Mt. Fuji.

Not only does Orlean’s account of a writing life offer a trove of indispensable gleanings for writers, it’s also an essential and practical “master class” ( The New York Times) to embracing any creative path. She takes us through her process of dreaming up ideas, managing deadlines, connecting with sources, chasing every possible lead, confronting writer’s block and self-doubt, and crafting the perfect lede–a Susan specialty.

While Orlean has always written her way into other people’s lives in order to understand the human experience, Joyride is her most personal book ever–a searching journey through finding her feet as a journalist, recovering from the excruciating collapse of her first marriage, falling head-over-heels in love again, becoming a mother while mourning the decline of her own mother, sojourning to Hollywood for films based on her work including Adaptation and Blue Crush, and confronting mortality. Joyride is also a time machine to a bygone era of journalism, from Orlean’s bright start in the golden age of alt-weeklies to her career-making days working alongside icons such as Robert Gottlieb, Tina Brown, David Remnick, Anna Wintour, Sonny Mehta, and Jonathan Karp–forces who shaped the media industry as we know it today.

Infused with Orlean’s signature warmth and wit, Joyride is a must-read for anyone who hungers to start, build, and sustain a creative life. Orlean inspires us to seek out daily inspiration and rediscover the marvels that surround us.

Climate Fiction Book Talk: Open the Floodgates by Nina Schuyler

Nina Schuyler discusses her new novel Open the Floodgates in conversation with the LA Times’ Rosanna Xia.

Join us for a conversation with Nina Schuyler in celebration of her new novel Open the Floodgates!

Nina will be joined by Rosanna Xia (California Against the Sea) to discuss how stories about the changing climate can help shape the stakes, generate empathy, and open a space for action. Rosanna’s research is heavily grounded in specific examples of communities addressing rising sea levels. Nina will talk about the need for new voices, new ways to see the world, which led to her anthropomorphizing the River.

About the participants:

NIna Schuyler’s collection, In This Ravishing World, won the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, the W.S. Porter Prize, the Prism Prize for Climate Literature, and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. Her novel, Afterword, was selected as one of San Francisco’s One City One Book Program. She lives in Northern California.

Rosanna Xia’s nonfiction book, California Against the Sea, won the PEN/E.O. Award for Literary Science Writing, the California Book Award, Golden Poppy Award Winner for Nonfiction, and was selected as a 2024 Great Read from Great Places by the Library of Congress. Xia is an environmental reporter for the Los Angeles Times and a documentary filmmaker of Out of Plain Sight. She lives in Los Angeles.

About the book:

We are in the midst of a profound legal shift: from New Zealand to India to Ecuador, real-world laws have granted personhood to rivers. With a mix of magic and pathos, Open the Floodgates imagines this new reality with a new configuration of the human and other-than-human relationship.

In an unnamed California town, the River is granted personhood and has the right–-and urgent need–-to argue in court for its existence. But powerful, well-funded enemies are determined to keep the River exactly as it is: gunk-filled, toxic, a convenient dumping ground for waste. The story moves like water, entering the minds of the town’s people, pigeons, deer, dogs, cats, the trees, the River’s home, and the River itself. When the River moves, the text winds its way along the page, mimicking water. When the River is ultimately jailed, the town faces a reckoning: what do we owe the River? And the River must answer in turn: what, if anything, does it owe humans?

Double Book Launch: Robert Hass & Brenda Hillman

An evening of poetry and non-fiction at Beyond Baroque

Join us for an evening celebrating new books by Robert Hass and Brenda Hillman in The Wanda Coleman Theater at Beyond Baroque.

Robert Hass’s A Third Commonness: Essays on Poetry, Poetics, and the Natural World, published by Copper Canyon Press, traces a literary and ecological lineage through poets, writers, landscapes, and traditions. In A Third Commonness, U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass follows a literary river through time and topography—from Zen Buddhism to California ecopoetics, from Barry Lopez to Walt Whitman, and even through an unlikely fellowship between Kentucky poet-priests. Told through essays and lectures, A Third Commonness is as much a love letter to landscape as it is a sprawling exploration of poetic heritage.

Brenda Hillman’s Still House in the Desert: An Eco-Contemplation, published in the Wesleyan Poetry Series, brings together meditations on time, domestic spaces, childhood, family, and non-human life. Each of Brenda Hillman’s books has been transformative for her readers, and her twelfth collection is no exception. Building on previous volumes about seasons, days and minutes, Hillman concludes her masterful quartet about time with an ecological journey into a family home of the mid-twentieth century.

Doors Open: 7:00 PM I Readings: 7:30 PM

About the authors

Robert Hass—poet, critic, and teacher—is one of the most renowned figures of modern American literature, serving as the poet laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. In 2007, he was awarded the National Book Award and shared the Pulitzer Prize for his poetry collection Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005. Hass is also the author of Field Guide (1972), Praise (1979), Twentieth Century Pleasures (1984), and A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry (2018), among other works. He has taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Saint Mary’s College of California, and the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a distinguished professor in poetry and poetics until his retirement in 2019.

Brenda Hillman was born in Tucson, Arizona, and has been an active part of the Bay Area literary community since 1975. She has published chapbooks with Penumbra Press, a+bend press, EmPress, A Minus Press, and Albion Books and is the author of twelve full-length collections from Wesleyan University Press, the most recent of which are In a Few Minutes Before Later (2022), Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (2013), which received the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and Extra Hidden Life, among the Days (2018), winner of the Northern California Book Award.

About Beyond Baroque

Beyond Baroque is one of the United States’ leading independent Literary | Arts Centers and public spaces dedicated to expanding the public’s knowledge of poetry, literature and art through cultural events and community interaction. Founded in 1968 as an experimental literary magazine, Beyond Baroque is based out of the original City Hall building in Venice, California. The Center offers a diverse variety of literary and arts programming including readings and workshops. The building also houses a bookstore with a large collection of new poetry books for sale.

Livestream: If you can’t join us in person the event will be livestreamed on Beyond Baroque’s YouTube channel at the scheduled time of the event. If you are tuning in this way, no ticket purchase is necessary.

If you are attending in person, ticket purchase is required. Tickets will be available at the Beyond Baroque bookstore on the day of the event, but we recommend registering in advance through Eventbrite. Masks are encouraged while inside our center. Please arrive early.

Event attendees are expected to behave in a respectful and considerate manner while in our space. Beyond Baroque reserves the right to remove individuals from our events, virtual or otherwise, if they are not respecting the space, staff, fellow attendees, or performers.

L.A. Book Launch: 88 Unashamed Black Mental Health Stories

Join us for an evening with contributors of this newly anthology published by Inlandia Institute’s Blacklandia

Beyond Baroque presents a poetry night highlighting resilience and mental health journeys within the Black community with contributors of 88 Unashamed Black Mental Health Stories. Published by Inlandia Institute’s Blacklandia, the evening features readings by anthology editor, Romaine Washington, and contributors: Brandon Allen, Akilah Brown, James Coats, Nicole J. Evans, and Justin C. Key.

Doors Open: 1:30 PM I Readings: 2:00 PM

About the authors

Brandon Allen is founder and CEO of Youth Writer’s Camp, Inc., a San Bernardino nonprofit using creative expression to build emotional resilience in young people. A poet, 3x TEDx speaker, and published author of This Little Boy, he also serves as a campus pastor and founder of Poetically Adorned Apparel.

Akilah Brown is an award-winning professor, blogger, and multi-genre storyteller who was a 2023 writing fellow for the Joshua Tree Highlands Artist Residency and a past scholarship recipient for the Rocaberti Writers’ Retreat. Originally from Bladensburg, MD, she now lives and writes in Los Angeles, CA.

James Coats is an award-winning author, poet, and educator from Southern California. As a creative change agent, he believes the arts can inspire positive change in the world. You can find him attending poetry readings throughout California.His newest poetry collection is Midnight & Mad Dreams. He is a 2023 Poetry Pushcart Prize nominee.

Nicole J. Evans (she/her) a Black woman from Los Angeles. She writes poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. Eldest daughter, Black sheep, vision alchemist, generational curse breaker, dream catcher, tale weaver, aspiring griot, latent gardener, inherent inherited beautician, poet by heart, writer by revelation, and singer of her own songs.

Justin C. Key is a practicing psychiatrist and a speculative fiction writer. He is the author of the short story collection The World Wasn’t Ready for You, and his stories have appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, Lightspeed, and on Tor.com. His debut sci-fi novel, The Hospital at the End of the World, is out now from HarperCollins.

Romaine Washington is the editor of 88 Unashamed Black Mental Health Stories and These Black Bodies Are… She has two published poetry books, is a twice Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, and has presented her work on NPR and CBS. Visit her at romainewashington.com.

About Beyond Baroque

Beyond Baroque is one of the United States’ leading independent Literary | Arts Centers and public spaces dedicated to expanding the public’s knowledge of poetry, literature and art through cultural events and community interaction. Founded in 1968 as an experimental literary magazine, Beyond Baroque is based out of the original City Hall building in Venice, California. The Center offers a diverse variety of literary and arts programming including readings and workshops. The building also houses a bookstore with a large collection of new poetry books for sale.

Livestream: If you can’t join us in person the event will be livestreamed on Beyond Baroque’s YouTube channel at the scheduled time of the event. If you are tuning in this way, no ticket purchase is necessary.

If you are attending in person, ticket purchase is required. Tickets will be available at the Beyond Baroque bookstore on the day of the event, but we recommend registering in advance through Eventbrite. Masks are encouraged while inside our center. Please arrive early.

Event attendees are expected to behave in a respectful and considerate manner while in our space. Beyond Baroque reserves the right to remove individuals from our events, virtual or otherwise, if they are not respecting the space, staff, fellow attendees, or performers.