Tag: Nonfiction

Literary Fiction Book Launch: Grand Tour by Aatif Rashid

Aatif Rashid debuts his new novel at Village Well.

Join us for the launch of Aatif Rashid’s new novel Grand Tour!

Aatif will conduct a reading and Q&A and discuss the inspiration behind this probing work.

About the author:

Aatif Rashid is the author of the novels Portrait of Sebastian Khan (2019) and Grand Tour (forthcoming 2026). His short stories have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Metaphorosis, Arcturus, Barrelhouse, Triangle House Review, X-R-A-Y, Maudlin House, The Ex-Puritan, Pithead Chapel, and The Adroit Journal, as well as the anthologies New Moons: Contemporary Writing by North American Muslims (2021), Made in L.A. Volume 4 (2022), and Narrating Pakistan: An Anthology of Contemporary Creative Writing (2023). He’s also published nonfiction in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Lit Hub, and Alta and he wrote regularly for The Kenyon Review blog from 2018 to 2021. He teaches creative writing classes through the UCLA Extension Writers program.

About the book:

“In the summer of 2012, when I was twenty-three, I bought the cheapest one-way ticket to continental Europe that I could find.”

From Aatif Rashid, author of Foreword Indies Winner Portrait of Sebastian Khan, comes a new novel about youth set in the now-nostalgic world of European backpacker hostels. Art history student Amir Rahim, unhappy with his life and uncertain about his future, decides to spend two months traveling Europe. What follows is an odyssey of pleasure seeking and self-discovery, with Amir drifting from city to city, staying at youth hostels and cheap hotels, going to museums and cafes, drinking at bars, hooking up with strangers, and meeting others as lost as he is. Ultimately, as he struggles with his own sense of purpose and what he feels is the profound ugliness of the modern world, Amir finds himself asking the age-old burning question: how does one live a meaningful life?

L.A. Book Launch: Wolf Cut by Anna Journey

Featuring Anna Journey, David St. John, and Allison Benis White

Wolf Cut gathers nearly twenty years of work by Anna Journey. From her early work’s baroque lyricism tinged with the southern gothic to her capacious later poems’ signature meditative charisma, Journey reminds us that mystery and imagination are the luminous thresholds through which our reckonings must pass.

Journey will be joined by authors David St. John and Allison Benis White in The Wanda Coleman Theater followed by a book signing and a reception in the Poets’ Garden with tacos and drinks!

Doors Open: 5:30 PM I Readings: 6:00 PM I Reception: 7:30 PM

About the authors

Anna Journey is the author of the poetry collections Wolf Cut: New & Selected Poems, The Judas Ear, The Atheist Wore Goat Silk, and Vulgar Remedies, all from Louisiana State University Press, and If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting, which was selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series and published by the University of Georgia Press. She’s also published the essay collection, An Arrangement of Skin, with Counterpoint Press. Her poems appear in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She’s an associate professor of English at the University of Southern California.

Allison Benis White is the author of five collections of poetry, including A Magnificent Loneliness, winner of the LA Times Book Prize, Please Bury Me in This, winner of the Rilke Prize, and Small Porcelain Head, selected by Claudia Rankine for the Levis Prize, and named a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award and the California Book Award. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Pushcart Prize XLI & XLVII: Best of the Small Presses, and elsewhere. She has received honors and awards from the Poetry Society of America, the San Francisco Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and Poets & Writers magazine. She is a professor in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside.

David St. John is the author of numerous books of poetry, including The Face: A Novella in Verse, Prism, and Study for the World’s Body: New and Selected Poems, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. He is also the co-editor of American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry. He edited The Selected Levis and The Darkening Trapeze: Last Poems by Larry Levis. He teaches at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.

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.

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.

Take Fountain: A Night of Non-Fiction Readings presented by LARB

Join the Los Angeles Review of Books at the historic PRS Library for a night of readings as a part of the YesterdayLA series!

Take Fountain: A Night of Non-Fiction Readings in the PRS Library!

Part of PRS’s YesterdayLA 2026, our monthlong celebration of our beloved city’s rich and diverse past.

LARB presents a night of readings that celebrate the hidden gems and oddities that make L.A. endlessly fascinating. Much like the writing it produces, L.A. is a city unlike any other—its peculiar geography, its infamous highways, the shared and fragmented realities sprawl begets.

Here, throngs of eastbound traffic spill into vast mountainous expanses; going westward, thick smog disappears into misty ocean vapor. This is a city that bears witness to the glamorous and the mundane, and which sits atop a fault line. How strange, how remarkable!

The evening will have readings of non-fiction works from L.A. writers Nikki Darling, Jordan Guevara, Molly Lambert, Tejal Rao, Greg Ruben, and Oliver Wang.

Tickets: $15 (in person only event)

Please email events@prs.org or phone 323-663-2167 with any questions.

A Juneteenth Poetry Reading: Poetry in AfroDiaspora & Chamorrita Song

A Reading celebrating Audrey Shipp’s debut poetry collection and Danielle P. William’s Chamorrita Song

Join us on Juneteenth for a double book launch celebrating Audrey Shipp’s new collection Poetry /Poes´ía/ Poésie in AfroDiaspora and Danielle P. Williams’s Chamorrita Song.

In this stunning collection, writer Audrey Shipp resucitates the poems of her poetic voice, Adriana––a young poet who resists the alienation of her bith city, Los Angeles. Using multilingual diction, from Caló to French and English, for an acercamiento towards an African/Black diaspora she perceived as distant the time, she offers “poetry/poesía/poésie” that “cascades from las caderas / pushing from the thighs / como recién nacido.”

For poet and spoken-word artist Danielle P. Williams, Kantan Chamorrita is more than just the ancient craft of Chamorro folk song. It is also a return and a homecoming. This impromptu style of communal call-and response performance art forms the spokes for Williams’s debut collection. Rooted in oral tradition, Chamorrita Song pays homage to Black and Chamorro cultures, honoring the artistic expressions that these communities have created to reconcile lifetimes of imposed trauma. Williams intertwines spoken word poetry and gospel music with Chamorro storytelling, weaving together the nuanced histories of queer, Black, and Indigenous existence and literature.

The poets will be joined in The Wanda Coleman Theater by guest co-features Maestro Gamin, Nicole J. Evans, and Naomi Nightingale.

Reception and book signings to follow in the Scott Wannberg Bookstore & Lounge.

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

Audrey Shipp is an AWP Writer to Writer mentee and a PEN America Emerging Voices Workshop LA honoree whose hybrid memoir When I Was a Bilingual Writer Birthed by Black L.A. will be published by Unsolicited Press in 2027. Her writing has been published in various literary journals including Good River Review, Panorama Magazine, Isele Magazine, A Long House, Another Chicago Magazine, Litro, and A Gathering Together. Her bilingual and trilingual poetry appeared in Americas Review (Arte-Público Press) which was formerly published by the University of Houston. She holds English degrees from both UCLA and Cal State L.A. and a Certificate in Creative Writing from UCLA Extension. Her professional life has been dedicated to teaching English and ESL in public high schools in Los Angeles. Founder and Editor at Decolonial Passage Literary Magazine, you can find her at

Nicole J. Evans (she/her) is a Black woman, born and reared in Los Angeles who writes poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. 2024 James Kirkwood Prize nominee, with poetry being published in an upcoming FlowerSong Press anthology and a Blacklandia/Inlandia Books anthology. Pre-Matriarch, future Ancestor, Black sheep, vision alchemist, generational curse breaker, generational blessing manifestor, dream catcher, tale weaver, aspiring griot, empath, latent gardener, inherent inherited beautician, poet by heart, writer by revelation, and singer of her own songs. IG @itsnicolejeanine.

Naomi Nightingale has been writing poetry since the age of seven. Until 2023, her poems, stories, reflections, and Spirit Talks remained in notebooks, journals, and informal pages rather than in a published collection. In 2024, she published It Is I Emerging: Poetry, Prose & Short Stories, a collection reflecting on living, learning, and becoming. She is currently working on a second book of poetry and short stories. Dr. Nightingale grew up in and resides in Venice, California. She is President and Founder of Oakwood Preservation Coalition, Inc., a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the Black history and culture of Oakwood-Venice.

Danielle P. Williams is a Black and Chamorro poet, essayist, translator, and spoken-word artist from Columbia, South Carolina whose work traces identity, heritage, and belonging across cultures and generations. She holds an MFA from George Mason University and fellowships from Open Mouth Poetry Retreat, Palm Beach Poetry Festival, The Watering Hole, and The Alan Cheuse Center for International Writers. Her chapbook Who All Gon’ Be There? was a finalist for the Button Poetry Chapbook Competition and was published by Backbone Press in 2021, and her debut collection Chamorrita Song was published by University of Arizona Press in January 2026.

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.

Refugee Crisis Book Talk: A Greek Tragedy by Jeanne Carstensen

Jeanne Carstensen and Michael Scott Moore discuss Europe’s ongoing refugee crisis and their work as investigative journalists.

Join award-winning journalist Jeanne Carstensen for a conversation with journalist and author Michael Scott Moore to celebrate the paperback release of A Greek Tragedy.

The book reconstructs a single, devastating day during the 2015 refugee crisis, when an overcrowded boat capsized off the coast of the Greek island of Lesvos, claiming hundreds of lives. Drawing on nearly a decade of reporting, Carstensen brings together the voices of survivors, rescuers, and witnesses to illuminate both the human cost of forced migration and the extraordinary acts of courage that followed.

In conversation with Moore—author of The Desert and the Sea, a memoir of his own harrowing experience of captivity by pirates and survival at sea—the two writers will explore what it means to document trauma at sea, the ethics of bearing witness, and how storytelling shapes our understanding of crisis.

Timely and deeply moving, this event offers a powerful look at survival, responsibility, and our shared humanity in an era of global displacement.

Tickets are available for $10 or with the purchase of A Greek Tragedy, now out in paperback. Purchase tickets on Eventbrite or on the Village Well website.

About the participants:

Jeanne Carstensen is an award-winning journalist and author of A Greek Tragedy (Simon & Schuster), a finalist for the 2026 PEN/Galbraith Award, the LA Times Book Prize, and the California Book Award. Her work appears in The New York Times, Foreign Policy, and The Nation, among others. She has received support from the Pulitzer Center and fellowships from Columbia University’s National Arts Journalism Program and Mesa Refuge. She lives in San Francisco.

Michael Scott Moore is a journalist and novelist, author of the comic novel Too Much of Nothing and the nonfiction book Sweetness and Blood, named one of The Economist’s best books of 2010. He writes about immigration for Bloomberg Businessweek and previously worked as an editor at Spiegel Online. Kidnapped by Somali pirates in 2012 and held for 32 months, he later recounted the experience in his international bestselling memoir The Desert and the Sea.

About the book:

The gripping true story of a devastating shipwreck during the biggest refugee crisis since World War II.

On October 28, 2015, a boat meant for only a few dozen passengers, capsized off the coast of the Greek island of Lesvos. Hundreds of refugees, forced in desperation onto the overloaded boat manned by armed smugglers, were tossed into a roiling sea. The resulting loss of life, the largest in a single day during the crisis in the Aegean, shocked the world.

Now, after nearly a decade of research, interviews, and investigation, reporter Jeanne Carstensen has captured the dramatic twenty-four hours—including details of the refugees’ lives before they left their homes to the courageous rescue efforts of the Greek islanders and volunteers rushing to help, even as their government and the EU failed to act. Carstensen brilliantly showcases the extraordinary heroism of ordinary people in extreme circumstances.

In a world where forced migration is on the rise, A Greek Tragedy challenges us to confront our collective humanity. It’s an unforgettable testament of our times and a compassionate depiction of the lengths to which a person will go to save another human being.