Tag: Poetry

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.

What Books Press Poetry Launch

Poets published by What Books Press present their new work.

Join us to celebrate this year’s fiction slate from What Books Press!

On October 25th, Amy Elisabeth Davis, James Cushing, Celeste Boyer, and Bill Mohr will read from and discuss their new work.

About the participants:

Amy Elisabeth Davis, a historian and poet who studied at Cornell and Columbia and grew up between Van Cortlandt Park’s forested land and the Hudson River in New York City. A longtime resident of Southern California, her poems have appeared in Tar River Poetry, December, The Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. She co-edited Written Here: The Community of Writers Poetry Review 2016 and was the recipient of a writing residency at Yefe Nof in autumn 2018.

James Cushing holds a doctorate in English from UC Irvine. From 1989 through 2020, when he retired, he taught literature and creative writing at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, and served as the community’s Poet Laureate 2008 – 2010. Cushing’s poems have appeared in many journals, and 35-year association with Cahuenga Press has resulted in seven full-length collections of poetry.

Celeste Goyer is a poet and artist living in Los Angeles. Her New England childhood in Northampton, Massachusetts informs her work, as do the many years she spent in remote California desert and mountain towns. She edited a literary quarterly for 14 years and her work has appeared in numerous journals as well as anthologies, including Poetry Goes to the Movies from Beyond Baroque Books and Women in a Golden State, from Gunpowder Press.

Bill Mohr has worked as an editor, publisher, literary historian, and poet since the early 1970s. His books include Holdouts: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance 1948-1992 (University of Iowa Press; 2011) and a bilingual edition of poems, Pruebas Ocultas (Bonobos Editores, Mexico; 2015). What Books will publish Remiges: Three Extended Poems in the fall of 2026.

About the featured titles:

Leaving the Grid by Amy Elisabeth Davis ponders constraints and forms of freedom—how we approach them and choose the roads we might best follow. It touches on memory, grief, the earth and its waters, and family. This is a book about the ability to see and create the most nourishing ways to be, about finding agency and hope. Leaving the Grid is about where we want to be going and how we might get there.

Spoken in the Dark by James Cushing is a collection of sixty poems which were written three years before and during the first days of the Covid-19 pandemic,. These poems are rooted in the American tradition of Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, James Tate, and W. S. Merwin, but speaks in the language of the 21st century. Readers will find pantoums, prose-poems, references to popular culture, and an overall sense that Rimbaud was right when he said “I is someone else.”

The poems in In the Style of Falling by Celeste Boyer see the consistent absurdity and mystery of the world as something both beautiful, and in an odd way, comforting. The tone is akin to a hushed but matter-of-fact tour guide through lands where much cannot be understood, but the view from the ruins still dazzles. Celeste’s poems, like her visual art, owe much to the layering and leaps of collage. Through her lens, has something to say, so we hear from bread (a woman, naturally) postcards, and hurricanes, among many others. Like falling in love, this book’s journey into mystery is led by the heart, though the wry Observer is never far away.

Remiges: Three Extended Poems (1985-2025) by Bill Mohr: In this collection, nimbly lurking at the periphery of the Language school in the early 1980s, Bill Mohr absorbed as much as he could of their derring-do poetics, then went his own contumacious way. Comprising three long poems, Remiges is the culminating effort of a West Coast poet whose maverick affinities have grown increasingly quirky, at least when juxtaposed with their somber starting point. If the literary precedents to Remiges are obvious, the aftermath is less discernible. Begun well before Ron Silliman’s anthology of Language poets, In the American Tree, was published, this triptych of extended poems will always remain an avant- garde outlier. Mohr seems a playful anomaly rather than someone intent being a model to be studied; nevertheless, these sustained sequences of poems revel in the pleasures of associative logic in unexpected ways that will reward anyone’s close reading of their capacious, jaunty dialogue.

WeHo Reads: No Apologies

Posted onAuthorcodysisco

Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2026 | 6:30–8 p.m. (PT)

WeHo Reads: No Apologies — Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2026, 6:30–8 p.m., online via Zoom and YouTube, featuring Marcus Clayton, Joshua Escobar, Rasheed Newson and Kaila Yu
Register on Zoom

Four local writers dare to break the rules, raise their voices, and refuse to compromise.

WeHo Reads: No Apologies

Online Via Zoom and YouTube

Free, RSVP Requested

What does a writer sacrifice when they soften their work to fit the mold? And what becomes possible when they refuse?

This November, four local writers confront subjects many books shy away from: race, desire, class, the messy moments when life stops making sense. They decline to sand off the rough edges. Their work runs from punk-inflected inter-genre prose to memoir, from poetry to historical fiction, but the nerve is the same: they write without asking permission and without apology. In an evening of reading and discussion, Marcus Clayton, Joshua Escobar, Rasheed Newson, and Kaila Yu will talk about writing hard truths, the pressure to make difficult material palatable, and what a writer stands to gain by holding the line.

Featuring:

  • Marcus Clayton is a multigenre Afrolatino writer from South Gate, who has a collection of inter-genre prose, ¡PÓNK!, with Nightboat Books.
  • Joshua Escobar is a poet, novelist, and screenwriter from Southern California’s Inland Empire and author of the Bo Huston Award-winning novel Demons of Eminence.
  • Novelist Rasheed Newson is the author of the national bestseller My Government Means to Kill Me, which was named one of The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2022, and the critically-acclaimed There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood, which explores Black LGBTQ+ life during Hollywood’s Golden Age.
  • Kaila Yu is a Los Angeles-based author and journalist whose debut memoir, Fetishized: A Reckoning with Yellow Fever, Feminism, and Beauty, was published by Crown, with bylines in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, the Los Angeles Times and Condé Nast Traveler.

RSVP on Eventbrite

WeHo Reads is a literary series presented by the City of West Hollywood. For more information and events, visit www.weho.org/wehoreads. The 2026 program is produced by BookSwell, a literary media company amplifying historically excluded voices. Additional support is provided by media partnerships with Book Soup and Los Angeles Review of Books. Attendees are advised that the program may include mature language and themes.

Authors

Marcus Clayton

Author Marcus Clayton

Marcus Clayton is a multigenre biracial Black and Costa Rican writer from South Gate, CA, and a current part-time professor for English and Ethnic studies departments across the California State University system. He has an inter-genre story collection titled ¡PÓNK! with Nightboat Books, is a 2026 finalist of the DAG Foundation Prize for Literature, and has published work in the anthology Black Punk Now!. He moonlights as a guitarist and shouts for Los Angeles punk band, tudors., and spends a lot of time at home tolerating his hyperactive pug named Darby Crash.

Learn more at marcus-clayton.com.

¡PÓNK! book cover

¡PÓNK!

Buy on Bookshop.org

Joshua Escobar

Author Joshua Escobar

Joshua Escobar is author of the chapbooks Califorkya Voltage (No, Dear/Small Anchor) and xxox fm (Doublecross Press), a full-length collection of poems, Bareback Nightfall (Noemi Press and Letras Latinas), and a novel, Demons of Eminence, that was the winner of the 2023 Bo Huston Award. Recipient of the 2022-2023 Faculty Excellence Award, they direct the Creative Writing program at Santa Barbara City College, where they co-publish the arts magazine Open Fruit. A 2026 Queer | Arts Fellow, they are at work on an original TV show about Mexico City’s electronic underground.

Find them on Instagram @djashtrae17.

Demons of Eminence book cover

Demons of Eminence

Buy on Bookshop.org

Rasheed Newson

Author Rasheed Newson
Photo by Christopher Marrs

Rasheed’s writing career began when he partnered up with T.J. Brady, and together they were hired as staff writers on the Fox drama Lie to Me. As a writing team, Rasheed and T.J. have worked on Narcos, The Chi, and Shooter, among other drama series. They are currently executive producers on Bel-Air.

Over the course of roughly two years, Rasheed wrote the novel My Government Means to Kill Me. It was a passion project that he wasn’t sure would attract a publisher. However, his literary agent, Jim McCarthy of Dystel, Goderich & Bourret, saw potential in the manuscript. So did his literary editor, Nadxieli Nieto of Flatiron Books. Rasheed is grateful to both of them.

Rasheed’s second novel, There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood, was published by Flatiron in June of 2026. Recently, Rasheed was selected as a 2025–26 American Library in Paris Visiting Fellow. Rasheed lives with his husband and their two children in Pasadena, California.

Learn more at rasheednewson.com.

There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood book cover

There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood

Buy on Bookshop.org

Kaila Yu

Author Kaila Yu

Kaila is an author based in Los Angeles. Her debut memoir, Fetishized: A Reckoning with Yellow Fever, Feminism, and Beauty, was just published with Penguin Random House’s Crown Publishing. She’s also a luxury travel and culture writer with bylines in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Los Angeles Times, Condé Nast Traveler, and many more.

Find her on Instagram @kailayu.

Fetishized: A Reckoning with Yellow Fever, Feminism, and Beauty book cover

Fetishized: A Reckoning with Yellow Fever, Feminism, and Beauty

Buy on Bookshop.org

BookSwell is a Bookshop.org affiliate. Purchases through these links support BookSwell and independent bookstores.

WeHo Reads: No Apologies

Four local writers dare to break the rules, raise their voices, and refuse to compromise.

What does a writer sacrifice when they soften their work to fit the mold? And what becomes possible when they refuse?

On Nov. 4, four local writers confront subjects many books shy away from: race, desire, class, the messy moments when life stops making sense. They decline to sand off the rough edges. Their work runs from punk-inflected inter-genre prose to memoir, from poetry to historical fiction, but the nerve is the same: they write without asking permission and without apology. In an evening of reading and discussion, they talk about writing hard truths, the pressure to make difficult material palatable, and what a writer stands to gain by holding the line.

Featuring:

Marcus Clayton is a multigenre Afrolatino writer from South Gate, who has a collection of inter-genre prose, ¡PÓNK!, with Nightboat Books.

Joshua Escobar is a poet, novelist, and screenwriter from Southern California’s Inland Empire and author of the Bo Huston Award-winning novel Demons of Eminence.

Novelist Rasheed Newson is the author of the national bestseller My Government Means to Kill Me, which was named one of The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2022, and the critically-acclaimed There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood, which explores Black LGBTQ+ life during Hollywood’s Golden Age.

Kaila Yu is a Los Angeles-based author and journalist whose debut memoir, Fetishized: A Reckoning with Yellow Fever, Feminism, and Beauty, was published by Crown, with bylines in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, the Los Angeles Times and Condé Nast Traveler.

This event is free to attend, and RSVPs are requested. A Zoom link will be provided to those who RSVP, and the livestream can be watched on the WeHo Arts YouTube channel (youtube.com/wehoarts).

WeHo Reads is a literary series presented by the City of West Hollywood. The 2026 program is produced by BookSwell, a literary media company amplifying historically excluded voices. Additional support is provided by media partnerships with Book Soup and Los Angeles Review of Books. Attendees are advised that the program may include mature language and themes.

The Poet’s Memoir

A generative writing workshop with Truong Tran

The Poet’s Memoir is a generative workshop that approaches the narratives of the self through short, non-narrative inquiries.

A memoir does not have to tell a life from beginning to end. It can be made of moments, snippets, fragments—parts of a story that, when brought together, begin to make a whole.

In this workshop, we will write toward discovery rather than completion. The hope is to find a path through: to plant seeds, follow what emerges, and see what might grow. Through a series of short generative exercises, participants will begin gathering the pieces of a larger story—the story of one’s life.

About the Facilitator

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 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.

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.

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

Workshop 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 workshops, virtual or otherwise, if they are not respecting the space, staff, fellow attendees, or performers.