Tag: Poetry

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.

Poetry From: Short Film Screening + Artist Panel

Poetry leaves the page and enters the frame. Join us for an evening of poetry films, conversation & a look behind the lens.

What happens to a poem when it leaves the page and enters the frame?

Join us at Glass & Quill Gallery next to Sims Library of Poetry for an evening of poetry + film featuring the “Poetry From” series—an ongoing project transforming contemporary poems into short films.

We’ll screen selections from “Poetry From the Garden” and “Poetry From the Kitchen,” alongside works in progress from the newest installment, “Poetry From the Hereafter.”

Between screenings, participating poets and the “Poetry From” team will take us behind the work: how a poem moves from text to screen, what changes in translation, what film can reveal that the page or stage cannot, and where the project goes next.

Come for the poems. See what happens when the camera gets involved. 🎥🍿

Thursday, September 10

Doors: 6 PM

Screening: 7 PM

Glass & Quill Gallery next to Sims Library of Poetry

2614 W. Florence Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90043

$10 admission

Poetry & Baseball: Henry Schipper & Teddy Tannenbaum

Double book launch for Henry Schipper’s “The Ball Dreams of The Sky” and Teddy Tannenbaum’s “The Dreamlife of Teddy Baseball”

Join us for a celebration of two collections on the sport of baseball. Both memoir and homage in love of the game, the poets meditate on their experiences as baseball players in the field while navigating their own personal lives. Henry Schipper and Teddy Tannenbaum will read in The Wanda Coleman Theater followed by a book signing & reception.

Henry Schipper’s The Ball Dreams of the Sky compiles autobiographical poems that translates life—all nine innings—into the language and metaphor of the game. Everything from childhood trauma, to early stardom, love, sex, creativity, meditation, midlife crisis, God and more is batted around, lofted high, and tenderly caught like a ball in a glove. Even the ghosts of the Holocaust sometimes haunt the all-embracing field of play. At once memoir, homage, and all-out celebration of the game, this book explores baseball as a mother tongue of the heart that seems capable of wrapping itself around everything.

In Teddy Tannenbaum’s The Life of Teddy Baseball, poetry, paradox, bodhisattvas and the sutras all collide in this first collection of baseball musings written over the past several decades. A combination of studied observations, personal experiences on the field and the whimsy that baseball unabashedly provides are scattered throughout.

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

About the authors

Henry Schipper is an award-winning filmmaker in Los Angeles who has written and/or produced over 125 primetime documentaries. He once held the Babe Ruth League record for consecutive no-hitters in Wisconsin. This is his first book of poems.

Teddy Tannenbaum is an executive coach and organizational consultant based in Venice, CA. He is also a founding member of Achievable Health, a primary care facility serving people with developmental disabilities. On most Sundays, you can find him playing baseball on fields around 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.

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.