Unquiet: A Night of Creative Resistance (Poetry Show/ Open Mic)

A night of poetry and art that confronts, resists silence, and reimagines the world.

Unquiet: A Night of Creative Resistance

$8 For Non Performers /// $5 To Sign Up For Open Mic

UNQUIET: A Night of Creative Resistance is a gathering for poets, artists, and anyone drawn to the kind of work that pushes against the world as it is. This evening brings together voices and visions that challenge, disrupt, reimagine, and insist on something more – through poetry, visual art, and open mic expression.

This is a space for language that shakes loose what’s stuck, imagery that cuts through the noise, and creative work that won’t sit down. If you’ve felt the urge to speak, make, resist, or remake – this night is meant for you.

The Night:

-4–5 featured poets

-Open mic slots available at the end

-Unlimited visual art displays — bring pieces that provoke, hold space, disrupt, or soothe * A room full of people who believe art is one of our greatest powers Contributors are invited to explore any of the following themes – or bring something entirely their own:

Voice, silence, and what breaks through

– Imagination as rebellion

– Disobedience

– Community, care, and survival

– Rage and reclamation – Surveillance

– Liberation – Art as weapon / art as refuge

– Memory, history, and rewriting the narrative

– Loss and legacy

– Identity and intersectional study.

These themes should be seen as prompts, not limits. If your work pushes, questions, agitates, or dreams, it belongs here.

Why “Unquiet”? Because staying quiet has never protected us. Because creativity has always found cracks in the system. Because imagination is a political act. And because poetry and art become powerful when they refuse to shrink.

Poetry & The Archive: Creating Poetry from Photographs

Poetry & The Archive: A Workshop on Creating Poetry from Photographs

Poetry & The Archive: Creating Poetry from Photographs is a generative workshop on the use of photographs from historical (and personal) archives to create poetry.

Participants will generate new work through a series of prompts and be invited to use their own photographs to create new (or revise existing) poems.

This workshop is drawn from previous archive-related workshops the author has facilitated, her personal work using archives for two poetry collections-in-progress and forthcoming chapbook (Akashic Books/Africa Poetry Book Fund, 2027) and research into the use and power of photography in telling a story. Example poets to be discussed in workshop include Patricia Smith, Caleb Femi, Gordon Parks, and photographs from Russell Lee, US government archives, and others.

This workshop supports writers of all stages.

Participants are required to bring a writing device of preference (Personal Notebook / Journal / Sketch Pad / Pen / Pencil / Markers / Crayons) and photographs to use during the workshop.

About the author

.CHISARAOKWU., MD (she/her) is an Igbo transdisciplinary poet artist and scholar. Her practice weaves archive, collage, film, and her experiences as a physician to explore memory and identity in the African diaspora. Her poetry and visual art has been featured in Michigan Quarterly Review, ANMLY, Beloit Poetry Journal, Transition and Obsidian, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of Net, and Best New American Poets. Her chapbook “This Wake Holding, Mmiri” received the 2023 Evaristo Poetry Prize’s Honorable Mention from the Africa Poetry Book Fund. She’s a been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, Cave Canem, Anaphora Arts, The Poetry Foundation, Torch Literary Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and Ucross. From 2010-2017, she served as a US Commissioner to UNESCO. She is currently working on two poetry collections and a novel.

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.

WeHo Reads: Reimagining History

Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2026 · 6:30–8:00 p.m. PT

In person, West Hollywood Library Community Room, 625 N San Vicente Blvd, West Hollywood, CA 90069

Free, RSVP Requested

Four Los Angeles writers return to the past, through fiction and poetry, to understand where we came from.

Why do we keep returning to history? And what changes when we recover what was buried, silenced, or forgotten?

WeHo Reads returns on Sept. 23 with four acclaimed Los Angeles writers whose work reaches back into personal, political, and civic histories and reshapes how we see it. Through historical fiction and poetry, they explore why the past still shapes the present, and what we can learn from seeing it through new lenses. In an evening of reading and discussion, they ask how memory, imagination, and the craft of writing become tools for reimagining where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going.

Featuring:

Kate Maruyama is a professor of writing and an author of realist and fabulist novels, short stories and essays set in and about Los Angeles.

Steven Reigns is a poet and educator who was the inaugural City Poet Laureate of West Hollywood and author of A Quilt for David, which explores the life of David Acer, a Florida dentist wrongfully vilified during the height of the HIV/AIDS panic, and Outliving Michael, which received the ‘Best in Literature’ 2025 Poz Award.

Mike Sonksen, aka Mike the PoeT, is a poet, professor, journalist, historian & tour guide with work in publications like the Academy of American Poets, Alta, PBS, Poetry Foundation & Westways.

Désirée Zamorano, author of the historical fiction novel Dispossessed and the collection of short stories, Amarisa’s Cooking Pot, delights in writing about the ordinary and the extraordinary.

West Hollywood City Poet Laureate Jen Cheng will open the event with the reading of a poem.

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. Free; RSVP requested. Free parking is available in the 5-story Public/Park Parking Structure at 625 N. San Vicente Blvd. Attendees are advised that the program may include mature language and themes.

Additional information:

Free Parking. Attendees may park in the 5-story Public/Park Parking Structure at 625 N. San Vicente Blvd

Content warning: This program may contain explicit language or content.

Slanguage Poetry Show Halloween Costume Open Mic

Slanguage Poetry Show {HALLOWEEN COSTUME OPEN MIC EDITION}. Come check out great poetry & fun energy! You can perform or enjoy the night.

Slanguage Poetry Show {HALLOWEEN COSTUME OPEN MIC EDITION}. Come check out great poets & fun energy! You can sign up on the open mic list and share your work on our stage!

We are excited to invite you to our OPEN MIC EDITION where you the audience is our feature! This show will be a costume party. Come dressed in a costume and share your poem on the mic. Come join us for an evening of powerful spoken word performances, great food, and an amazing community of poets and poetry lovers.

Our event promises to showcase some of the most talented poets in the city, who will take to the stage to share their unique perspectives and experiences through their art. You won’t want to miss this opportunity to be inspired and moved by the power of poetry.

So mark your calendars and join us for an unforgettable evening on Saturday, October 31st. Doors open 7pm at Sims Library of Poetry in Los Angeles, Ca.

W e have 10 slots for people who by presale tickets.

The show will be hosted by AKoldPiece

The Mic is open for you to share a poem, story, jokes or songs.

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.