December 2019
Special Guests
Povi-Tamu Bryant as a black, queer, gender nonconforming person, Povi-Tamu is committed to working with people to bring an intersectional understanding to the ways we build and interact with each other. That commitment roots Povi-Tamu in their facilitative approach to leadership development.
They have spent time honing their facilitation, mediation skills, and analysis through working with an array of organizations. From facilitating strategic vision processes to designing leadership development programs for marginalized communities, Povi-Tamu has worked with a diverse set of needs and struggled with leaders to best address them.
For several years, Povi-Tamu worked for Leadership Development in Intergroup Relations, a program of Asian Americans Advancing Justice-LA. As Program Manager, Povi-Tamu facilitated and developed curriculum to support embracing and working across difference, building strong and effective teams, strategic planning, and conflict management, among other leadership development skills rooted in a social change philosophy. Povi-Tamu also spent time with the LA Black Worker Center as the Interim Managing Director, providing oversight to the organizing team, legal clinic, and campaign work.
Povi-Tamu is currently bringing all of their experience and skills to their work as a Leadership, Diversity and Equity Consultant for Freedom Verses, which they co-created.
Alexander Chee is the bestselling author of the novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, and the essay collection How To Write An Autobiographical Novel. He is a contributing editor at The New Republic, and an editor at large at VQR. His essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, T Magazine, Tin House, Slate, Guernica, and Best American Essays 2016, among others. He is winner of a 2003 Whiting Award, a 2004 NEA Fellowship in prose and a 2010 MCCA Fellowship, and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the VCCA, Civitella Ranieri. He is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.
Natashia Deón is a 2017 NAACP Image Award Nominee and author of the critically-acclaimed novel, Grace (Counterpoint Press), which was named a best book of 2016 by The New York Times, The Root, Kirkus Review, Book Riot, and Entropy Magazine, and has been featured in People Magazine, TIME Magazine, and Red Book. Grace won the 2017 American Library Association, Black Caucus Award for Best Debut Fiction. A practicing attorney, mother, and law professor, Deón is the recipient of a PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellowship and served as a 2017 U.S. Delegate to Armenia in partnership with the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, for a reconciliation project involving Armenian and Turkish writers.
Rae Dubow is director of Talking Out Loud, where, since 2013, she has worked with architects and writers, teachers and artists, administrators and executives to hone their presentation and public speaking skills. Clients include actor/activist Edward Asner, Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Kahn-Cullors, Los Angeles architect Barbara Bestor, and actress Genevieve Angelson. Rae has also worked with the organizations Dress for Success, which trains women from underserved communities to enter the job market, and MOSTe, which offers similar training to high school girls from disadvantaged backgrounds working towards college admission.
Rae has taught at the University of Southern California, where she worked on undergraduate and graduate presentations in the School of Architecture; the University of California, Riverside, where she is regular guest faculty, instructing MFA writing students in lecture and reading preparation; Antioch University Los Angeles, where she has also instructed MFA writing students; and Woodbury University, where she taught presentation skills to undergraduate architecture students.
Rae received her B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to founding Talking Out Loud, she taught at private schools, including Wildwood School and the Center for Early Education. She has worked extensively in the theater arts as a director, actor and teacher.
Rae has trained clients for lectures, interview preparation, panels and presentations, readings, media training, speeches, and pitches. For further information, please visit her website at www.talkingoutloud.net.
Curt Duffy teaches English at Los Angeles Pierce College and has provided educational design and administration services to a number of clients, including West Coast University and Southern California Edison. Dr. Duffy has conducted creative writing workshops on ground, online, and even on a Star Trek–themed cruise. His short fiction has been published in The Journal of Experimental Fiction and Storyglossia. Dr. Duffy's current political activism is focused on educational quality and faculty rights through his role as Grievance Representative for AFT1521 Faculty Guild and membership in the Miracle Mile Democratic Club.
Ilya Kaminsky is the author of the widely acclaimed Deaf Republic (Graywolf, 2019), which Kevin Young, writing in The New Yorker, called a work of “profound imagination.” Poems from Deaf Republic were awarded Poetry magazine's Levinson Prize and the Pushcart Prize. He is also the author of Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004), and Musica Humana (Chapiteau Press, 2002). He is the editor of several anthologies, among them The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, co-edited with Susan Harris, which John Ashbery praised as “immediately indispensable;” A God in the House: Poets Talk About Faith, co-edited with Katherine Towler; and Gossip and Metaphysics: Russian Modernist Poets and Prose co-edited with Katie Farris and Valzhyna Mort . He and Jean Valentine’s translations of Marina Tsvetaeva can be found in Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva. Kaminsky has won the Whiting Writer's Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Metcalf Award, the Dorset Prize, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and the Foreword Magazine’s Best Poetry Book of the Year award. Recently, he was on the short-list for the Neusdadt International Literature Prize. His poems have been translated into numerous languages and his books have been published in many countries including Turkey, Holland, Russia, France, Mexico, Macedonia, Romania, Spain and China, where his poetry was awarded the Yinchuan International Poetry Prize.
Katelyn Keating (she/her) is the editor in chief of CRAFT and the operations manager at Prospect Park Books. She was a 2017 fellow of the LA Review of Books Publishing Workshop, and has since joined their staff as the web advisor to PubLab. She is the publisher coordinator for LITLIT: The Little Literary Fair, and is on the advisory group for BookSwell, LA’s literary events navigator, where she has also worked as the features editor and in marketing and special projects. Her personal and critical essays appear in Crab Orchard Review, Flyway, Lunch Ticket, Tahoma Literary Review, the U Press of FL anthology In Season: Stories of Discovery, Loss, Home, and Places in Between, and elsewhere. She’s a contributing writer and editor to the forthcoming Read Me Los Angeles: Exploring L.A.’s Book Culture [Prospect Park Books, March 2020]. Katelyn has a BA in communication arts from Skidmore College, and an MFA in creative writing from Antioch University Los Angeles (vermilion cohort). Her critical thesis, “A Horizon of Dogs: Canids as Companions and Narrators in Contemporary Fiction,” was a 2017 Antioch University Library Research Award finalist. She served as editor in chief for issues 11 and 12 of Lunch Ticket, where she’d formerly edited the Diana Woods Memorial Award and the nonfiction section, and written as a staff blogger.
Eloise Klein Healy, the author of nine books of poetry and three spoken word recordings, was named the first Poet Laureate of Los Angeles in 2012. She was the founding chair of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles where she is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing Emerita. Healy directed the Women’s Studies Program at California State University Northridge and taught in the Feminist Studio Workshop at The Woman’s Building in Los Angeles. She is the founding editor of ARKTOI BOOKS, an imprint of Red Hen Press specializing in the work of lesbian authors. A Wild Surmise: New & Selected Poems & Recordings was published in 2013 and her latest work, Another Phase, is newly out.
Gary Phillips’ 1950s set The Be-Bop Barbarians riffs on race, comic strips, the Red Scare and jazz. E. Ethelbert Miller said in his review in the New York Journal of Books, “…this graphic novel is for readers who know how to snap their fingers while turning the page.” Phillips’ debut 1994 novel Violent Spring was the first such mystery set in the aftermath of the Rodney King civil unrest, and more recently he edited the Anthony award-winning anthology, The Obama Inheritance: Fifteen Stories of Conspiracy Noir. He’s also been story editor on FX’s “Snowfall,” about crack and the CIA in 1980s South Central.
Joshua Roark is the founding editor of Frontier Poetry and Palette Poetry, as well as the managing editor of The Masters Review and CRAFT. He received his MFA in Poetry from Antioch University in 2017—during which he served as Associate Editor for Lunch Ticket—as well as the Certificate in the Teaching of Creative Writing. His chapbook of poems about teaching in the Mississippi Delta, Put One Hand Up, Lean Back, is available online.
Anjali Singh is an agent at Ayesha Pande Literary. Before becoming an agent, she worked as an international literary scout, as an editor Vintage Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Simon & Schuster and as Editorial Director at Other Press. She is best known for having championed Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis after stumbling across it on a visit to Paris. She has always been drawn to the thrill of discovering new writers, and among the literary novelists whose careers she helped launch are Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Samantha Hunt, Preeta Samarasan, Zoe Ferraris (winner of the LA Times Book Prize for Best First Novel for Finding Nouf), Victoria Patterson (Story Prize finalist for Drift), Brigid Pasulka (winner of the PEN-Hemingway Prize for A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True), and Saleem Haddad. As a literary agent, she is looking for new voices, character-driven fiction or non-fiction works that reflect an engagement with the world around us, and graphic novels for all ages. Some of her recent and forthcoming projects include Arif Anwar's debut novel The Storm, Bridgett Davis’ critically-acclaimed memoir The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother’s Life in the Detroit Numbers, internationally bestselling Palestinian author Susan Abulhawa's novel Against the Loveless World (Atria, 2020); and the graphic novels Wake: The Hidden History of Enslaved Black Women's Armed Resistance (37ink, 2020) by Rebecca Hall and Hugo Martinez, Shubeik Lubeik (Pantheon, 2021) by Deena Mohamed, and Fine: A Comic about Gender by Rhea Ewing (Norton/Liveright, 2021).
Lorinda Toledo is a writer born and raised in New Mexico, where her family has lived for many generations. For more than a decade, Los Angeles has been her home. Her novel-in-progress, The Nature of Fire, is a story about New Mexican twin sisters Maria and Reyna Romero, who grow up estranged in the contemporary American West, but who must reunite to discover the cause of wildfires threatening their family home. The manuscript was named first-runner up for the 2019 James Jones First Novel Fellowship, and a stand-alone excerpt was published in the Winter 2019 issue of the Mississippi Review. Her short fiction is forthcoming in The Normal School and has appeared elsewhere. Lorinda earned a PhD in Literature with Creative Dissertation from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where her fiction was supported by multiple awards. Her MFA is in fiction and creative nonfiction from Antioch University Los Angeles (Scirocco). She has been fiction editor at the award-winning Witness literary magazine, and assistant editor in both fiction and nonfiction genres at Lunch Ticket. She has a background in journalism, and her work has appeared in such places as the Associated Press, New Mexico Business Weekly, and L.A. Weekly. She has taught writing, literature, and composition at UNLV. She strives to empower writers in their skills and goals through the AULA Teaching and Learning Center and the Antioch University Writers’ Exchange. She is also a freelance journalist, editor, and writing coach.