December 2020 Special Guests
Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo is the daughter of Mexican immigrants. Her debut poetry collection, Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge (Sundress Publications 2016), is inspired by her family's immigration stories and her time volunteering with the humanitarian aid organization, No More Deaths. A dramatization of her poem “Our Lady of the Water Gallons,” directed by Jesús Salvador Treviño, can be viewed at latinopia.com. Most recently, Bermejo was chosen as the first “Poet in the Parks” resident at Gettysburg National Military Park in partnership with the Poetry Foundation and the National Parks Arts Foundation. Locating the Dead, a chapbook inspired by her time at Gettysburg was published by A-B Projects as part of the collaborative art exhibit, “The Stacks.” A former Steinbeck fellow, Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange poetry winner, Barbara Deming Memorial Fund/Money for Women grantee, and Tucson Festival of Books 3rd place poetry winner, she was once selected by her mentor, Eloise Klein Healy as a Los Angeles Central Library ALOUD newer poet. She has received residencies with Hedgebrook and the Ragdale Foundation and is a member of the Miresa Collective. Bermejo is co-founder and director of Women Who Submit, a literary organization fighting for gender parity by empowering women and non-binary writers to submit work for publication. She received a BA in Theatre Arts from California State University of Long Beach and an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. She teaches adult writing workshops with UCLA Extension and children’s poetry workshops throughout LA County.
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.
Laura Buccieri is the Director of Publicity at Copper Canyon Press. She has led the publicity efforts for Pulitzer Prize winning collections such as The Tradition by Jericho Brown and National Book Award winners like Arthur Sze's Sight Lines. She is the author of the chapbooks Songbook for a boy inside (Belladonna*, 2018) and On being mistaken (PANK Books, 2018). Her poems can be found in Lit Hub, Metatron, Prelude, Cosmonauts Avenue, Lambda Literary, Word Riot, Apogee, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in poetry from The New School and lives in Brooklyn, NY. Find her online at laurabuccieri.com.
Elizabeth DeMeo is an Associate Editor at Tin House in Portland, Oregon, where she acquires and edits books of fiction, literary nonfiction, and poetry. Originally from New Hampshire, she holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Arkansas, where she was Managing Editor of the Arkansas International—a biannual journal of fiction, poetry, essays, and comics, both originally in English and in English translation—and Director of the Arkansas Writers in the Schools program, in which MFA candidates from the University of Arkansas lead two-day poetry workshops for elementary, middle, and high school students throughout the state. Her writing appears in Indiana Review, and her reviews and author interviews appear in Arkansas International online. In 2014, she spent a year teaching English in Maran, Malaysia on a Fulbright grant, where she founded a drama club with her students at SMK Maran 2.
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 Redbook. 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.
Tananarive Due is an American Book Award and NAACP Image Award-winning author who was an executive producer on Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror for Shudder. She is also a screenwriter. She and her husband, science fiction author Steven Barnes, co-wrote an upcoming episode for Season 2 of “The Twilight Zone” for CBS All Access and Monkeypaw Productions. Due is the author of several novels and a short story collection, Ghost Summer: Stories. She is also co-author of a civil rights memoir, Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights (with her late mother, Patricia Stephens Due). In 2013, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award in the Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. She teaches Afrofuturism and Black Horror at UCLA. Her website is at www.tananarivedue.com
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.
Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for several other awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award and the LA Times Book Prize. Named a Best Book of 2016 by over 50 publications in nine countries, it has been translated into thirteen languages. His new book of fiction, Cleanness, was published in January, and has been named a best book of the year so far by Time, Entertainment Weekly, the BBC, Esquire, and the Financial Times. He has taught at New York University, the University of Mississippi, where he was the John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and he is currently a visiting faculty member at Grinnell College. A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, he lives in Iowa City with his partner, the poet Luis Muñoz.
Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman grew up in the Potomac Highlands of West Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Her debut, Sounds Like Titanic: A Memoir was named a finalist for The National Book Critics Circle Award, a “best book of 2019 ” by Amazon and Vox, described as “moving” by the New Yorker, “outrageously funny” by O, The Oprah Magazine, and “fascinating,” by NPR. Her recent writing has appeared in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, The New York Times Magazine, Brevity, and Hippocampus. She holds a BA in Middle Eastern studies and an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Columbia University, and a PhD in English from the University of North Texas. She is an Associate Professor of English at Northern Kentucky University where she recently won the Outstanding Junior Faculty Award and the Excellence in Research, Scholarship, & Creative Activity Award. She lives in Newport, Kentucky with her husband, the astronomer Nathan De Lee. .
For more information, go to www.jessicahindman.com
Allison Joseph lives and writes in Carbondale, Illinois, where she is on the creative writing faculty at Southern Illinois University. Her latest books are The Last Human Heart (Diode Editions), Sart Pretender (Finishing Line Press), and Confessions of a Barefaced Woman (Red Hen Press). Her next book, Lexicon, is due from Red Hen Press in spring 2021. She is the widow of acclaimed poet and editor Jon Tribble.
Erin Aubry Kaplan is a contributing writer to the New York Times opinion page and a former weekly op-ed columnist for the Los Angeles Times, the first African American in the paper's history to hold the position. Kaplan first appeared in a monthly independent newsmagazine called Accent L.A., a small publication dedicated to a large mission of providing thoughtful, literate, alternative coverage of black Los Angeles. From 1987 to 1992 at Accent, Kaplan authored everything from book reviews to commentary and began developing a voice at once broadly political and deeply personal, a voice that would become something of a hallmark. She began working full-time as a journalist in 1992 for the Los Angeles Times, for a short-lived but much-heralded section called City Times that was created in the aftermath of the civil unrest to expand meaningful coverage of the central city. Kaplan essentially continued the mission begun by Accent L.A., covering the Crenshaw district, South Central and events affecting L.A.’s disparate black communities and black communities at large. Kaplan’s articles have appeared in many publications, including Ms. Magazine, UCLA Magazine, Barnard magazine, The London Independent, The Guardian, Salon.com, The Crisis, Newsday, Contemporary Art Magazine, Utne Reader and Black Enterprise. She is the author of Black Talk, Blue Thoughts and Walking the Color Line: Dispatches From a Black Journalista, (2011) and I Heart Obama (2016).
Julia Kardon was born and raised in New York City. Her first job in publishing, while in high school, was shelving fiction at the fabled Strand Bookstore. After receiving degrees in Comparative Literature, as well as in Slavic Languages and Literature at the University of Chicago, she moved to Prague to teach English for a year. Julia then returned to New York to restart her career in publishing. She joined HG Literary in 2018 after building a list at Mary Evans Inc and handling foreign rights. She is interested primarily in literary and upmarket fiction and memoir, especially with a focus on identity or with an international lens, narrative nonfiction, journalism, and history, and her clients include New York Times Best Sellers Brit Bennett and Etaf Rum, Barnes & Noble Discover picks John Freeman Gill and Leah Franqui, Center For Fiction Emerging Writer Fellow Melissa Rivero, Moriel Rothman-Zecher, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, and others.
Mitali Perkins (mitaliperkins.com) has written many books for young readers, including Between Us and Abuela (Winner of the Américas Award), Forward Me Back To You (SLJ and Kirkus Best YA Books of the year), You Bring the Distant Near (nominated for a National Book Award), and Rickshaw Girl (adapted into a film by Sleeperwave Productions), all of which explore crossing different kinds of borders. Mitali's goal is to make readers laugh or cry, preferably both, as long as their hearts are widening. She currently lives and writes in the Bay Area.
For more information, go to mitaliperkins.com
Carl Phillips is the author of 15 books of poetry, most recently Pale Colors in a Tall Field (FSG, 2020). His other books include Wild Is the Wind (FSG, 2018), winner of a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Publisher’s Weekly, in a starred review, called it “haunting and contemplative as the torch song for which the collection is named.” His selected poems, Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems 1986-2006, was published by FSG in 2007. Other books include The Tether (FSG, 2002), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, Double Shadow (FSG, 2012), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Silverchest (FSG, 2014), a finalist for the Griffin Prize. He recently published a chapbook, Star Map with Action Figures (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019). A four time finalist for the National Book Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, his other honors include the Lambda Literary Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Award, the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the Academy of American Poets, for which he served as Chancellor from 2006-2012.
Lise Quintana is the inventor of Lithomobilus, an ereader platform for nonlinear literature, whose genesis came from her MFA work at Antioch. She was an editorial assistant on the very first issue of Lunch Ticket, and editor in chief for the next four issues (2012-2013). She then went on to found Zoetic Press and its award-winning journal NonBinary Review. In addition to her short story writing, which has appeared in SLAB, The Rambler, and various online journals, she has hosted the podcasts I Liked the Book Better, The Literary Whip, Alphanumeric, and her current show Living Large in America where she and her guests discuss the experience of living as a fat person. She currently sits on the advisory board for Nanowrimo, and is working with former Antioch University president Felice Nudelman on the American Democracy Project, teaching college students how to become smarter voters.
Drew Tewksbury is a L.A.-based journalist, editor, and multimedia producer. As an editor at the Los Angeles Times, Tewksbury helmed coverage in the arts and books sections, where he spearheaded literary criticism and steered coverage of L.A.’s diverse creative communities. In 2018, Tewksbury was the contributing editor at GOOD Media, where he built a team of international freelancers to highlight innovators, report on global culture, and showcase inspiring people who are working to improve the world. Previously, Tewksbury was the managing editor of LA Weekly where he oversaw the section editors, edited long-form cover stories, developed special issues, and spearheaded video production, which earned him and his team an Association of Alternative Newsmedia award for Documentary Profiles. An accomplished journalist, Tewksbury has written and reported feature articles or radio pieces for: National Public Radio (NPR), Time, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Magazine, L.A Weekly, KPCC, NME (U.K), Billboard, The Hollywood Reporter, Flaunt, and SWINDLE Magazine, among other publications. As an educator, Tewksbury has taught Entertainment Journalism at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where he went to graduate school.
Lorinda Toledo was born and raised in New Mexico, while Los Angeles has been her home for more than a decade. Her novel-in-progress was named first runner-up for the 2019 James Jones First Novel Fellowship, and received an honorable mention in CRAFT's First Chapters Contest. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Mississippi Review, The Normal School, and elsewhere. She earned a PhD in Literature with creative dissertation from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 2019. While there, her writing and research were supported by multiple awards, including a Black Mountain Institute fellowship. She is a past fiction editor at Witness literary magazine, and teaches writing at Antioch University Los Angeles.
Michael Wiegers has been acquiring and editing books for Copper Canyon Press since 1993, and currently serves as the Press’s Executive Editor/Editor in Chief. He has edited two retrospective volumes of the poetry of Frank Stanford, including What About This, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and received the Balcones Poetry Prize. He edited the anthologies The Poet’s Child and This Art, and translated poems for Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry, which he co-edited with Mónica de la Torre. He is also the poetry editor of Narrative and regularly speaks about the art of publishing at universities and colleges around the world. He is currently at work on a book about the poet W.S. Merwin.