Save the date: April 24 at 6 pm
What is said and what is left unsaid in poetry?
How do we communicate across gulfs of understanding and secrets unspoken?
How do we interpret what we hear others say?
Our journeys to the present moment have all taken different twists and turns and making connections can be remarkably tenuous in our chosen homelands. Author and poet Mariano Zaro brings a potent nostalgia and intimate observations to the task of tracing a journey from his boyhood Spanish village to his coming of age and arrival in California.
Join Mariano and his featured guests, including Kim Dower, Alicia Elkort, and Steven Reigns, in a discussion of our journeys, making a literary life in LA, and poetic examinations of memory and destiny.
About BookSwell’s Read & Relate vidchat salon
To keep connections alive between readers and writers during troubled times, BookSwell is organizing Read & Relate, a biweekly virtual video chat salon celebrating books, writers, and the literary life.
We’ll be using Zoom to conduct the salon. Audio and video may be recorded and re-shared via BookSwell’s social media channels.
Mariano Zaro
Mariano Zaro is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Decoding Sparrows and Padre Tierra. His translations include Buda en llamas by Tony Barnstone and Cómo escribir una canción de amor by Sholeh Wolpé. Zaro’s short fiction has appeared in many magazines. In 2018, he received the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Short Fiction Prize. He is the host of a series of video-interviews with prominent American poets as part of the literary project Poetry.LA. Zaro is a professor of Spanish at Rio Hondo Community College (Whittier, California).
Kim Dower
Kim Dower has published four collections of poetry all from Red Hen Press: Air Kissing on Mars, Slice of Moon, Last Train to the Missing Planet, and Sunbathing on Tyrone Power’s Grave. Widely anthologized and nominated for four Pushcart Prizes, Kim Dower was City Poet Laureate of West Hollywood, from October 2016 to October 2018. She teaches poetry workshops at Antioch University, UCLA Writers Extension, and for the City of West Hollywood Library.
Alicia Elkort
Alicia Elkort’s poetry has been published in AGNI, Arsenic Lobster, Black Lawrence Press, Georgia Review, Heron Tree, The Hunger Journal, Jet Fuel Review, Menacing Hedge, Rogue Agent, Stirring: A Literary Collection, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, as well as many others. Her poems have been nominated for the Orisons Anthology (2016), A Best of the Net (2018), and the Pushcart (2017 / 2019). Alicia reads for Tinderbox Poetry Journal. For more info or to watch her two video poems: http://aliciaelkort.mystrikingly.com/
Steven Reigns
Steven Reigns is a poet and educator and was appointed the first Poet Laureate of West Hollywood. He has published the collections Inheritance and Your Dead Body is My Welcome Mat, and dozens of chapbooks. Reigns is 2019-2020 recipient of The Los Angeles County’s Department of Cultural Affairs’ COLA Fellowship and a fourteen-time recipient of their Artist in Residency Grant. He edited My Life is Poetry, showcasing his students’ work from the first-ever autobiographical poetry workshop for LGBT seniors. Reigns has lectured and taught writing workshops around the country to LGBT youth and people living with HIV. Currently he is touring The Gay Rub, (www.thegayrub.com) an exhibition of rubbings from LGBT landmarks, facilitates the monthly Lambda Lit Book Club, and is at work on a new collection of poetry. www.stevenreigns.com
