Join us for a night of poetry as Beyond Baroque welcomes Lee Herrick to Los Angeles. Last year Herrick was appointed California Poet Laureate by Governor Gavin Newsom. He is the author of poetry books Scar and Flower, Gardening Secrets of the Dead, and This Many Miles from Desire. A Fresno native, Herrick is a professor at both Fresno City College, and University of Reno, Lake Tahoe. As Poet Laureate he plans to improve access to poetry and the arts in communities where people might not have ready access to them.

Herrick will be joined by renowned poets of Southern California, F. Douglas Brown, Amy Uyematsu, and Michelle Brittan Rosado. Enjoy a reception before and after the performances with refreshments. The authors will be signing books.

Doors open: 6:30 p.m. Readings: 7:00 p.m.

About the Authors:

Lee Herrick is the California Poet Laureate. He is the author of three books of poems: Scar and Flower, Gardening Secrets of the Dead, and This Many Miles from Desire. He is co-editor of The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit. His writing appears in anthologies such as HERE: Poems for the Planet, with an introduction by the Dalai Lama; Indivisible: Poems of Social Justice, with an introduction by Common; The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems from the San Francisco Bay Watershed; Naming the Lost: The Fresno Poets: Interviews and Essays; and Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, among others. He served as Fresno Poet Laureate from 2015-2017. Born in Daejeon, Korea and adopted to the United States at ten months, he teaches at Fresno City College and the MFA program at the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe.

Amy Uyematsu is a sansei (third-generation Japanese American) poet and teacher from Los Angeles. She has six published collections–the most recent being That Blue Trickster Time (What Books Press, 2022). Her first poetry collection, 30 Miles from J-Town, won the 1992 Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Amy taught high school math for LA Unified Schools for 32 years. Active in Asian American Studies when it first emerged in the late 60s, she penned “The Emergence of Yellow Power in America” and was co-editor of the widely-used UCLA anthology, Roots: An Asian American Reader.

F. Douglas Brown is the author of two poetry collections, ICON (Writ Large Press, 2018), and Zero to Three (University of Georgia, 2014), winner of the 2013 Cave Canem Poetry Prize selected by US Poet Laureate, Tracy K. Smith. He also co-authored with poet Geffrey Davis, Begotten (URB Books, 2016), a chapbook of poetry as part of the Floodgate Poetry Series. Brown, an educator for over 20 years, currently teaches English and African American Poetry at Loyola High School of Los Angeles, an all-boys Jesuit school. He is both a Cave Canem and Kundiman fellow, and was selected by Poets & Writers as one of their ten notable Debut Poets of 2014. His poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets, The PBS News Hour, The Virginia Quarterly (VQR), Bat City Review, The Chicago Quarterly Review (CQR), The Southern Humanities Review, The Sugar House Review, Cura Magazine, and Muzzle Magazine. He is co-founder and curator of un::fade::able – The Requiem for Sandra Bland, a quarterly reading series examining restorative justice through poetry as a means to address racism.

Michelle Brittan Rosado is the author of Why Can’t It Be Tenderness, which won the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil and published by University of Wisconsin Press in November 2018. Her chapbook, Theory on Falling into a Reef, was the winner of the inaugural Rick Campbell Prize (Anhinga Press, 2016). Her poems have been published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, Poet Lore, and The New Yorker, as well as the anthologies Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets Under 25, Only Light Can Do That: 100 Post-Election Poems, Stories, & Essays, and Ink Knows No Borders: Poems of the Immigrant and Refugee Experience. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from California State University, Fresno, and recently completed a PhD Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. She lives in Long Beach.

This event is Free & In-Person at Beyond Baroque. Masks are required while inside our center.

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, fellow attendees, or performers.

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.

Please RSVP if you are planning to attend this event. We accept walk-ins, but priority will be given to people that have registered. Limited seating is available; we recommend arriving early.