ABOUT THE EVENT

Los Angeles poets L.A. Johnson and Elizabeth Metzger will co-host a reading and Q & A with five extraordinary poets as part of a curated reading series with local and non-local poets.

L. A. Johnson is a writer from California. She is currently a Mellon Humanities postdoctoral fellow at the University of Southern California. The winner of the 2021 Rumi Prize in Poetry from Arts & Letters, her poems appear in Best New Poets, Poetry Magazine, The Slowdown Podcast, and elsewhere.

Elizabeth Metzger is the author of Lying In (Milkweed, 2023), as well as and The Spirit Papers, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry, and the chapbook Bed, recipient of The Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize. She is a poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and she lives in California.

ABOUT THE POETS

Natalie Shapero is a writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, The Nation, and elsewhere. She is the author of the poetry collections Popular Longing (2021), Hard Child (2017), and No Object (2013), and she has performed at The Pulitzer Arts Foundation, The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches at UC Irvine.

Morgan Parker is the author of Who Put This Song On?, a young adult novel; and the poetry collections Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, and Magical Negro, which won the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award. Her debut collection of nonfiction,You Get What You Pay For, will be released in March (and is now available for preorder from your favorite local bookshop).

Prageeta Sharma is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Grief Sequence (Wave, 2019), a narrative reflection on grief over the loss of a loved one; Undergloom (Fence, 2013); and Infamous Landscapes (Fence, 2007). She is the founder of the conference Thinking Its Presence: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Race, Creative Writing, and Artistic and Aesthetic Practices. A recipient of the 2010 Howard Foundation Award and a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s 2020 Four Quartets Prize, she has taught at the New School for Social Research, Goddard College, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the University of Montana-Missoula, and is now the Henry G. Lee ’37 professor of English at Pomona College.

Kien Lam is the author of “Extinction Theory,” winner of the 2021 National Poetry Series (University of Georgia Press). He received his MFA from Indiana University and is the Kundiman SoCal co-chair. Poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Republic, The Nation, and elsewhere. He lives in Los Angeles where he is currently working on a novel.

Dean Rader has authored or co-edited twelve books, including the poetry collection Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry and Works & Days, which won the T. S. Eliot Prize. Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly, appeared in 2023 from Copper Canyon. He is a professor at the University of San Francisco and a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry.