Orange Coast Review Publication Party: this Thursday

Celebrate this year's new issue of the Orange Coast Review with a reception featuring a reading and live music in the Arts Pavilion Courtyard of Orange Coast College on Thursday May 8 from 5-7 pm.

The reading will feature writers from this year's issue: Greg November and Lauren Johnson will read their fiction and Justin Rigamonti, Abby Gambrel, Rick Sims, and Kelly Swartz will read poetry. Linda May, a writer from Silverado Canyon, will read from her personal essay about last year's wildfires.

Local artists whose work will be on exhibit: Noriho Uriu, Jim Koch, Daney Saylor, Marilou Hogeboom, Robert Norton, James Ridley, Sharon Brown, Susan D’Zmura, Tootie Nienow, Tony Almaguer, Carole Williams Gelker, Sheryl Smith Seltzer, and Jared Millar.

Cornel Bonca, writing in the OC Weekly in 2005, had this to say about the journal:

"Small literary magazines, which tend to pay neither their contributors nor the editors who put them together, are labors of love. But that doesn’t mean they’re amateurish. With the paying market for serious fiction, poetry and artwork reduced to maybe a dozen publications nationwide (The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, etc.), “little magazines” have for a long time been the lifeblood for young writers on their way up and even well-published writers whose work doesn’t fit into established modes. They soak up a tremendous amount of the country’s most independent creative juices and, in the case of the Orange Coast Review, showcase some genuinely affecting work by mostly local talent operating at a surprisingly high artistic level."