This Saturday: Beside the City of the Angels: A Long Beach Poetry Festival

This weekend, nearby Long Beach celebrates poetry with the first ever Beside the City of Angels: A Long Beach Poetry Festival.

Donna Hilbert describes the initial inspiration in a post for the Belmont Shores/Naples Patch:

Standing around after a poetry reading in early spring with my good friends, the exceptional poets, Anna Badua, Clint Margrave, Kevin Lee, Paul Tayyar and Tamara Madison, all of us chatting about how much we love poetry and how much we love Long Beach, when one of us said, “We should have a Long Beach poetry festival.” It was like being a kid again when someone says, “Let’s put on a show!”

Only this time there would be no costumes or puppets and we would have bona fide talent. Thus, Beside the City of Angels: A Long Beach Poetry Festival was born. This is a free event, open to the public. In addition to the readings, there will be the opportunity to buy books and have them signed by the authors as well as rub elbows with editors and publishers.

The impressive line-up includes some of my former teachers and fellow students from my undergraduate days at CSULB:

Erika Ayon
Amanda J. Bradley
John Brantingham
David Caddy
Jeff Epley
Dorothea Grossman (with trombonist Michael Vlatkovich)
Raymond P. Hammond
David Hernandez
Steve Kowit
Cassandra Love
Rick Lupert
Bill Mohr
Joan Jobe Smith
Clifton Snider
G. Murray Thomas
Mehnaz Turner
Fred Voss
Charles Harper Webb
Grace Zabriskie
Rafael Zepeda

For more information, visit their website.




And go!

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