‘We must continue to show up, speak up, be heard and thrive in our joys,’ writes Executive Editor Luivette Resto. ‘This is truly a movement not a moment.’ Read on!
Category Archive: It’s a Movement Not a Moment
‘The biggest challenge we are living now—during the worst pandemic in 100 years—is to stretch the collective imaginations to the creative means needed to overcome the current economic and political crisis,’ writes former Los Angeles Poet Laureate Luis J. Rodriquez in his Letter to L.A.
‘Better to not know what hanged me.’ A preview of Cassandra Lane’s poignant, potent and exquisitely crafted forthcoming memoir, discovering her mysterious and painful family past and reflecting on what it means to be a Black mother, with an introduction by F. Douglas Brown.
Through an imagined affair between his grandfather and Lucille Ball, bestselling author Darin Strauss shines a spotlight on the dualities of desire and love, infidelity and marriage, fiction and reality–and traces the ongoing impact of the revolutionary ‘I Love Lucy’ star and studio mogul.
Twenty years after its original publication, Deanne Stillman’s California cult classic, TWENTYNINE PALMS, is even more relevant and has just been optioned. A look back at an epic true tale of murder, Marines and the Mojave, plus a Q&A examining the book’s place in our cultural landscape.
‘Gossip Girl’ meets ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ in this dramatic debut YA novel about a group of friends at a prep school in an affluent L.A. suburb. An excerpt plus Q&A revealing how the title touches on issues of Asian-American profiling, class and privilege that we are reckoning with in the U.S. today.
For Danielle Broadway, the current moment feels like a suspension of time between victory and destruction, much like in ‘Avengers: Infinity War,’ when Scarlet Witch seemingly stops Thanos and saves the universe. Yet, as she shares in her essay, to be marginalized in America is to know that there’s a chance that Thanos will snap his fingers or, off-screen, that Trump may return with his minions.
In the wake of the pandemic, arts organizations have been hard hit, including L.A.’s Beyond Baroque. A conversation between Executive Director Quentin Ring and board VP Shonda Buchanan on how the literary home to inaugural poet Amanda Gorman has survived in the age of Covid-19 and continued to break barriers for creatives in Los Angeles.
‘Your name is not / an apology, the sound kowtowing / to ears accustomed to Jennifers / and Debbies. You are a namesake / for a temple rising / in the Chao Phraya River / face to the morning sun. Your name / is mantra, meant for repetition.’ A poem in tribute to Vice-President Kamala Harris and to girls and women like her with names that are hard to pronounce and mean so much by Aruni Wijesinghe.
‘Are we not deserving of nice things? / Twenty families in search for more / The neighbors kick in the door / The glass cuts through skin pores / California Highway Patrol rolls in with hogties & roars.’ Poet and activist Iris De Anda reminds us that housing rights are human rights, as movements in L.A. fight for fair and just shelter while home and rental prices increase. Her words reclaim the land we stand on.
As families wrestle with unforeseen stresses and responsibilities during the Covid-19 pandemic, a writer revisits her son’s early years—and the uncertainties of parenting through trauma.