Rubén Funkahuatl Guevara is a multifaceted Los Angeles artist. His autobiography, Confessions Of A Radical Chicano Doo-Wop Singer, published by the University of California Press, was selected as a Finalist for Best Autobiography in English by the International Latino Book Awards in 2019. Con Safos, a KCET Artbound episode based on his work, is nominated for a 2021 Emmy and was a recipient of two LA Press Club awards in 2022. He writes poetry to bathe in the fire of language, to share the incandescence of the human experience, and to live and die in grace.
féi hernandez is a trans, Inglewood-raised, formerly undocumented immigrant author of the full-length poetry collection Hood Criatura (Sundress Publications 2020). They are a Define American Fellow for 2021 and are currently the Board President of Gender Justice Los Angeles. They have been published in POETRY, Autostraddle, Immigrant Report, The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, Somewhere We are Human, TransLash Media & Narrative, and more. féi is the founder of The House of Etéreo and within it, Spirit School for the Divinely Gifted, a spiritual learning space for TGNC BIPOC spiritual practitioners developing their healing abilities.
Charles Linder is an internationally recognized American artist from Pittsburgh. Since 1988, he has lived in San Francisco, making art, curating projects and events, and reintroducing the art of the veloflaneur to the world. He found much success helming the galleries Rufasalon, and later Linc Art. Find him at charleslinder.com
Christina Brown is a poet and educator living in Long Beach, CA. She is the managing editor at Pear Shaped Press and cohost of The Bi Pod: A Queer Podcast. In her free time, you’ll find her writing pop culture think pieces no one asked for, experiencing deep, short-lived obsessions, and trying not to kill her houseplants. Her first poetry collection, Girl Teeth, published by innateDIVINITYpress, is available now.
Kaori Takamura is an artist from Tokyo, Japan. She lives and works in the US. A graphic designer by trade, Takamura captures the essence of long forgotten memories embodied in letter forms and familiar icons found in everyday objects. Her pieces have been shown at the Phoenix Art Museum, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum, the San Jose Museum of Textile and Quilts, Haneda International Airport,and numerous galleries in Washington D.C., Santa Fe, Park City, and Tokyo. www.kaoritakamura.com
Christina Cha is a writer and artist from California. Raised in Los Angeles, and San Francisco, she writes and travels internationally working on an upcoming collection. @christina.wj.cha
Susan Eileen Jizba – Growing up as the Black Sheep Liberal, raised by a family of Conservatives, Susan Eileen Jizba has always felt like an outsider. Susan is a LA based writer, photographer and artist who loves to create and is inspired by driven female characters that echo her personal quest to find her “own tribe”; a home in which she is heard, understood, and can fully express her own unique authentic voice. @theweaverofwords
Anna Talhami is a poet, filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist in Los Angeles. She has performed at the Emily Dickinson Museum, the El Paso border for Artist Uprising with One Billion Rising, WBAI’s Radio Bloomsday, the Theopoetics Conference, the Alena Museum and Root Division Gallery in San Francisco. Recent poetry appears in The Ekphrastic Review, Rattle Magazine, Hevria, and Life as Ceremony. annatalhami.com
Veronica Jauregui started writing poetry three years ago. In February 2020, her book (with M. Ait Ali) “Shower Intimate Poems”, was published. Her short films have been shown at the Echo Park film Center in the Alpha60 film group and in the LA Weekly Art Show at Bergamot Station. Her latest film is an adaptation for the poem City on the Second Floor by Matt Sedillo.
Erica Ryan Stallones is an interdisciplinary artist and educator in Los Angeles. Her work is research-based and intuitive, each in response to the nature of the space it is shown in. Primarily a painter, her practice includes performance, video, installation, writing, and other media. Recent solo exhibitions have been at General Projects (2020-2021), Elephant (2017) and Age of Art Multiples (2016). She made new work for PAM Artist Residencies (2018) and Oceanic Sound Art in Spain (2019), and has exhibited commissioned artwork for the Summer Solstice Festival in Copenhagen (2019). She runs an experimental art, film, and music label with her partner, Sun Ark Records, which seeks to engage in local /global communities, fostering creative collaboration.
Colleen Shoshana McKee, Riot Grrl and singer, is the author of six collections of poetry, memoir, and fiction: My Hot Little Tomato (Cherry Pie Press); Are We Feeling Better Yet? Women Speak About Health Care in America (PenUltimate Press); A Partial List of Things I Have Done for Money (JKP/The Saint Louis Projects); Nine Kinds of Wrong (JKP/The Saint Louis Projects); The Kingdom of Roly-Polys (Pedestrian Press); and Routine Bloodwork, a finalist for the Charlotte Mew Award from Headmistress Press. Currently she is working on a novel, Shlomo the Strong Man and the Uninvited Guests. She grew up speaking Yiddish in the woods in Missouri but now lives in Oakland, where she lives with six snails who do not consider themselves her pets. She works as an editor, writing teacher, and US citizenship test preparation teacher. ColleenShoshanaMcKee.com
Brian Sonia-Wallace is the West Hollywood City Poet Laureate and a national 2021 Laureate Fellow for the Academy of American Poets for LGBTQ+ poetry activism. In 2020, Harper Collins published his book The Poetry of Strangers: What I Learned Traveling America with a Typewriter, which US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera called, “flaming toward humanity…a text we have been dreaming of.” Brian has been published in Poets.org, 14poems, Rattle, Rolling Stone, LitHub, and The Guardian, and has spent the last decade writing poems for over 10,000 strangers based on their stories in a string of unlikely residencies, ranging from Amtrak to the Mall of America. Brian’s custom poetry business, RENT Poet, was featured on NPR’s How I Built This. Its motto is, “everyone needs a poem.” As an educator, Brian helps foster new writers through UCLA Extension Writers’ Program and Get Lit – Words Ignite. More at briansoniawallace.com and @rentpoet.
L Bogner is a writer and photographer living in Joshua Tree California. She spent her formative years in Cincinnati and studied fine arts at the University of Cincinnati. She moved to Los Angeles on a whim and worked as a fashion designer and costumer until her love for yoga and Pilates inspired her to open a beloved yoga studio that served her community for over twenty years. She closed her studio during Covid and made the move to the high desert. Her work explores folklore, mythology and fairy tales through a feminine narrative infused with irony and satire. She finds inspiration from the ridiculousness of social media, people watching, and eavesdropping Her work has appeared at Skylight Books, Salvation Theater, Space Cowboy Books Podcast, Live From Joshua Tree and La Matadora Gallery in Joshua Tree.
Susan Hayden is a poet, playwright, novelist and essayist. Her writing has appeared in the anthologies Los Angeles in The 1970s: Weird Scenes Inside the Goldmine (Rare Bird Lit); The Black Body (Seven Stories Press); I Might Be The Person You Are Talking To (Padua Playwrights Press) and elsewhere. She’s the creator/curator/producer of the monthly literary series Library Girl, now in its 13th year at Ruskin Group Theatre in Santa Monica, CA. In 2015, Hayden received the Bruria Finkel/Artist In The Community Volunteerism Award for her “significant contributions to the energetic discourse within Santa Monica’s arts community.” She is currently working on a hybrid book. The proud mother of singer-songwriter Mason Summit, she lives in Sunset Park with her husband, music journalist Steve Hochman.
Jennifer Lewis is a writer, editor, and the publisher of Red Light Lit. Her debut short story collection, The New Low, will be released in October 2022 by Nomadic Press, where her short story, “New Low,” was the winner of the Bindle Award in 2018. In 2020, she won the Los Angeles Review Flash Fiction award for “Put a Teat in It.” Her fiction has been published in Cosmonaut’s Avenue, ENTROPY, Fourteen Hills Press, The Los Angeles Press, Midnight Breakfast, sPARKLE & bLINK, and X-Ray Lit Mag. She received her MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University in May 2015. She teaches at The Writing Salon in San Francisco.
Claressinka Anderson’s poetry and essays have appeared in Autre Magazine, Chiron Review, bedfellows, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles (Carla), and elsewhere, as well as in the anthology Choice Words: Writers on Abortion (Haymarket Books, 2020). Through her ongoing collaborations with artists, her work engages the interstitial spaces of contemporary art, literature, and music. Anderson holds an MFA in writing and literature from Bennington College. Born and raised in London, she lives in Los Angeles and dreams about rain.
Steven Sachse was born in Germany and grew up in Los Angeles. He promptly left after graduating high school, moving to Santa Cruz, where he was fortunate to take a poetry class from William Everson (Brother Antonius), as well as a few art classes. After living on the East Coast and Orange County, he moved back to Los Angeles in 2014, where he began to write and paint once again. Mathematics and science influence both his writing and art, attempting to find balance between the left and right sides of his brain.
Terry Wolverton is author of eleven books of poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction, including Embers, a novel in poems, and Insurgent Muse: art and life at the Woman’s Building, a memoir. She has also edited fifteen literary compilations. She received a COLA Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles and a Fellowship in Poetry from the California Arts Council, among other honours. She is the founder of Writers At Work, a creative writing studio in Los Angeles, and Affiliate Faculty in the MFA Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles. http://terrywolverton.net
Bernadette McComish was born in a blizzard in New York with the gifts of premonition and manifestation, Bernadette McComish is an educator and fortuneteller. She earned an M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence, and an M.A. in TESOL from Hunter College. Her poems have appeared in The Cortland Review, Deluge, Bowery Gothic, Indolent, For Women Who Roar, Slipstream, Storyscape, Flypaper Magazine, Waxing and Waning, Persephone’s Daughter, Peregrine, and she was a finalist for the New Millennium Writers 41st poetry prize. She has two chapbooks— The Book of Johns, 2018 published by Dancing Girls Press, and Florence Nightingale’s Lost Log, 2021 published by Lily Poetry Review. She teaches High School in LA, and performs poetry and produces vaudeville performances with The Poetry Society of New York for their West Coast Chapter.
Ben Belknap is an artist and teacher who lives and works in Oakland, CA. He received a BA from The California College of Arts and Crafts in 2003. His work consists primarily of small-scale, richly glazed ceramic sculpture. Through his work as Glaze Production Manager at Leslie Ceramic Supply in Berkeley, he has developed a keen understanding of ceramics. In addition to using many glazes developed for his own use, Ben teaches workshops and classes about glaze technology and since 2010, makes custom glazes for clients in his home studio.
Brittany Delany was born in Boston, Massachusetts and is based in Los Angeles. She loves to research, teach and perform around the world. She has performed at CounterPulse, Highways Performance Space, Joshua Tree National Park, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Temescal Arts Center, among others. She is founding co-director of GROUND SERIES dance & social justice collective. She holds a BA in Dance from Wesleyan University.
Skippy is a designer and artist from Los Angeles. She holds a BA from the University of California at Channel Islands. Find her @bejabberzz
Leila Bilick’s poetry has been published in Soundings East and The Merrimack Review. She has an MA in English from UMass Boston, and works as a grant writer. She hails from the East Coast but is slowly and surely making Los Angeles her home. She has two daughters.
Aruni Wijesinghe is a project manager, ESL teacher, occasional sous chef and erstwhile belly dance instructor. A Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, her work has been published nationally and internationally in journals and anthologies. Her debut poetry collection, 2 Revere Place, is available at Moon Tide Press and booksellers everywhere.
The Los Angeles Press was founded by poet and performance artist Linda Ravenswood in 2018 – as a resource, gathering community, and beacon for emerging and established artists and writers from California, the West, and beyond. We produce books, journals, broadsides, live events, and collaborations.
Find us at thelosangelespress.com
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