Author’s Note: This essay originally published in Lana Turner Journal, January 2018. Thank you to Editor David Lau for permission to reprint. A People’s History of Chicago is 132 pages,…
Mike Sonksen
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Creative Nonfiction / EssayCultureList
Listing Literary Los Angeles: Part 1
by Mike Sonksen March 14, 2019[Author’s Note: In the coming weeks I will be sharing other lists composed by not only me but voices I know from the Bay Area, Chicago, Seattle, New York City…
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Featured Image Credit: Obi Kaufmann Books Discussed: The California Field Atlas, By Obi Kaufman DTLA/37: Downtown Los Angeles in 37 Stories, By Yennie Cheung & Kathryn E. McGee In the…
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CultureFeaturedLiteraturePoetry
Redefining LA Poetry: Robin Coste Lewis and the Emerging Poets
by Mike Sonksen May 17, 2017Compton-born Dr. Robin Coste Lewis was just appointed the new Los Angeles Poet Laureate. Winner of the 2015 National Book Award and a Provost’s Fellow in Poetry and Visual Studies…
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LiteraturePoetry
Pacific Standard Time: the Surf Noir Poetics of Kevin Opstedal
by Mike Sonksen February 7, 2017Poet Kevin Opstedal was born in Venice in 1956 and after living his first two decades there he made his way up the coast to Santa Cruz where he’s spent…
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Current EventsLiteratureReview
Other Books and A Few More After That
by Mike Sonksen October 18, 2016It’s no secret that Literary Los Angeles is hotter than the Mojave. The following essay is a dispatch spotlighting a new bookstore and several recent books. The latest great news…
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Creative Nonfiction / EssayCulture
Marguerite Navarrete: A Teacher Ahead of Her Time
by Mike Sonksen October 12, 2016Some people are so influential and instrumental in our development that we do not even recognize their magnitude until they are gone. I first realized this when my grandfather died…
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CultureLiterature
Learning from Masters: Ray Bradbury and Richard Wyatt Jr. at Los Angeles High School
by Mike Sonksen August 4, 2016Ray Bradbury will always be known as one of the City of Angels most famous native authors. Similar to our most well-known poet, Charles Bukowski, Bradbury graduated from Los Angeles…
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CultureLiterature
Thomas McGrath’s Los Angeles and the Pursuit of Academic Freedom
by Mike Sonksen July 14, 2016Thanks to the efforts of Los Angeles Poet Laureate Luis Rodriguez, two poetry anthologies published in the last year and a few recently written histories on Los Angeles Poetry, there…
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Literature
Douglas Brown: The Bridge between the Avant-Garde and Formalism
by Mike Sonksen February 29, 2016Douglas Brown is a poet at the intersection of the avant-garde and tradition. Mixing experimental work with formalism, his work tackles three generations of his family history from his mother…