The seventeenth annual newer poets program is guest curated by three acclaimed poets: Eloise Klein Healy, Arktoi Press; Suzanne Lummis, Los Angeles Poetry Festival; and Gail Wronsky, professor, Loyola Marymount University and member, Glass Table Collective.
Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo is a poet, high school teacher, and native Angelino. She is creator and host of Beyond Baroque’s reading series Hitched, co-founder of The Splinter Generation, and was nominated for a 2009 Pushcart Award. Her work has been published in The Los Angeles Review, PALABRA, and Writers at Work's Poem of the Month.
Mia Carli was born in Corona, CA. She studied English and Political Science at Loyola Marymount University and is now getting her M.F.A. in Poetry at the University of Iowa.
Paul Lieber produces and hosts Why Poetry on KPFK radio in L.A. and Santa Barbara. His poetry collection, Chemical Tendencies, published by Tebot Bach, was a finalist in the MSR poetry contest and received an honorable mention in the Allen Ginsberg Contest. His poems have appeared in the Patterson Review, Askew, Alimentum, New York Quarterly, Solo and many other journals. Paul works as an actor and has performed on and off-Broadway and in numerous films and TV shows.
Angela Peñaredondo was born in the Philippines and grew up in Los Angeles and San Francisco. She is a recipient of a UCLA Community Access Scholarship in Poetry and a Fishtrap Fellowship. She has been featured in various literary venues such as The World Stage, Avenue 50, West Hollywood Book Fair and The Los Angeles Poetry Festival’s Night and the City. Currently, she is working on a collection of poetry and will soon start a graduate program in creative writing this year.
Verónica Reyes is a Chicana jota from East LA. Her poems give voice to her Mexican-American communities. She was a resident at Ragdale Foundation, Vermont Studio Center and a NEA fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her poetry has been published in Calyx, Feminist Studies, ZYZZYVA, North American Review and The New York Quarterly.
Rolland Vasin, third-generation American writer (pen name Vachine) is published in the journals Open Minds Quarterly, Gnome, and Found and Lost and is an active open-mic-reader at venues from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Big Sur, California. He has featured at Los Angeles’ World Stage, The Rapp Saloon, and Cobalt Cafe, among others, and dabbles in improvisational theater and stand-up comedy for which we was recognized as the Laugh Factory’s 1992 3rd Funniest CPA in Los Angeles. As a day job, Rolland's CPA corporation audits youth and family charities.
