About this Event
Beyond Baroque presents an evening with authors of What Books Press. The night features new work by Sean Bernard, Amy Elizabeth Davis, James Cushing, Celeste Goyer, Bill Mohr, and Paul Bergstraesser. Spanning fiction and poetry, these four books explore the creative process, memory, family, language, and the uncertainties of life. The authors will introduce their latest publications and share selections from their latest books.
Sean Bernard, Can Writing Be Taught & Other Novel Ideas
A singular novel exploring the dark and tender heart of literature, the challenges of writing, and the complicated relationship between a teacher and student, mentor and mentee. A M**der mystery unfolds at its center.
Amy Elizabeth Davis, Leaving the Grid
With careful attention to nature, climate, family, and politics, Leaving the Grid considers constraints and forms of freedom, exploring how we choose the paths we follow. Moving through memory, grief, the earth and its waters, the collection considers how we find agency, hope, and more nourishing ways to live.
James Cushing, Spoken in the Dark
Written in the years leading up to and during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, this collection of sixty poems draws on the American poetic traditions of Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, James Tate, and W. S. Merwin. Moving between pantoums, prose poems, and popular culture, the collection explores the shifting nature of identity and perception.
Celeste Boyer, In the Style of Falling
In these poems, the absurdity and mystery of the world become both beautiful and strangely comforting. Drawing on collage and surrealism, Boyer gives voice to unexpected subjects, from bread and postcards to hurricanes, creating a journey through the familiar and the inexplicable, guided by wit and wonder.
Bill Mohr, Remiges: Three Extended Poems (1985–2025)
A collection of three extended poems spanning four decades, Remiges brings together diaristic prose poetry and minimalist versification. Drawing on the experimental poetics of the Language school while following its own unconventional path, Mohr's work explores associative logic through sustained, playful, and unexpected poetic sequences.
Paul Bergstraesser, The Less Said encourages its readers to dive into the obsessive, darkly comic mind of the 60ish narrator, P—. He’s been diagnosed with terminal cansha, he calls it, and decides, along with his wife and college-age son, that a final celebration of life is in order. Over a single weekend, friends and family travel to a destination to fete P— one last time. The wrinkle: P—has hired a killer to dispatch him, the where and when unknown. Against this backdrop, P— compulsively records random memories from his life into a voice recorder, a request from his son. What emerges is an end-of-life story that deftly balances the play of irony and a heartbreaking humanity.
Doors Open: 5:30 PM I Readings: 6:00 PM
About the authors
Sean Bernard directs the BA Creative Writing Program at the University of La Verne. He studied creative writing at Arizona, Oregon State, and the Iowa Writers Workshop, and has received grants and fellowships from numerous groups including the National Endowment for the Arts. His novel, Studies in the Hereafter, was published in 2015, and his collection Desert sonorous was awarded the 2014 Juniper Prize. His prose has appeared in The Iowa Review, Santa Monica Review, The Common, Glimmer Train, The Gettysburg Review, and elsewhere. Sean Bermard Book: Can Writing Be Taught & Other Novel Ideas is a singular journey into the dark and tender heart of literature, wandering the minefields of the private act and the public surrender of writing and the fraught tension of a long, complex relationship between a teacher and student, mentor and mentee, lover and lover. Plus a M**der mystery spreading out from its center.
Amy Elizabeth Davis, a historian and poet who studied at Cornell and Columbia and grew up between Van Cortlandt Park’s forested land and the Hudson River in New York City. A longtime resident of Southern California, her poems have appeared in Tar River Poetry, December, The Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. She co-edited Written Here: The Community of Writers Poetry Review 2016 and was the recipient of a writing residency at Yefe Nof in autumn 2018.
James Cushing holds a doctorate in English from UC Irvine. From 1989 through 2020, when he retired, he taught literature and creative writing at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, and served as the community’s Poet Laureate 2008 – 2010. Cushing’s poems have appeared in many journals, and 35-year association with Cahuenga Press has resulted in seven full-length collections of poetry. James Cushing’s Collection: Spoken in the Dark is a collection of sixty poems which were written three years before and during the first days of the Covid-19 pandemic. These poems are rooted in the American tradition of Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, James Tate, and W. S. Merwin, but speaks in the language of the 21st century. Readers will find pantoums, prose-poems, references to popular culture, and an overall sense that Rimbaud was right when he said “I is someone else.”
Celeste Goyer is a poet and artist living in Los Angeles. Her New England childhood in Northampton, Massachusetts informs her work, as do the many years she spent in remote California desert and mountain towns. She edited a literary quarterly for 14 years and her work has appeared in numerous journals as well as anthologies, including Poetry Goes to the Movies from Beyond Baroque Books and Women in a Golden State, from Gunpowder Press.
Bill Mohr has worked as an editor, publisher, literary historian, and poet since the early 1970s. His books include Holdouts: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance 1948-1992 (University of Iowa Press; 2011) and a bilingual edition of poems, Pruebas Ocultas (Editores, Mexico; 2015). What Books will publish Remiges: Three Extended Poems in the fall of 2026.
Paul Bergstraesser’s prose and poetry have appeared in The Barcelona Review, The Portland Review, Another Chicago Magazine, and The American Journal of Poetry. He was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts prose fellowship and has been a finalist for the Autumn House Press fiction prize numerous times. He teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Wyoming and lives in Laramie with his wife and son.
About Beyond Baroque
is one of the United States' leading independent Literary | Arts Centers and public spaces dedicated to expanding the public's knowledge of poetry, literature and art through cultural events and community interaction. Founded in 1968 as an experimental literary magazine, Beyond Baroque is based out of the original City Hall building in Venice, California. The Center offers a diverse variety of literary and arts programming including readings and workshops. The building also houses a bookstore with a large collection of new poetry books for sale.
Livestream: If you can’t join us in person the event will be livestreamed on at the scheduled time of the event. If you are tuning in this way, no ticket purchase is necessary.
If you are attending in person, ticket purchase is required. Tickets will be available at the Beyond Baroque bookstore on the day of the event, but we recommend registering in advance through Eventbrite. Masks are encouraged while inside our center. Please arrive early.
Event attendees are expected to behave in a respectful and considerate manner while in our space. Beyond Baroque reserves the right to remove individuals from our events, virtual or otherwise, if they are not respecting the space, staff, fellow attendees, or performers.
Event venue & nearby stays
Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, 681 Venice Blvd, Los Angeles, United States
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