About this Event
Join us at Village Well Books & Coffee for a poetry reading centered on sunny California!
Co-hosts L. A. Johnson and Elizabeth Metzger are joined by Lynne Thompson, Allison Benis White, Callie Siskel, and Vandana Khanna for readings and conversations about their latest works.
About the participants:
Lynne Thompson served as Los Angeles’ 4th Poet Laureate and received a Poet Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. She is the author of four collections of poetry, Beg No Pardon, winner of the Perugia Press Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award; Start With A Small Guitar (What Books Press); Fretwork, winner of the 2019 Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize selected by Jane Hirshfield; and Blue on a Blue Palette (BOA Editions, 2024.) A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Thompson is the recipient of multiple awards including the George Drury Smith Award for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles, the Tucson Literary Festival Poetry Prize, and the Steven Dunn Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from the Summer Literary Series (Kenya) and the Vermont Studio Center. Thompson’s recent work can be found or is forthcoming in the literary journals Best American Poetry 2020, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, and Georgia Review.
Allison Benis White is the author of A Magnificent Loneliness (forthcoming in 2025 from Four Way Books), The Wendys, Please Bury Me in This, winner of the Rilke Prize, and Small Porcelain Head, selected by Claudia Rankine for the Levis Prize in Poetry. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, New England Review, Pushcart Prize XLI & XLVII: Best of the Small Presses, and elsewhere. She has received honors and awards from the Poetry Society of America, the San Francisco Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and Poets & Writers magazine. She is an associate professor in the Creative Writing Department at the University of California, Riverside.
Callie Siskel is the author of Two Minds (W. W. Norton) and Arctic Revival, selected by Elizabeth Alexander for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. Her poetry appears in The Paris Review, The Atlantic, and the New York Review of Books. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is a poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review Books.
Born in New Delhi, India, Vandana Khanna is a writer, educator, and editor. Her third collection of poetry, Burning Like Her Own Planet, was recently published by Alice James Books. Her previous books have won the Crab Orchard Review First Book Prize, The Miller Williams Poetry Prize, the Diode Editions Chapbook Competition, and the Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in publications such as Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day, The New Republic, Guernica, New England Review and The Penguin Book of Indian Poetry.
Elizabeth Metzger's second full-length collection Lying In came out with Milkweed Editions in April, 2023. Her next book is coming out with Milkweed in late 2025. She is also the author of The Spirit Papers, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry, as well as the chapbooks The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death and Bed, winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, NYRB, The Paris Review, Poetry Magazine, The Nation, APR, and Poem-a-Day.
L. A. Johnson is from California. She is the author of the chapbook Little Climates (Bull City Press, 2017). She holds a PhD from the University of Southern California, where she is currently a Mellon Humanities and University of the Future postdoctoral fellow. The winner of the 2022 Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, the 2022 Greensboro Review Poetry Prize, the 2021 Arts & Letters Rumi Poetry Prize, and the 2021 Gregory Djanikian Scholarship by Adroit Journal, her poems appear in The Atlantic, American Poetry Review, Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Village Well Books & Coffee, 9900 Culver Boulevard, Culver City, United States
USD 0.00
