About this Event
Celebrating Women's History Month, twelve incredible women writers from Los Angeles and beyond come together for a poetry river in the courtyard of the Wende Museum for the Culver City Book Festival! What is a poetry river? It's a reading where each poet reads one piece at a time and where each poet's reading flows into the other. Come hear as this diverse lineup shares their perspectives on womanhood, women's rights, femininity and the divine feminine, history and culture, contemporary politics, and more!
About the participants:
Born in San Francisco, raised in San José, Barrio Horseshoe, Lorna Dee Cervantes was a self-taught activist by fifteen, taught herself how to run her own printing press and was the founding editor/publisher of MANGO Publications at twenty, and author of the American Book Award-winning EMPLUMADA at twenty-four. A XícanIndX poet (Chumash/Purépecha), Cervantes (PhD/ABD, History of Consciousness) was professor of English for twenty years at the University of Colorado, Boulder, serving as Director of Creative Writing. Cervantes has held faculty positions at the University of Houston, the University of California, Berkeley, where she has served as a UC Regents Lecturer in the English department, and as a Visiting Writer at Yale, Vassar, and others. Awarded two NEA Fellowships, two Pushcart Prizes, a Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest Award, state arts grants, and numerous awards for six books of poetry including her recent collection, April on Olympia, Cervantes has presented her poetry at hundreds of campuses, venues and countries over the past fifty years. Her poems have appeared in hundreds of anthologies and publications (Norton, Heath, Penguin, Poetry). Her newest solo collection, FIRE: Poems Against Pandemic, is forthcoming from El Martillo Press (2026).
Alyesha Wise is an award-winning, published poet, educator & speaker from Camden, N.J. Currently residing in LA, she is the Director of Programming for Street Poets, Inc., an organization mostly serving juvenile injustice-involved youth with mentorship and arts programming. Alyesha has been featured on platforms and in publications such as OWN TV, BET, LA Times, Bustle, Afropunk, PBS, Buzzfeed and more. Other collabs include the ACLU, The Shabazz Center, The Nantucket Project, Brave New Films and the Google Interstellar Project. Ron Howard once wrote about Alyesha's work, "Very Powerful."
Tanzila “Taz” Ahmed is a political strategist, storyteller, and artist creating at the intersection of counternarratives and culture-shifting as a South Asian American Muslim 2nd-gen woman. Her latest poetry collection Grasping at This Planet Just to Believe (Writ Large Projects, 2024) was written over ten years of poetry-a-day for Ramadan meditating on spirituality and resilience in difficult times.
Eve Wood is a Los Angeles-based writer, artist and art critic. Her writing and poetry has been widely published in magazines and literary journals such as The New Republic, Best American Poetry 1997,The Denver Quarterly, North American Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Santa Monica Review, Poetry, The Seattle Review, and many others. She holds a BFA and MFA (1992, 1994) from California Institute of the Arts and an MFA from UC Irvine (1996) in creative writing. She is the recipient of a Jacob Javits Fellowship and a California Community Foundation Fellowship. Her drawings and paintings have been exhibited nationally and internationally in galleries such as Susanne Vielmetter, Western Project, Ochi Projects, and Track 16 Gallery, which currently represents her. She is the author and/or illustrator of eight collections of poetry and chapbooks. Her forthcoming four-part collection of poems, Diane Arbus Goes Shopping will be published by DoppelHouse Press.
Jasmine Williams is an actress, poet, & creator from South Central Los Angeles. She is a graduate of San Francisco State University, where she received her B.A. in Dramatic Arts & Playwriting. She has been featured on HBO, TV One, & All Def Digital, just to name a few. She is currently one of the hosts of "Da Poetry Lounge", one of the largest spoken word and open mic venues in the country. Jasmine creates art to inspire and amplify the voices of those brave enough to be heard.
Macondo fellow Margaret Elysia Garcia is the author of the poetry collection the daughterland (El Martillo Press, 2023), of the short story collection Graft (Tolsun Books, 2022), and the poetry chapbooks Iconistas!, and Burn Scars, (Lit Kit Collective, 2025, 2022). She’s the co-editor of the anthology Red Flag Warning: Mutual Aid and Survival in California’s Fire Country (AK Press, 2025). Her second short story collection Chicana Noir and Other Stories will be published in 2026 by El Martillo Press. She's the recipient of Chapman University's non-tuition fellowship for Creative Writing.
Teresa Mei Chuc was born in Saigon, Vietnam. Shortly after the Vietnam War, Chuc, her mother, and her brother were granted political asylum and settled in Pasadena, California. Her father remained in a Vietnamese “reeducation camp” for nine years. Chuc earned a BA in philosophy and credentials in primary and secondary education as well as an MFA in creative writing from Goddard College. She is the author of three collections of poetry: Red Thread (2012), Keeper of the Winds (2014), and Invisible Light (2018). Her many chapbooks include Truth is Black Rubber (2010), Year of the Hare (2013), and How One Loses Notes and Sounds (2016). Chuc’s poetry engages memory, trauma, healing, and her family’s particular history of the Vietnam War. In an interview with Rattle magazine, Chuc said of the poems in Red Thread, “I felt an almost urgent need to document my family’s experiences for them and for my children. … I felt that there was this big story about war and humanity and my family was part of it, not by choice but by chance.”
Briana Muñoz is a poet from Southern California. She is the author of Loose Lips (Prickly Pear Publishing, 2019) Everything is Returned to the Soil (FlowerSong Press, 2021), and Matriarchy: Sacred Poems (El Martillo Press, 2025). Her work has been published in the anthologies: Somos Xicanas, Reimagine America, and Beat Not Beat, as well as on websites and in literary journals: Cultural Daily, The Oakland Arts Review, Dryland Literary Journal, Angel City Review, and several other publications.
Jennifer Espinoza is a trans woman poet and the author of I Don’t Want to Be Understood (Alice James Books, 2024); There Should Be Flowers (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016); and i’m alive / it hurts / i love it (Boost House, 2014). A creative writing instructor, she lives in Riverside, California.
Kathleen Florence is a poet, performer and visual artist whose work spans screen, stage, and page. She is author of the award-winning play Who Killed the Curator and co-director of Poet Film Stage. Her work has been published in multiple journals and anthologies, including L.A.'s Cultural Daily, Paris Lit Up, NYC's Arteidolia and Maintenant issues 10 - 19 (Three Rooms Press). Her writing has been supported by Ontario and Canada Arts Council grants and a Valparaiso artist residency in Spain. Kathleen has performed at NYC's Poets House, L.A.'s Beyond Baroque, and Ottawa's Versefest, and her short films have screened at festivals in Los Angeles and Quebec City. Prayers With a Side of Cash is her debut poetry collection. She lives in Los Angeles.
Janet Gonzalez is a poet and spoken word artist who has brought her stories of the immigrant experience to the Los Angeles poetry scene for decades. Having featured and performed at venues such as Da Poetry Lounge and A Mic and Dim Lights, Flowers of Fire at Corazon del Pueblo and various colleges and universities, she was also a part of the Boom Crew with poets including: Nikki Blak, Kat Magill and Judy Holiday. In 2025, she hosted Santuario Open Mic at Mercado La Paloma.
Consuelo is an artivist, student, and Pushcart Prize nominee from the Inland Empire. Her debut poetry book, Water Damage, is published through Riot of Roses Publishing House, and it explores divinity, mental health, queerness, and Chicanisma. You can find her at open mics across the IE and LA, experimental art shows, your local public library, or spiritual apparitions.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
The Wende Museum, 10808 Culver Boulevard, Culver City, United States
USD 0.00
