Tuesday, September 20, 2016

Altadena Library Presents Poetry: The People’s Art

Poets Victoria Chang and Blas Falconer

Poetry Reading, Open Mic and Q&A featuring multi-award winning poets Victoria Chang and Blas Falconer. Saturday, October 22 from 1:00 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. at the Altadena Library. Open mic at 1:00 p.m., followed by readings and a Q&A with guest poets.

Spoken poetry is a little like jazz improvisation as poets improvise new color and meaning into the text that the reader won’t find on the written page. – Saeed Jones

This promises to be an electrical combination of two well-loved master poets. One critic describes Victoria Chang’s work as “rueful wit and sense of irony undercut any sense of self-righteousness.” Latino poet, editor, and memoirist, Blas Falconer’s work is described as “stunning, lyrical, fierce, and elegant.” As Falconer puts it, “poetry offers the potential to say what cannot be said in life.”

Victoria Chang‘s fourth book of poems, Barbie Chang, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2018. Her most recent book, The Boss, was published by McSweeney’s and won the PEN Center USA Literary Award and a California Book Award. Other books are Salvinia Molesta and Circle. Her poems have appeared in many places such as Poetry, American Poetry Review, Paris Review, Best American Poetry. She has also published a picture book, Is Mommy?, by Beach Lane Books/Simon & Schuster and it was a New York Times Notable Book. She lives in Southern California and teaches at Chapman University.

Blas Falconer is the author of two poetry collections, The Foundling Wheel and A Question of Gravity and Light, and a coeditor of two essay collections, The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity and Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets. His awards include an NEA Fellowship, the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange, and a Tennessee Individual Artist Grant, and his poems have appeared in various literary journals, including Poetry, Poetry Northwest, and Prairie Schooner. He is the poetry editor for The Los Angeles Review and teaches in the low-residency MFA at Murray State University. His third full-length poetry collection, Forgive the Body This Failure (Four Way Books), is forthcoming in 2018.

Altadena Library is located at 600 E. Mariposa St., Altadena.

For more information, visit the Altadena Library in person or visit the library online at www.AltadenaLibrary.org.