Friday, April 24, 2026

Where Fire Survivors Come for Help, a Poet Is Coming to Listen

Right: Carla Rachel Sameth [photo by Hilary Jones]

A free workshop series for Eaton Fire survivors reaches its final session Saturday at Altadena’s recovery hub — led by the community’s own former poet laureate

Carla Sameth knows this community. She served as Altadena’s Co-Poet Laureate for Community Events for two years, running readings and programs in the same foothills neighborhoods that the Eaton Fire tore through in January 2025. On Saturday, she is coming back — not to a library or a school auditorium, but to the building where fire survivors go to find a case manager, a housing counselor, or a path through the paperwork of losing everything.

The San Gabriel Valley Phoenix Poets is holding its final free, public poetry workshop at the Eaton Fire Collaboratory, 540 W. Woodbury Road, Altadena, at 11:30 a.m. Saturday. The workshop is led by Sameth, who served as Altadena’s Co-Poet Laureate for Community Events from 2022 to 2024 alongside Peter J. Harris and received a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. It is free and open to anyone directly or indirectly affected by the fire.

The series is the work of Raffi Joe Wartanian, the inaugural Poet Laureate of Glendale, who launched San Gabriel Valley Phoenix Poets after he received a 2025 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship to support poetry programming in communities touched by the Eaton Fire. The project has now completed eight of nine planned workshops — three at schools, two at Pasadena City College, and three at the Collaboratory. “Literal and figurative fires can silence us,” Wartanian said in a statement issued by the organization, “so aftermath moments like these are critical to elevate overlooked perspectives and stay rooted in the complex truths of what communities endure and process.”

Earlier workshops in the Collaboratory series were led by two other poets with deep ties to this place: Teresa Mei Chuc, who grew up in Pasadena and Altadena and served as Altadena’s Co-Poet Laureate Editor-in-Chief from 2018 to 2020, led the February 28 session. Linda Ravenswood, the Los Angeles-based poet and founder of The Los Angeles Press, led the March 21 workshop. The series was a collaboration between San Gabriel Valley Phoenix Poets and Light Bringer Project, the Pasadena-based arts nonprofit founded in 1990 that serves as fiscal receiver for the emerging program.

The workshops fed something larger. According to organizers, 65 writers submitted approximately 204 poems for the program’s inaugural anthology and scholarship fund before the April 1 deadline. Three student poets will receive cash prizes — $1,000 for first place, $700 for second, $300 for third — with winners to be announced in early summer. The anthology, both print and digital, is still in development.

Sameth’s books include the memoir One Day on the Gold Line, the chapbook What Is Left, and the 2024 poetry collection Secondary Inspections. A Pasadena Rose Poet and Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, she teaches creative writing to high school and college students, incarcerated youth, and other diverse communities.

The Collaboratory, which opened in October 2025 at the Altadena address that sits near the border of Pasadena, is more than a backdrop for Saturday’s session. It is where the Long Term Recovery Group, Community Recovery Group, and Leadership Council of the Eaton Fire Collaborative meet survivors directly. Poetry is happening in the same room as the hard work of rebuilding.

The workshop is free. No registration is required. For more information, visit www.sgvphoenixpoets.org.