LA Times Festival of Books Offsite
Sunday, April 27
Doors: 4pm
Event: 4:30pm
at 2220 Arts+Archives
Free/RSVP
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Poet Ruben Quesada hosts an offsite reading in association with the LA Times Festival of Books, with writers Carribean Fragoza, Luivette Resto, Dan O’Brien, Colby Cotton, and Nik De Dominic.
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Ruben Quesada is an editor, a translator and poet. He edited the award-winning anthology Latinx Poetics. His writing appears in The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, The Believer, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from the Jentel Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He teaches in the low residency MFA programs at Antioch University-Los Angeles. His new poetry collection, Brutal Companion, won the Barrow Street Press Editors Prize.
Carribean Fragoza is a fiction and nonfiction writer from South El Monte, CA. Her collection of stories Eat the Mouth That Feeds You was published in 2021 by City Lights and was a finalist for a 2022 PEN Award. Her co-edited compilation of essays, East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte was published by Rutgers University Press and her collection of essays Writing Home: New Terrains of California is forthcoming with Angel City Press. She has published in Harper’s Bazaar, The New York Times, Zyzzyva, Alta, BOMB, Huizache, KCET, the Los Angeles Review of Books, ArtNews, and Aperture Magazine. She is the Prose Editor at Huizache Magazine and Creative Nonfiction and Poetry Editor at Boom California, a journal of UC Press. Fragoza is the founder and co-director of South El Monte Arts Posse, an interdisciplinary arts collective. She is a 2023 Whiting Literary Award recipient and Creative Writing faculty at California Institute of the Arts.
Luivette Resto is an award-winning poet, a mother of three revolutionary humans, and a middle school English teacher. She was born in Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico, and was proudly raised in the Bronx, New York. She is a CantoMundo and Macondo Fellow. Her books of poetry include Unfinished Portrait (2008) and Ascension (2013), both published by Tía Chucha Press, as well as Living on Islands Not Found on Maps (FlowerSong Press, 2022). Her work has been mentioned in the LA Times and Ms. Magazine, and her work has been published in North American Review. Resto is the associate editor of Tía Chucha Press, and she serves as the President of the Board of Trustees at Beyond Baroque. She lives in the San Gabriel Valley in Los Angeles.
Dan O’Brien is a poet, playwright, and nonfiction writer whose recognition for poetry includes the UK’s Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, and for playwriting a Guggenheim Fellowship and two PEN America Awards. He has published six collections of poetry in the US and in the UK, including the prize-winning War Reporter, praised in The Guardian as “a masterpiece of truthfulness and feeling.” His latest collections are Survivor’s Notebook (Acre Books) and Flying on Easter (Poetry London). O’Brien lives in Los Angeles.
Colby Cotton is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. A graduate of the MFA Writing Program at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, he is a recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. His work appears or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Copper Nickel, the Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, and Best New Poets among others. Originally from upstate New York, he lives in Los Angeles.
Nik De Dominic is a poet and essayist. Work appears in DIAGRAM, Bennington Review, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. He is an Associate Professor of Writing at the University of Southern California, where he co-directs the Dornsife Prison Education Project. De Dominic is the Poetry Editor of the New Orleans Review and lives in Los Angeles.