
(L-R) Brent Ameneyro, Lory Bedikian, Blas Falconer, Cherene Sherrard, and Douglas Manuel (Photo – Vroman’s Bookstore)
Enjoy an afternoon of poetry featuring your favorite local poets on September 7 at 2:00 pm at Vroman’s Bookstore.
By News Desk
Brent Ameneyro is the author of the collection A Face Out of Clay (The Center for Literary Publishing, 2024) and the chapbook Puebla (Ghost City Press, 2023). His E-Lit has been selected for the 2022 Education and Electronic Literature Conference and Art Festival in Italy, as well as for film festivals in Denmark, Barcelona, Canada, and Los Angeles. He was the 2022-2023 Letras Latinas Poetry Coalition Fellow at the University of Notre Dame. He currently serves as the poetry editor at The Los Angeles Review.
Lory Bedikian’s second book Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body won the 2023 Prairie Schooner/Raz-Shumaker Book Prize in Poetry forthcoming September 2024 from the University of Nebraska Press and her first collection The Book of Lamenting won the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. Several of Bedikian’s poems received the First Prize Award in the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry as part of the 2022 Nimrod Literary Awards. Her work is published in Tin House, Gulf Coast, The Los Angeles Review, BOULEVARD, The Adroit Journal, Orion, wildness, and was featured on Pádraig Ó Tuama’s Poetry Unbound podcast. Her poem “The Mechanic,” is included in the anthology Border Lines: Poems of Migration, KNOPF, 2020. Bedikian’s manuscript-in-progress received a 2021 grant from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. New work appears in Massachusetts Review’s “Revisiting WOMAN: An Issue, 50 Years Later.” Bedikian earned an MFA from the University of Oregon. She teaches poetry workshops in Los Angeles and elsewhere.
Blas Falconer is the author of four books, including Rara Avis (Four Way Books 2024), as well as the coeditor of two anthologies, Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets and The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity. The recipient of a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers, he teaches in San Diego State University’s MFA program and is the editor in chief at Poetry International Online.
Cherene Sherrard is a poet, scholar, and essayist. She is the author of two poetry collections, Vixen and Grimoire, and an award-winning chapbook, Mistress, Reclining. Recent creative nonfiction and poetry have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Hidden Compass, Ecotone, Terrain.org, Blackbird, Water~Stone Review, and elsewhere. She is a professor of English at Pomona College
Douglas Manuel was born in Anderson, Indiana and now resides in Whittier, California. He received a BA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University, an MFA in poetry from Butler University, and a PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Testify (2017) and Trouble Funk (2023). His poems and essays can be found in numerous literary journals, magazines, and websites, most recently Zyzzyva, Pleiades, and the New Orleans Review. He has traveled to Egypt and Eritrea with The University of Iowa’s International Writing Program to teach poetry. A recipient of the Dana Gioia Poetry Award and a fellowship from the Borchard Foundation Center on Literary Arts, he is an assistant professor of English at Whittier College and teaches at Spalding University’s low-res MFA program.
Local Poetry Day September 7, 2024 2:00 pm Location Vroman's Bookstore 695 E. Colorado Blvd Pasadena, CA 91101









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