A Very Public Feeling, An AWP Offsite

Join Los Angeles Review of Books for A Very Public Feeling, a literary party during AWP, the biggest writer’s conference of the year. On Thursday, March 27, at 7 p.m., we invite you to join us to celebrate two of the things we love most: writing and feeling. Whether it’s crying on a park bench, taking your shoes off at TSA, or reading your poetry in front of strangers, A Very Public Feeling is the sense that being perceived is all a part of the collective soup of human experience.

Hear from LARB contributors and enjoy a drink at the Granada Buildings, a historic epicenter of creativity and the arts, and the home of LARB here in Los Angeles. With readings from LARB contributors Bryan Byrdlong, Victoria Chang, Tongo Eisen-Martin, K. Iver, Lauren Markham, Chris Molnar, Maya Popa, and Greta Rainbow.

Drinks will be provided by Maker Wines. Maker is premium wine with a personal story. The company was founded in 2019 by Sarah Hoffman, Kendra Kawala, and Zoe Victor and partners with women and underrepresented winemakers to put their award-winning, dry wines into eco-friendly cans. Each can shares the signature and story of the producer who crafted it. Maker is the highest rated canned wine, ever – winning 50+ Gold Medals at major bottle competitions and has 25+ wines with a 90 pt or higher score.

This event is free and open to the public. RSVP is encouraged as space is limited. Street parking is available. The event is located about 10 minutes from the Los Angeles Convention Center.

______________________

Bryan Byrdlong is a Black poet from Chicago, Illinois. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from the Helen Zell Writers Program. He has been published in Guernica Magazine, The Kenyon Review, and Poetry Magazine, among others. Bryan received a 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. He is currently a PhD student in Creative Writing at USC in Los Angeles. His debut collection of poetry, Strange Flowers is forthcoming from Yes Yes Books.

Victoria Chang’s most recent book of poems is With My Back to the World, published in 2024 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the U.S. and Corsair/Little Brown in the U.K. It received the Forward Prize in Poetry for Best Collection. A few of her other books include The Trees Witness Everything, OBIT, and Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Chowdhury International Prize in Literature, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and Director of Poetry@Tech.

Originally from San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin is a poet, movement worker, and educator. His curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. He is the author of Someone’s Dead Already, Heaven Is All Goodbyes, Waiting Behind Tornados for Food, and Blood on the Fog. In 2020, he co-founded Black Freighter Press to publish revolutionary works. He was San Francisco’s eighth poet laureate.

K. Iver was born in Mississippi. Their debut collection Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco won the 2022 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry from Milkweed Editions, selected by Tyehimba Jess. Short Film won the Wisconsin Literary Award and was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the Lambda Literary Awards. It was named a Best Book of 2023 by the New York Public Library. Iver has received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Sewanee Writers Conference, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. They have a Ph.D. in Poetry from Florida State University. 

Lauren Markham is a writer based in California whose work regularly appears in outlets such as Harper's, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine and VQR, where she is a contributing editor. She is the author of the award-winning The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life, the critically-acclaimed A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging (2024) and the recently-released Immemorial.

Chris Molnar is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in such outlets as The Believer, BOMB, and Los Angeles Review of Books. He is co-founder of Archway Editions, as well as the Writer’s Block, the first independent bookstore in Las Vegas. His first novel, Heaven's Oblivion, is forthcoming in 2025. He lives in New York City.

Maya C. Popa is most recently the author of Wound is the Origin of Wonder (W.W. Norton 2022; Picador 2023) named one of the Guardian’s Best Books of Poetry and a finalist for the Levis Reading Prize. American Faith (Sarabande 2019) was runner-up in the Kathryn A. Morton Prize judged by Ocean Vuong and was awarded the North American Book Prize in 2020. She is previously the author of three chapbooks published in the US and the UK. She is the Poetry Reviews Editor of Publishers Weekly and teaches poetry at NYU. She holds a PhD on the role of wonder in poetry from Goldsmiths, University of London and is at work on a book on literary wonder. Her newsletter, Poetry Today, is one of Substack's best-selling literature publications. She works closely with established and emerging writers through Conscious Writers Collective, her online writing platform and community.

Greta Rainbow is a Seattle-born, Brooklyn-based writer and researcher. Her essays, criticism, interviews, and fiction have appeared in the Cleveland Review of Books, Dirt, Hobart, Interview Magazine, SSENSE, and Vulture, among others. She is an editor at The Creative Independent, a research editor at Bustle Digital Group, and a contributing art critic at the New York Review of Architecture. For LARB, she has written about staring at her laptop, La Chimera, and "Voice Notes" cinema. She is working on her first book.