Air Release Party

In this elemental issue of LARB Quarterly, no. 39: Air, we aimed to look at the world from new vantage points. Writers took note of what was in the sky—the invisible pollutants and the all-too-visible police helicopters that patrol Los Angeles—and on the ways air, or breath, sustains or stifles us, the way it can bridge or divide one person from another.

Join us to celebrate the launch of our new issue at Stories on October 18 with readings from contributing writers Dan O'Brien, F. Douglas Brown, Katie Kadue, Kate McInerny, and Jacobo Pereira-Pacheco.

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Dan O’Brien joins us to read his poem, My Bird Promises Today a Story. He is an award-winning playwright, poet, librettist, and essayist. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife Jessica, and their daughter Isobel.

F. Douglas Brown will read from his piece Hot Air Love. He is the author of two poetry collections, ICON, and Zero to Three, winner of the 2013 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Brown, an educator for over 25 years, currently teaches African American Poetry and African American Studies at Loyola High School of Los Angeles.

Katie Kadue will read from her work The Funny Thing About Misogony. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research on sixteenth-and seventeenth-century French and English literature explores relationships between domestic and poetic labor; agricultural and intellectual cultivation; and gender and genre.

Contributing co-authors Kate McInerny and Jacobo Pereira-Pacheco join us to read from their piece State Eyes in the LA Sky, authored by Nicholas Shapiro. Kate McInerny is a staff researcher with the Carceral Ecologies Lab at UCLA, where she recently earned her BA in Public Affairs. She also works as a digital historian for the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. Jacobo Pereira-Pacheco is a statistician and data scientist working with the Carceral Ecologies Lab at UCLA. He received his statistical education at UCSB and UCSC where he worked in various research groups—and outside of his prior academic institutions he worked as a data scientist in San Francisco.