Paul Vangelisti (born 1945) is a United States poet and broadcaster. He graduated from the University of San Francisco in 1967 with a Bachelor of Arts in English and Philosophy. He attended Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, for a year as a research Fellow and moved to Los Angeles in 1968 to attend the University of Southern California, where he took several graduate level classes but never earned a degree.
Vangelisti has edited several anthologies of poetry, including one each in Italian and Polish. His anthologies of Los Angeles area poets, such as "Specimen '73", were among the first such collections to begin defining the historical trajectory of post-World War II poetry in Southern California. His first such volume, "Anthology of L.A. Poets", was co-edited with Charles Bukowski and Neeli Cherkovski. Most recently, he edited "L.A. Exiles", an anthology of displaced Los Angeles writers.
Vangelisti is the author of almost twenty collections of poetry, including "Air" (1973), "Portfolio" (1978), "Another You" (1980), "Villa", "Rime" (1983), and "Nemo" (1995). He was awarded a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1988. Vangelisti is also well known as a translator of Italian poetry, particularly experimental poets such as Adriano Spatola and Antonio Porta.
Vangelisti produced broadcasts of poetry readings through an association with Pacifica radio station KPFK in Los Angeles, where he worked as a Cultural Affairs Director between 1974 and 1982. While in that position, he initiated and directed L.A.T.E. (Los Angeles Theater of the Ear), which produced both live and recorded radio theater broadcasts of classic plays by Pirandello and Brecht, as well as contemporary playwrights.
Vangelisti is currently the Chair of the MFA writing program at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles.
Jerome Rothenberg is an American poet, translator and anthologist, noted for his work in the fields of ethnopoetics and performance poetry.
Jack Spicer was an American poet often identified with the San Francisco Renaissance. In 2009, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer won the American Book Award for poetry.
Clayton Eshleman was an American poet, translator, and editor, noted in particular for his translations of César Vallejo and his studies of cave painting and the Paleolithic imagination. Eshleman's work has been awarded with the National Book Award for Translation, the Landon Translation prize from the Academy of American Poets (twice), a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Rockefeller Study Center residency in Bellagio, Italy, among other awards and honors.
Luigi Ballerini is an Italian writer, poet, and translator.
Al Young was an American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and professor.
Quincy Thomas Troupe, Jr. is an American poet, editor, journalist and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, in La Jolla, California. He is best known as the biographer of Miles Davis, the jazz musician.
Patricia Smith is an American poet, spoken-word performer, playwright, author, writing teacher, and former journalist. She has published poems in literary magazines and journals including TriQuarterly, Poetry, The Paris Review, Tin House, and in anthologies including American Voices and The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry. She is on the faculties of the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing and the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Sierra Nevada College.
William Craig Berkson was an American poet, critic, and teacher who was active in the art and literary worlds from his early twenties on.
Dennis Graham Holt (born October 6, 1942) is an American poet, linguist and translator.
Suzanne Lummis is a poet, influential teacher, arts organizer and impresario in Los Angeles. She is associated with the poem noir, as well as the sensibility for which she was a major exponent–a literary incarnation of performance poetry–the Stand-up Poetry of the 80s and 90s. She is also grouped with “The Fresno Poets.”
Clarence Major is an American poet, painter, and novelist; winner of the 2015 "Lifetime Achievement Award in the Fine Arts," presented by the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. He was awarded the 2016 PEN Oakland/Reginald Lockett Lifetime Achievement Award.
Harry E. Northup is an American actor and poet. As an actor, he made frequent appearances in the films of Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme.
Samiya A. Bashir is an American poet and author. Much of Bashir's poetry explores the intersections of culture, change, and identity through the lens of race, gender, the body and sexuality. She is currently Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
Standard Schaefer is an American poet.
Leland Hickman was an American poet, editor, actor, and literary magazine publisher. During his lifetime, Hickman was best known as the publisher and editor of the influential magazine Temblor which was noted for the publication of many east and west coast language-related poets. His editorial and publishing activities brought the work of many established and emerging poets into the public view. Hickman has steadily gained posthumous recognition and fame for his poetry.
Douglas Messerli is an American writer, professor, and publisher based in Los Angeles, California. In 1976, he started Sun & Moon, a magazine of art and literature, which became Sun & Moon press, and later Green Integer press. He has taught at Temple University in Philadelphia, and Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles.
David A. Romero is an American spoken word artist, poet, and activist from Diamond Bar, CA. Romero is a graduate of the University of Southern California (USC) and is the second spoken word artist to be featured on All Def Digital, a YouTube channel from Russell Simmons.
Lee Mallory is an American poet, editor and academic best known for hosting and performing monthly poetry readings in Orange County, California, for more than 20 years.
Gian Maria Annovi is an Italian poet, essayist, and professor. He has published four collections of poetry, along with appearing in various literary journals, and anthologies. He is currently an Associate Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California.
Kaya Press is an independent non-profit publisher of writers of the Asian and Pacific Islander diaspora. Founded in 1994 by the postmodern Korean writer Soo Kyung Kim, Kaya Press is currently housed in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.
