The Los Angeles Poetry Festival supports 100 Thousand Poets for Change, September 24, 2011.

Recent Events

Contact Los Angeles Poetry Festival

Request sponsorship Information

Organizing Committee
Suzanne Lummis, Director
Mary Armstrong, Financial Officer
Laurel Ann Bogen, Secretary
liz gonzález
Cece Peri
Cathie Sandstorm
Larry Colker

LA Poetry Festival is a non-profit
501(c)3 arts organization.

LA Poet running through Los Angeles

Banner for Speechless, L.a. poetry magazine
click image to go  to
Speechless

The coolest, hottest, warmest and oddest literary magazine
on the Web.

Forthcoming Events

James Ellroy (L.A. Confidential) - Judith Freeman - Naomi Hirahara (Edgar Allan Poe Award Winner) - Eddie Muller (Founder, President Film Noir Foundation)  - Robert Polito (Detours: Seven Noir Lives, forthcoming Knopf) - Noir Scholar Alan K. Rode.

And Movies. And Panels. And L.A.'s Noir Poets.

Click here for complete EVENT CALENDAR!

From NYC, Robert Polito, National Book Critic's Circle Award for Savage Art, author of the forthcoming Seven Noir Lives, gives the "Night and the City: L.A. Noir" keynote presentation on Oct. 15, Beyond Baroque. Reservations required. (310) 822-3006. See full program of events for more info.

This fall, the Los Angeles Poetry Festival and Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center will collaborate to produce "Night and the City: L.A. Noir in Poetry, Fiction and Film" — October 28 - November 13, with keynote speaker, Robert Polito, poet and editor of the Library of American volumes Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 40s and Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s, reading on October 15. While many major events will take place at Beyond Baroque in Venice, others are being developed for venues around the city, as well as L.A.'s farthest outposts, where Festival and Beyond Baroque collaborators will celebrate "Long Beach Noir" and "Oxnard Noir."

"Night and the City" will introduce audiences to some of the region's finest contemporary poets, authors and thinkers. The era we call "noir" thrived artistically in the 40s and 50s but is constantly being redefined by contemporary perspectives. The fall events will investigate Los Angeles culture and history by way of noir's dark, witty, unsentimental visual and verbal beauty. Group readings of literature will also present seminal noir writers from beyond the region, such as San Francisco's Dashiell Hammett. Through these explorations, “Night and the City: L.A. Noir" will offer up a sultry, edgy, alternative vision of Los Angeles, a vision both imaginative and informed, to supplement the flat, simplistic images by which it has often been defined.


Poetry Noir

Poetry and the Movies

To enter Poetry Noir, click a door and walk in.

noir poetry link to cop.html link to noir html

Noir Design by Penelope Torribio and Suzanne Lummis



About the Los Angeles Poetry Festival

The Los Angeles Poetry Festival has presented over 150 city-wide events that explore the culture, character and history of Los Angeles through the writings of some of the city's most distinctive poets.

Since its creation in 1989, by Suzanne Lummis and Sherman Pearl, The Los Angeles Poetry Festival, in collaboration with many arts and cultural entities—Beyond Baroque, MOCA, The Los Angeles Public Library, The World Stage, The Southwest Musuem, The Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department, and others—has produced over a hundred fifty readings involving various themes and explorations. Some of these include Women at the Edge, Exiles and Immigrants, Poetry of the Sacred, Hangugin-Yongshi: Images from the Country of the Morning Calm, Poetry and the Unbroken Line (Poets and Fiction Writers), The Poetry of Conscience, Play Ball! Poets Take on the American Sport, Tribute to Black Bards, Mermaids Singing: Contemporary Voices in Classical Forms, La Poesia de la Americas, The Mythical Works of Yeats, Jump into the POOL! (A celebration of the literary magazine, Pool) and Poetry, Dreams and Healing: A Workshop.