The Last Bookstore in Los Angeles, California, is pleased to present, The Other Side of Sadness - A Night of Poetry and Conversation, an otherwise reading series event with J. Jennifer Espinoza and Donika Kelly, on Friday, December 14, 7 p.m. The conversation following the reading will be moderated by F. Douglas Brown. 

 

Donika Kelly is the author of the chapbook Aviarium (fivehundred places, 2017), and the full-length collection Bestiary (Graywolf Press, 2016), winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the 2017 Hurston/Wright Award for poetry, and the 2018 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Bestiary was long listed for the National Book Award in 2016 and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and a Publishing Triangle Award in 2017. A Cave Canem Graduate Fellow, she received her MFA in Writing from the Michener Center for Writers and a Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt University. She is an Assistant Professor at Baruch College, where she teaches creative writing.

 

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza is a trans woman poet living in California. Her work has been featured in Denver Quarterly, the American Poetry Review, Lambda Literary, The Offing, and elsewhere. She is the author of i’m alive / it hurts / i love it (boost house, 2014), There Should Be Flowers (CCM, 2016), and Outside Of The Body There Is Something Like Hope (Big Lucks, 2018).

 

F. Douglas Brown is the author of ICON, a new collection of poetry from Writ Large Press in 2018, and Zero to Three (University of Georgia Press, 2014), winner of the 2013 Cave Canem Poetry Prize selected by U. S. Poet Laureate, Tracy K. Smith. He also co-authored with poet Geffrey Davis, Begotten (URB Books, 2016), a chapbook of poetry. Brown, an educator for over 20 years, currently teaches English and African American Poetry at Loyola High School of Los Angeles, an all-boys Jesuit school. He is both a Cave Canem and Kundiman fellow and was selected by Poets & Writers magazine as one of their ten notable Debut Poets of 2014. His poems have appeared in numerous journals and magazines such as the Academy of American Poets, The PBS News Hour, The Virginia Quarterly (VQR), Bat City Review, The Chicago Quarterly Review (CQR), and the Southern Humanities Review. He is co-founder and curator of un::fade::able – The Requiem for Sandra Bland, a quarterly reading series examining restorative justice through poetry as a means to address racism. When he is not teaching, writing or with his children (Isaiah, Olivia, and Simone), he is busy DJing in the greater Los Angeles area.

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