Three devastating losses are at the heart of Susan Hayden’s lyrical memoir, Now You Are a Missing Person. The suddenness of each of these deaths ― her father, her childhood best friend and her husband ― sparks and guides a series of explorations to claim equilibrium and a sense of self. Stories, poems and fragments are woven together to trace Hayden’s search for identity and belonging through lovers and friends, some enduring, some ephemeral. She creates an intimate album of her life, from the 1970s to the present, evoked in an LA populated by troubadours and actors, both shining and fading. Raised in an observant Jewish family in the suburban San Fernando Valley, she struggles and finds her footing in an ever-shifting culture of expectations around body image, sexuality, motherhood, widowhood, and autonomy.

Contributor

Beat Not Beat, edited by Rich Ferguson and published by Eric Morago's Moon Tide Press, is an anthology of California poets screwing on the Beat and post-Beat tradition. Co-edited by Alexis Rhone Fancher, S.A. Griffin and Kim Shuck, this dynamic anthology spans the postwar, atomic-bomb-obsessed American landscape to the here and now: a period when Beat poets, the Vortex, Baby Beats, and their progenitors inspired one another through cultural, political, and humorous means to create new forms of consciousness weaponizing pen and paper to enact mighty forms of lyrical rebellion. The collection features notable poets such as Bob Kaufman, Diane di Prima, Jack Hirschman, Wanda Coleman, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Charles Bukowski. It also features contemporary poets such as Douglas Kearney, Brendan Constantine, Kim Addonizio, Ellyn Maybe, Will Alexander, and former United States Poet Laureate Robert Hass.

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With the tragic and bloody ending to the optimistic 1960s in Los Angeles's fabled hills, the 1970s became a defining decade in the city. Marked by the Manson murders, rampant inflation, and recession, the decade seemed to usher in a gritty and unsightly reality. The city of glitz and glamour overnight became the city of smog and traffic, a cultural and environmental wasteland.

Los Angeles in the 1970s was a complex and complicated city with local cultural touchstones that rarely made it near the silver screen. In Los Angeles in the 1970s, LA natives, transplants, and escapees talk about their personal lives intersecting with the city during a decade of struggle. From The Doors' John Densmore seeing the titular L.A. Woman on a billboard on Sunset, to Deanne Stillman's twisting path from Ohioan to New Yorker to finally finding her true home as an Angeleno, to Chip Jacobs' thrilling retelling of the "snake in the mailbox" attempted murder, to Anthony Davis recounting his time as "Notre Dame Killer" and USC football hero, these are stories of the real Los Angeles--families trying to survive the closing of factories, teens cruising Van Nuys Boulevard, the Chicano Moratorium that killed three protestors, the making of a porn legend.

Los Angeles in the 1970s is a love letter to the sprawling and complicated fabric of a Los Angeles often forgotten and mostly overlooked. Welcome to the Gold Mine.

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What does it mean to have, or to love, a black body? Taking on the challenge of interpreting the black body's dramatic role in American culture are thirty black, white, and biracial contributors—award-winning actors, artists, writers, and comedians—including voices as varied as President Obama’s inaugural poet Elizabeth Alexander, actor and bestselling author Hill Harper, political strategist Kimball Stroud, television producer Joel Lipman, former Saturday Night Live writer Anne Beatts, and singer-songwriter Jason Luckett.

Ranging from deeply serious to playful, sometimes hilarious, musings, these essays explore myriad issues with wisdom and a deep sense of history. Meri Nana-Ama Danquah’s unprecedented collection illuminates the diversity of identities and individual experiences that define the black body in our culture.

Contributor

Short plays from twenty cutting-edge Los Angeles playwrights make up this powerful and entertaining anthology. Includes works produced by Padua Playwrights and Sharon's Farm. Contributing playwrights include: Sissy Boyd, Hank Bunker, Heidi Darchuk, Juli Crockett Feldman, Susan Hayden, Coleman Hough, Bernard Goldberg, Michael Hacker, Rachel Jendrzejewski, Marc Jensen, Christopher Kelley, Murray Mednick, Kevin O'Sullivan, Gray Palmer, Chris Rossi, April Rouveyrol, Cheryl Slean, Wesley Walker, Sharon Yablon and Guy Zimmerman.