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On February 24, 2021, Mayor Eric Garcetti appointed Lynne Thompson Poet Laureate for the City of Los Angeles. She is the first native Angeleno to hold the post. Thompson is the author of Start With a Small Guitar, Beg No Pardon, winner of the Perugia Book Award and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award, and Fretwork, selected by Jane Hirshfield for the Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize and published in 2019. Her recent work appears or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, New England Review, december, Black Warrior Review, and Best American Poetry 2020 as well as the anthology Sh*t Men Say To Me.

Hiram Sims is a poet, essayist, short fiction writer, and Creative Writing Professor at The Los Angeles Film School. He is also the Founding Director of The Community Literature Initiative. In addition to being a great fan of every writer in this book, he is also incredibly handsome.

Gail Wronsky’s newest book is Under the Capsized Boat We Fly: New & Selected Poems, available April 13 from White Pine Press. She is the author of numerous books of poetry, prose, and translations. She teaches creative writing and women’s literature at Loyola Marymount University.

Mariano Zaro is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Decoding Sparrows (What Books, Los Angeles, CA) and Padre Tierra (Olifante, Zaragoza, Spain). His poems have been included in the anthologies Monster Verse (Penguin Random House), Wide Awake (Beyond Baroque, CA), The Coiled Serpent (Tía Chucha Press, CA) and in several magazines in Spain, Mexico and the United States. He is a professor of Spanish at Rio Hondo Community College (Whittier, California).