Happy Birthday, Beyond Baroque! Join Howl! Happening in celebrating a half-century of art and poetry with a gathering of East-West performers paying tribute to the rich mix of literary tradition, commitment to emerging artists, and community-building that Beyond Baroque represents. Founded as a magazine by poet George Drury Smith in the waning days of the Beats, Beyond Baroque is one of the nation’s most influential grassroots incubators of the literary arts, contributing to the early development of Tom Waits, Wanda Coleman, Mike Kelley, Viggo Mortensen, the seminal punk band X, and many others. Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, Raymond Carver, and Patti Smith are some of the literary luminaries who have passed through.

Beyond Baroque enjoys a distinguished history of reaching out to diverse groups in and out of Los Angeles and offers a fascinating variety of literary and arts programming, including readings by poets and touring authors, free writing workshops, art exhibits, and youth education. So many of us have experienced their warm welcome on the West Coast, and we are honored to return the hospitality.

We look forward to another 50 years of cutting edge poetry, literature, and art. C. Bain, Eve Brandstein, Victor D. Infante, Nancy Mercado, Richard Modiano, Amber Tamblyn, George Wallace and Michelle Wittaker bring their brilliance and dedication to the party. Hosted and curated by Puma Perl.

C. Bain is a gender-liminal writer-performer. His full-length poetry collection, Debridement, was a finalist for the 2016 Publishing Triangle Awards. He currently works to create beautiful, interdisciplinary, and intersectional performance texts via Tiresias Projekt.  http://tiresiasprojekt.com/

Eve Brandstein, in addition to being a poet, is a producer, a film and theater director, writer/creator, documentary filmmaker. She is also an artist and workshop facilitator, who has led writing and performance groups. Her poetry appears in national publications and she produces the celebrated reading series – Poetry In Motion, launched in 1988 which presents the monthly series in Los Angeles at Beyond Baroque and in New York City at The Cutting Room and Gotham Comedy Club. Eve is a publisher of The Hollywood Review, an anthology of L.A. poets.

Victor D. Infante is a displaced Californian living in New England. He is the entertainment editor of the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, a contributing writer for OC Weekly, editor-in-chief of Radius, and author of City of Insomnia from Write Bloody Publishing. His poems and stories have appeared in dozens of periodicals and anthologies. He doesn’t get enough sleep.

Nancy Mercado is a writer, editor, educator, and activist. Her work focuses on issues of injustice, the environment, and the Puerto Rican and Latino experience in the United States. She is the 2017 recipient of the prestigious American Book Award for Lifetime Achievement and was recently recognized as one of 200 by the Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives and the Antiracist Research and Policy Center of American University. Her upcoming full-length poetry collection is titled Please Postpone My Death. https://www.nancy-mercado.com/

Richard Modiano is executive director of the Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center and a lifelong member of Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). His poems have been published in Blue Satellite, Big Scream, Maintenant, The Mas Tequila Review, and the Los Angeles Cultural Weekly. Modiano is also a contributor to Bukowski: An Anthology of Poetry & Prose About Charles Bukowski.

Puma Perl is a widely published poet and writer, and has four solo collections in print. She is the producer and creator of Puma Perl’s Pandemonium, which brings spoken word together with rock ‘n’ roll, and she performs regularly with her band Puma Perl and Friends. She writes for The Villager and has received three New York Press Association awards in recognition of her journalism. Perl is the recipient of the 2016 Acker Award in the writing category.

Amber Tamblyn is an author, actress, and director who has been nominated for an Emmy, a Golden Globe, and an Independent Spirit Award for her work in television and film. She is the author of three books of poetry—including the critically acclaimed bestseller Dark Sparkler (Harper Perennial)—and a debut novel, Any Man. Tamblyn co-wrote and directed the feature film Paint it Black, based on the novel by Janet Fitch and currently streaming on Netflix. She lives in New York City. 

George Wallace is writer-in-residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace, the author of 33 chapbooks of poetry, and a third generation New Yorker. As editor of poetrybay.com and co-editor of great weather for MEDIA, he travels internationally to appear at literary festivals and perform his poetry. Wallace is the winner of numerous poetry prizes and laureateships, including the Alexander the Great Gold Medal (Greece) for significant contributions to the development of culture.

Michelle Whittaker is a Long Island poet, the author of Surge (great weather for MEDIA), and a finalist for the 2018 Next Generation Indie Book Award. She has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Southampton Review, Narrative, Long Island Quarterly, and other publications. Whittaker was awarded a Jody Donohue Poetry Prize and a Cave Canem fellowship. She is the recipient of the 2017 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry.