Please join us for the second installment of Long Beach Notebook on Saturday, May 13th at 8 pm in the city of Long Beach for readings by poets Jen Bervin, Jen Hofer and India Radfar. Bring food, drink or just a willingness to listen. Long Beach is approximately 35 minutes south of downtown L.A. (traffic permitting) and our house is located on an island. A real live island replete with canals, gondolas and cascades of night blooming jasmine. Sometimes the gondoliers sing opera. For real.

JEN BERVIN, poet and visual artist, is the author of a non breaking space (http://www.uglyducklingpresse.org/clouds/pages/intro.html), Nets (Ugly Duckling 2004) and Under What Is Not Under (Potes & Poets 2001). Her work has been published in Aufgabe, Chain, Denver Quarterly, Fell Swoop, Five Finger Review, How2, Insurance, Poets & Poems (a collaboration with Alystyre Julian), and Web Conjunctions. Bervin has received a BFA and a Presidential Merit Scholarship from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, an MA in Poetry from the University of Denver, an Edward M. Lannan Prize from the Academy of American Poets. She teaches an Advanced Poetry Workshop at NYU, co-curates Pratt's Friday Forum Reading Series with Brian Blanchfield, and directs the writing internships for Writing for Publication, Performance and Media at Pratt Institute.
JEN HOFER’s recent publications include Sin puertas visibles: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by Mexican Women (University of Pittsburgh Press and Ediciones Sin Nombre, 2003), slide rule (subpress, 2002), and the chapbooks lawless (Seeing Eye Books, 2003) and sexoPUROsexoVELOZ (translations of poetry by Dolores Dorantes, Seeing Eye Books, 2004). Her next books will be a full-length translation of Dorantes’ sexoPUROsexoVELOZ, forthcoming from Kenning Editions, a translation of Laura Solórzano’s lobo de labio, forthcoming from Action Books, and a book-length series of anti-war-manifesto-poems, titled one, forthcoming from Palm Press. Her poems and translations can be found in recent issues of 1913, Bomb, Bombay Gin and Primary Writing. She lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches poetics, works as a court interpreter, and is happily a founding member of the City of Angels Ladies’ Bicycle Association, also known as The Whirly Girls.
INDIA RADFAR is the author of The Desire to Meet the Beautiful (Tender Buttons), India Poem (Pir Press) and Breathe. After earning a B.A. at Middlebury College in 1990, with intermittent studies at The Naropa Institute and the Aegean Center for Fine Arts, she came to live in New York City, encountering the large community of poets there through The Poetry Project and other reading venues. From 1992-94, she gave instruction in poetry to children in Bushwick, Brooklyn, which led to her present collaboration with anthropologist Jenny Fox on a book about the oral poetics of children. An extended stay in India followed by the death of her father, author and scholar of comparative religion, Lex Hixon, forced Radfar into a new space with her writing. Her first book, India Poem, published in 2002, bridges her personal world with that of the country for which she was named. In 2003, she read at the Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago, in conjunction with an Indian filmmaker. A former resident of Woodstock, N.Y., she currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband and son.

LONG BEACH NOTEBOOK is located at the home and offices of Palm Press:

143 Ravenna Drive
Long Beach, CA 90803

For those of you who made the trek last time, I promise that citywide partygoers for the Naples Island boat parade will be home watching American Idol. It should be an easy trip this time, something like driving from Chinatown to the West side of L.A. The boat parade was a holiday thing. We will never do that to visitors again!

Depending on where your departure point is, directions are best found here: www.mapquest.com or call: (562) 434-0789

from WLA:
405 S to 7th St/22W- L@ light- R@ next light - L on Ravenna- park where you can but not at Rite Aid, they live to tow cars away.

from D&C-town:
5S to 605S to 7th St/22W and rest as above.

If you want to maximize your car time and see the sights, take the 110 S through the port city of San Pedro, follow signs for Port of Long Beach (the exit gives some route called 47- I think) follow this over 2 beautifully lit bridges through the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach and follow the 110 S to the end. Keep going straight. Proceed forward through downtown Long Beach on Ocean Blvd. Continue on to 2nd Street (there will be a slight curve to the left). Go R on Ravenna. Park as above.

There is also a truly FANTASTIC bookstore in downtown Long Beach called {open} books. Somewhat utopian in nature, in light of our times, with independent bookstores closing all around us (they opened 2 years ago and are thriving), {open} is a staunch supporter of independent publishers; Palm Press books can be found on their shelves. {open}books is located at 144 Linden Avenue, left off of Ocean. Near Linden and 3rd, the bookstore will be on your right. (http://accessopen.com/) They close at 8pm on Saturdays.

Please forward to others whom you think might be interested.

Mark your calendars and see you soon!

questions? call me or write-

next month:
Walter K. Lew
Rita Wong
and more...6/10/06...8pm

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