L.A. Book Launch: Creature by Marsha de la O

Join us for an evening in celebration of Marsha de la O’s new collection, Creature (University of Pittsburgh Press).

Written during the last five years of the poet’s father’s life, Creature is a book about love, destruction, and the self, all standing in relation to family and the natural world. The poems themselves try to move toward what can’t be said by finding connection with other life forms. By moving past linguistic walls into otherness, words become proximate to mystery and inhabit territory where expanses open and embodiment is always on the verge of transformation. The author will be joined by poets Kim Young and Holaday Mason for readings in The Wanda Coleman Theater. Readings will be followed by book signings and a reception.

Doors Open: 6:30 PM I Readings: 7:00 PM

Marsha de la O’s new book, Creature, came out from Pitt Poetry Series in January 2024, published through the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her previous book, Every Ravening Thing, also from Pitt, came out in 2019. Antidote for Night won the 2015 Isabella Gardner Award and was published by BOA Editions. De la O's first book, Black Hope, was awarded the New Issues Press Poetry Prize and was published by New Issues Press, Western Michigan University. Black Hope won an Editors’ Choice, Small Press Book Award. Other awards include the Morton Marcus Poetry Award and the da Poetry Award, as well as the Ventura Poetry Festival Poetry Award. De La O has received multiple Individual Artist Grants from the City of Ventura, Cultural Affairs Division, and a Tumbleweeds Residency from the California Arts Council. She has been featured various times at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at USC, presented at AWP, and given workshops and readings at various colleges and universities including UCLA, UCSB, UC Riverside, the University of Pittsburgh, Sacramento Poetry Center, College of the Redwoods, Cal Lutheran, and other venues. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College and has published extensively in journals and anthologies, including two recent poems in The New Yorker, as well as poems in the Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Barrow Street, Third Coast, and the North American Review. Her work was featured by Tracy K. Smith in The Slowdown.

Kim Young is a writer, teacher, and author of poetry book Night Radio, winner of the Agha Ali Shahid Poetry Prize and finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; Tigers, a collection of prose poems; and two poetry chapbooks. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Alta, Los Angeles Review of Books, TriQuarterly, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. She edited for many years the literary journal Chaparral, which features interviews and new writing from Maggie Nelson, Jericho Brown, Victoria Chang, and many others. She is currently at work on a hybrid book of memoir, journalism, and biography on the late poet Lee McCarthy.

Holaday Mason is author of five full-length collections of poetry:Towards the Forest, Dissolve, The Red Bowl: A Fable in Poems, The “She” Series: A Venice Correspondence (with Sarah Maclay), and The Weaver’s Body and two chapbooks: Interlude & Light Spilling From its Own Cup. Her sixth collection, As If Scattered, will be published by Giant Claw Press in 2024. Nominated for several Pushcart awards, Mason has been published in Hotel Amerkia, Spillway, Solo, Pool, Poetry International, The Laurel Review, and more. She is also a portrait and fine art photographer focusing on the beauty of aging and humans as a part of nature. She served as co-editor for Beyond Baroque’s anthology Echo 681 and she has also lead writing workshops at Beyond Baroque. Currently she is poetry editor for online art an poetry magazine Furious Pure, and she was poetry editor for Mental Shoes. In private practice as a psychotherapist since 1993, she lives in Venice, California, with the flocks of wild green parrots, a meanass cat named Ms. T.T. ( AKA Ms. Twirly Tail, a big ole’ dog named Chewie, and her husband the musician and educator Adrian Baer (#jellybirdla). She can be found at #holadaymasonphotography or #holadaymason or www.holadaymason.com or www.holadaymasonphotography.com.

Masks are encouraged while inside our center.

Event attendees are expected to behave in a respectful and considerate manner while in our space. Beyond Baroque reserves the right to remove individuals from our events, virtual or otherwise, if they are not respecting the space, fellow attendees, or performers.

Please arrive early.