L.A. Book Launch: Random Experiments in Bioluminescence, Amy Shimshon-Santo

Join Amy Shimshon-Santo & friends for an afternoon of eco-poetry and community conversation at the LA launch of her book Random Experiments in Bioluminescence. Choral, cryptographic, and exhilarating, her work is a homecoming to the body and the planet, cultivating respect for multiple languages, and awe for life in our pluriverse. The poems ask us to become attentive to multi-species, biotic and abiotic phenomena, and welcome plurilingualism into our everyday lives.

Doors Open: 1:30 PM I Readings: 2:00 PM

About the Authors:

Dr. Amy Shimshon-Santo is a writer, educator, and culture maker who believes that creativity is a powerful tool for personal and social transformation. She was born on Tovaangar land in current day Los Angeles, and has immediate family in the Southwest, the Middle East, and South America. Amy is the author of Random Experiments in Bioluminescence (Flowersong Press, 2024), Catastrophic Molting (Flowersong Press, 2022), Even the Milky Way is Undocumented (Unsolicited Press, 2020), the limited edition chapbook Endless Bowls of Sky (Placeholder Press, 2020). Her essays have appeared in GeoHumanities, Urban Education, and Imagining America, and come together in her forthcoming collection Piecework: Ethnographies of Place (Unsolicited Press, 2025). She has been nominated for an Emmy Award, two Pushcart Prizes, a Rainbow Reads Award, Best of the Net (Poetry), and was a finalist for the NightBoat Poetry Prize. She has performed and taught throughout the U.S., Latin America, West Africa, Taiwan, and Singapore. Recent community collaborations touched the University of Boulder Colorado’s Access and Community Engagement efforts, UCSC’s Department of Play, University of Maryland’s Creative Placemaking, along with global initiatives with UNESCO in Mexico, UNEB in Brazil, PaGya Literary Festival in Ghana, and the Lagos International Poetry Festival in Nigeria. She has edited anthologies and special editions published by UC Press, IOPN, Critica Cultural (Brazil), Libretto Magazine (Nigeria), and, most recently, Songs of the Earth for the LA Public Library and Reading Braille With Chocolate for the Braille Institute of America Library.

Karen Llagas' chapbook, All Of Us Are Cleaved, was published by Nomadic Press/Black Lawrence Press in 2023. Her first collection of poetry, Archipelago Dust, was published by Meritage Press in 2010. Karen has recently translated Dancing Hands: A Story of Friendship in Filipino Sign Language (Chronicle Books, 2023), which won a Schneider Family Book Award, and How Do You Eat Color? (Eerdmans Books for Young Readers, 2025). A recipient of the 2022 RHINO Founder’s Prize, Filamore Tabios, Sr. Memorial Poetry Prize, an Elizabeth George Award and a Hedgebrook residency, her poems, translations & prose have also appeared in various journals and anthologies. She has an MFA from Warren Wilson College and teaches Filipino/Tagalog at UC Berkeley.

Àkpà Árinzèchukwu is a 2023 Oxbelly Writing Retreat Fellow, a winner of the 2021 Poetry Archive Worldview Prize, a Best of the Net nominee, Pushcart, and Geoffrey Dearmer Prize, shortlisted for the FT/Bodley Head Prize, and a finalist for the 2020 Black Warrior Review Fiction Prize. His works appear in Kenyon Review, Adda, Transition, Black Warrior Review, Prairie Schooner, The Rumpus, Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He is the curator of Muqabalal, a bilingual conversation series, co-host of Muqabalal’s Poem a Day in Translation, and the Church of Poetry.

Ticket purchase is required. No one will be turned away for lack of funds! Tickets will be available at the Beyond Baroque bookstore on the day of the event, but we recommend registering in advance through Eventbrite. Masks are encouraged while inside our center.

Livestream: If you can’t join us in-person the event will be livestreamed on Beyond Baroque’s YouTube channel at the scheduled time of the event.