Dorothy Vena Johnson — Collected Poems
A poet of racial justice and childlike wonder, Dorothy Vena Johnson also spent more than forty years turning Los Angeles classrooms, libraries, galleries, and stages into places where Black art could be made public.
Arthur Franklin Fuller — Collected Poems
Flat on his back in a handmade traveling wagon, Arthur Franklin Fuller crossed America selling his own poems and songs, turning disability, performance, self-publishing, and an iron insistence on independence into one of the strangest literary careers of early Los Angeles.
Adolphe Danziger de Castro — Collected Poems
A multilingual Jewish writer, diplomat, lawyer, Bierce collaborator, Lovecraft client, and Los Angeles fabulist moves from rose lyrics and wartime verse to sprawling biblical romances—while the facts of his nearly century-long life compete with the legends he made of it.
Moon Kwan — Collected Poems
Moon Kwan crossed the Pacific with poetry in one hand and a movie camera in the other. He became an early Chinese American poet in English, translated Li Po and Wang Wei for national magazines, advised Hollywood, fought for Cantonese cinema, and spent seven decades turning cultural translation into art.
Eva Carter Buckner — Collected Poems
Before Los Angeles could forget her, Eva Carter Buckner wrote Black soldiers, suffragists, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Abraham Lincoln, and women’s ambition into poems meant to be sung, recited, and used. A seamstress, painter, club leader, and NAACP organizer, she turned verse into public action—and made citizenship answer for its promises.
C. F. MacIntyre — Collected Poems
A Los Angeles poet who became a Parisian bohemian and one of America’s boldest translators, C. F. MacIntyre wrote jaguars, cafés, cathedrals, war, eros, and mortality into poems whose polished surfaces barely contain their appetite and mischief.
Leroy E. Mosher — Collected Poems
A fourteen-year-old cavalry bugler became a railroad telegrapher, the comic “Hank Wagoner,” and the editor trusted to run the Los Angeles Times during war. Mosher’s recovered poems and literary prose sound his battered bugle again: patriotic, satirical, tender, topical, and inseparable from the noisy machinery of the nineteenth-century press.
Grace Ellery Channing — Collected Poems
A Whitman devotee, California lyricist, Roman expatriate, and front-line correspondent, Grace Ellery Channing wrote poems that move from poppy fields and Tuscan graveyards to the flags, wounds, and fierce public feeling of the First World War.
E. A. Brininstool — Collected Poems
A telephone operator talks back, coyotes howl in impossible syllables, cowboys curse the railroad and the movies, and the open range disappears in real time. E. A. Brininstool’s comic, musical West is stranger, sharper, and more self-aware than its dusty reputation suggests.
Eliza Ann Otis — Collected Poems
A Civil War diarist, Alaska traveler, newspaper owner, children’s poet, and tireless singer of California, Eliza Ann Otis turned a life lived beside national upheaval into an immense poetry of sunlight, mountains, missions, patriotism, childhood, grief, and spiritual survival.