John Steven McGroarty — Collected Poems
John Steven McGroarty was poet, newspaperman, lawyer, congressman, regional mythmaker, and author of The Mission Play, once among America’s most frequently performed historical dramas. His verse helped turn California’s missions and Spanish past into public spectacle—a legacy at once theatrically powerful, culturally influential, and open to necessary reappraisal.
Alberta Johnston Denis — Questionings
Daughter of Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston and a participant in Los Angeles civic culture, Alberta Johnston Denis used poetry to ask difficult questions about faith, grief, conscience, and survival after war. Her privately printed Questionings reveals an inward, searching voice hidden behind one of America’s most imposing military family names.
Julia Boynton Green — Collected Poems
Julia Boynton Green crossed from Gilded Age New York verse into the gardens, missions, deserts, and shorelines of Southern California, publishing across nearly fifty years. Married to another writer and active in Redlands literary life, she turned regional beauty into poems alert to age, labor, illness, faith, and the cost of enchantment.
Grover Jacoby — Collected Poems and Translations
Heir to two founding Los Angeles families and the son of poet Rosalie Seligman Jacoby, Grover Jacoby became an audacious theorist of rhythm, translator, editor, and experimenter. His poetry and prose pursue what he called fluctuant syllabic verse, linking family history, radical magazines, formal analysis, a shared Lydia Rader Billings Award, and a lifelong argument with free verse.
Hanson Kellogg — Collected Poems
Hanson Kellogg’s path ran from a scandalous interruption at the University of Michigan through marionette theatre, journalism, religious experiment, and a formally adventurous Los Angeles poetry career. His poems of variegation and recurrence test how pattern, prayer, satire, and obsession can keep changing while stubbornly returning to their sources.
Samuel Hawkins Marshall Byers — Collected Poems
A Civil War prisoner wrote his most famous song behind Confederate lines, then watched it escape in an officer’s artificial leg and sweep the Union army. Samuel Hawkins Marshall Byers carried that astonishing beginning into a ninety-four-year life of diplomacy, civic verse, California legend, and restless reworking of war memory.
Richard Frederic Carlyle — Collected Poems
Newspaperman, philosophical traveler, and small-press poet, Richard Frederic Carlyle compressed an extraordinary burst of writing into three books published in Los Angeles in 1933–34. His rhymed Krishna paraphrases, oracular poems, and attack on greed turn Depression-era unease into a strange, ambitious meeting of comparative religion and American public verse.
Annie Elizabeth Cheney — Dreams of Hellas and Other Poems
Annie Elizabeth Cheney transformed Greek myth, spiritual experiment, and a reform-minded Los Angeles household into the luminous, eccentric poems of Dreams of Hellas. Long overshadowed by her husband’s public career, she emerges here as a poet of occult inquiry, classical memory, bereavement, and women’s intellectual independence.
Nora May French — Collected Poems
Nora May French blazed through California bohemia, writing fierce, haunting poems of freedom, desire, landscape, and death before her life ended at twenty-six. Published in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and national magazines, her work captures a restless new California—and the struggle of a gifted woman to build an independent artistic life within it.