Odell Francis — Smoking Flax and Other Poems
Odell Francis carried poetry through song, radio, women’s clubs, newspaper columns, editorial work, and an Inglewood manuscript service. This edition restores all forty-three poems in her 1941 collection Smoking Flax and eleven uncollected newspaper poems, including antiwar writing on aircraft, military regimentation, and Shanghai. The documentary biography gathers every securely located event from 1930 to 1942 while keeping her probable legal name and still-unidentified origins, marriage, and later life clearly marked as unresolved.
Ethelean Tyson Gaw — Drums of El Dorado and Other Poems
All fifty-nine poems in Ethelean Tyson Gaw’s 1951 collection, newly reset from the complete source scan, together with all six of her poems in the 1923 Second Anthology of Verse, including the uncollected “Le Jour D’Amour.” Periodical witnesses, archival images, a corrected publication census, and the fullest documented account yet assembled recover her work as poet, playwright, editor, lecturer, and Los Angeles literary organizer.
Virginia Woodson Frame Church — Collected Poems
A teacher listens as closely as she lectures. Virginia Church’s brief classroom portraits catch adolescents bluffing, grieving, flirting, reading, resisting, and going to war; her Paris poems turn the same dramatic eye on expatriates, artists, and models. This first broad recovered edition restores eighty-four verified poems, an extensively researched life, and the documentary record of a writer whose work joined education, theater, satire, and faith.
Lillian Amber Hunt — Arista and Other Poems
A star-bearing maiden descends to rescue a poet, the wind breaks every chain, and fairy dancers cross an Ebell Club stage: Lillian Amber Hunt’s surviving poems turn spiritual allegory, women’s labor, desire, and performance into an ardent record of Los Angeles literary life just after World War I.
Harry MacPherson — Squared Circles and Other Poems
Sportswriter, automobile journalist, comic performer, and poet, Harry MacPherson brought the velocity of the modern newspaper into Squared Circles. His verse races through cars, courtship, California roads, family feeling, urban spectacle, and self-mocking rhyme, capturing a Jazz Age writer delighted by both speed and sentiment.
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.