Join us for a special Grand Performances Friday night show of The Poetry of Pride with Brian Sonia-Wallace.
Schedule:
6:00pm – DJ Succubus
7:00pm – The Poetry of Pride with Brian Sonia-Wallace
9:00pm – Closing Remarks
Please RSVP on Eventbrite
For Location, Parking & FAQ, click here
The Poetry of Pride:
A drag queen reads banned children’s books aloud while a chorus of poets responds and creates new work on typewriters, on the spot and in collaboration with the audience, celebrating the outsider in us all.
Brian Sonia-Wallace has been creating poems for people on-the-spot at a typewriter since 2012, and teaching other poets to do the same. Through this act of service, he began to ask what it meant to be queer as an artist in conversation with your community: to be an outsider, an expert mimic, and a careful speaker.
Brian’s group Pride Poets brings queer poets to write thousands of poems for people at Pride parades, celebrating and memorializing lives which are too often invisible, and therefore, seen as disposable. In this show he brings together a righteous rainbow of LGBTQ+ poets, aged seventeen to seventy, to share their own work and write new work in dialogue with the audience about what we all share -- the capacity to feel.
Poets:
Brian Sonia-Wallace
Steven Reigns
Terry Wolverton
Victor Yates
Carla Sameth
Jen Cheng
Meliza Bañales
Linda Ravenswood
Nate Lovell
Marcos James
Jose Rios
Jeffrey McCray
*& a special performance by Get Lit high school student Sam Luo
With DJ Succubus & Drag Queen Pickle of LA Drag Story Hour
Brian Sonia-Wallace is a queer, bilingual poet and cultural worker interested in themes of intimacy, service, debt, queerness, grief, authorship, memory, and transcendence. He is the West Hollywood City Poet Laureate and founder of Pride Poets, an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, and the author of Maze Mouth and The Poetry of Strangers: What I Learned Traveling America with a Typewriter. His long-term project RENT Poet invites the public to share their stories in exchange for poems about them, written in real-time on a vintage typewriter. Brian runs a monthly queer open mic at Micky’s WeHo and teaches at the UCLA Extension Writers' Program.
About Poetry Nights at Grand Performances
On the final Fridays of June, July, and August, Grand Performances will host three poetry nights focused on Pride Poetry with West Hollywood Poet Laureate Brian Sonia-Wallace, LA Neighborhoods with 3rd generation LA Native Mike the Poet, and Black Voices with award-winning author, poet, and educator Shonda Buchanan. These nights will begin at 6pm at the amphitheater next to the stage at California Plaza and will feature music and various local poets each night until 9pm.
Featuring influential voices from all over Los Angeles, Grand Performances will host three nights curated by influential award winning LA-based poets and educators, reflecting the diverse cultures that make up the beautiful city we live in. With nights focused on Pride Month, LA neighborhoods, and black and indigenous voices, the experience will focus on singular voices in an intimate setting that will honor the resilience, strength, and beauty of these communities in order to create an opportunity for love, understanding, and acceptance.
Check out the entire series:
Friday, June 23rd - Pride Poetry Night, hosted by Brian Sonia-Wallace
Friday, July 28th - LA Stories, hosted by Mike the Poet
Friday, August 25th - Black Voices, hosted by Shonda Buchanon
This performance is made possible in part by a grant from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Department of Arts and Culture.
