For twenty years, groundbreaking poets Eileen Myles (Chelsea Girls; I Must be Living Twice) and Maggie Nelson (National Book Critics Circle Award, The Argonauts) have been friends, mutual influences, and interlocutors on the experiences of living in a poetry and gender-inflected writing world. Myles…
In partnership with PEN Center USA, ALOUD presents the culminating event of PEN’s 2016 Emerging Voices Fellowship to mark the program’s 20th anniversary. Revisit this evening of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction with readings from the 2016 Fellows: Marnie Goodfriend, Jian Huang, Wendy Labinger…
For three years, award-winning journalist Ben Ehrenreich has been traveling to and living in the West Bank, living with Palestinian families in its largest cities and smallest villages. Placing readers in the footsteps of ordinary Palestinians, Ehrenreich’s new book, The Way to the Spring, offers…
Like dreams, poetry and song enter our lives by way of a mystery—unrecognized and often uninvited. Both represent the speaking of the otherwise unspeakable: the place where real truth is unencumbered by fact, time is made elastic, and narrative emerges from the abstract to tell us something of who…
Hailed as "an inspiration" by writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel, Homegoing, traces 300 years of history and family lineage through a sweeping account of the many descendants of two half-sisters born in 18th century Ghana. From the beginnings of slavery to the Harlem Renaissance to…
How does one become a writer? For acclaimed novelist Judith Freeman—born the sixth child of eight in a devout Mormon household, married at seventeen, and divorced at twenty-two with a young child—it was an unlikely path. In her arresting, lyrical memoir set in the patriarchal cloister of Utah in the…
Chef, food personality, bestselling author of Fresh Off the Boat, and inspiration behind the hit television show of the same name, Eddie Huang made his ALOUD debut with a brash new memoir about love, meaning, and returning to your ancestral homeland. Double Cup Love takes readers on a cultural romp…
Like writing, cities are all about process, the back-and-forth between our aspirations and our abilities; we walk to discover them and to discover ourselves. In this dialogue, moderated by Los Angeles native Louise Steinman, Vivian Gornick and David L. Ulin investigate the role of the city as both…
Visionary writer Maxine Hong Kingston has been writing about war and peace since her landmark 1976 book The Woman Warrior. Her lifelong efforts on this theme often touched on the Vietnam War, from China Men to The Fifth Book of Peace. These works influenced award-winning novelist and critic Viet…
New Yorker writer William Finnegan leads a counter life as an excessively compulsive surfer. In his deeply lyrical self-portrait Barbarian Days, Finnegan chronicles his lifelong adventures from a young man chasing waves all over the world to becoming a distinguished writer and war reporter. Part…
From the Watts Towers in Los Angeles to the Forbidden City in Beijing, Geoff Dyer’s newest collection of essays, White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World, explores what defines place: where do we come from, what are we, where are we going? The elegant, witty, and always inquisitive Dyer…
Award-winning poet and rapper Kate Tempest’s electrifying debut novel takes us into the beating heart of London in this multi-generational tale of drugs, desire, and belonging. The Bricks That Built the Houses explores a cross-section of contemporary urban life with a powerful moral microscope…
Our third annual gathering unites students from five Southland graduate writing programs—CalArts, Otis College, UC Irvine, UC Riverside, and USC—to share recent work and tune our ears to the future of language. What are the ideas, forms, questions, syntaxes, images, and narratives of our immediate…
