The family of Diane di Prima will host a tribute to the late San Francisco Poet Laureate on August 6, from 2 p.m. to 7 p.m., at the Castro Theater, 429 Castro Street in San Francisco. The event is free and open to the public.
Los Angeles Poet Laureate Lynne Thompson, a native Angeleno, reflects on her appointment before stepping down.
The symbolism was stunning, but it was far more critical that President Biden hit the ground running, and he did. He signed 17 executive orders, reversing some of the most onerous declarations of his predecessor. He dissolved the 1776 Commission, an odious truth-erasing propaganda body charged with developing “patriotic education.” Replete with lies, peppered with quotes by Dr. Martin Luther King and Abraham Lincoln, neither of whom would have cosigned the report, the previous administration had the utter audacity to release this madness on Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday holiday. One of the final slaps in the face from the deranged “leader.”
Fresh off her nationally acclaimed poetry reading at President Joe Biden’s inauguration, Los Angeles native Amanda Gorman will be presenting her work on another massive stage — the Super Bowl,
As the pandemic of COVID-19 continues to ravage our community and the country, the pandemic of the pathology of racist oppression continues to claim its victims among us also. And this is not only because of the inequalities in our life conditions, health access, working needs and circumstances, and other structural disadvantages, but also because Black people and other people of color remain targets of racist violence. One of the latest cases is from Aurora, Colorado, August 2, where the police targeted, stopped, terrorized and humiliated four Black girls and a mother, out to get their nails done at a salon. Not satisfied with drawing guns on the children, 6, 12, 14 and 17, causing them to fear for their lives and call for their mother and sister, the White officers, men and women, ordered them out of the car, handcuffed them, except the 6-year old, and forced them all to lay face down on the parking lot pavement. The repulsively transparent lie told for this unjustifiable act of targeting and terrorism was that the police mistook the family’s SUV for a stolen motorcycle with the same license plate number but from another state.