Coiled Serpent ─ Poets Arising from the Cultural Quakes & Shifts of Los Angeles

This anthology features the vitality and variety of verse in the City of Angels, a city of poets. This is more about range then representation, voice more than volume. Los Angeles has close to 60 percent people of color, 225 languages spoken at home, and some of the richest and poorest persons in the country. With an expansive 502.7 square miles of city (and beyond, including the massive county of 4,752.32 square miles), the poetry draws on imagery, words, stories, and imaginations that are also vast, encompassing, a real "leaves of grass."

Well-known poets include Holly Prado, Ruben Martinez, traci kato-kiriyama, and Lynne Thompson. Many strong new voices, however, makes this a well-rounded collection for any literary class, program, bookstore, or event.

The image of the coiled serpent appears in various forms in mythologies throughout Asia, Africa, Europe, India, and America. In pre-conquest times, Quetzalcoatl—the Precious Serpent—served as a personification of earth-bound wisdom, the arts and eldership in so-called Meso-America, one of seven "cradles of civilization" that also includes China, Nigeria, Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, and Peru.

Neelanjana Banerjee, managing editor at Kaya Press and co-editor of the award-winningIndivisible: An Anthology of South Asian American Poetry (University of Arkansas Press). Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared inPrairie Schooner, Pank Magazine, The Rumpus, World Literature Today, the Literary Review, and more.

Daniel A. Olivas is the author of seven books including the award-winning novel,The Book of Want (University of Arizona Press). His first nonfiction book isThings We Do Not Talk About: Exploring Latino/a Literature through Essays and Interviews (San Diego State University Press). Olivas is also the editor of the landmark anthology,Latinos in Lotusland (Bilingual Press).

Ruben J. Rodriguez, a recent graduate of UCLA, Magna Cum Laude, was previously an editor atWestwind magazine and has read at UCLA’s Powell Library.