Village Poets features Beverly LaFontaine and David W. Parsley on the fifth Sunday of them month. Breaking with tradition, Village Poets will host its poetry reading on the fifth Sunday, which is the last Sunday of the month, May 31. The reading will take place at Bolton Hall Museum at 4:30 p.m. and will feature two Los Angeles poets, Beverly Lafontaine and David W. Parsley.

There will also be an open mic and poets are invited to participate in the open reading segment of the event. The Bolton Hall Museum is located at 10110 Commerce Ave. in Tujunga.

The reading continues until 6:30 pm. Light refreshments will be served. Free parking is available on the street and also at Elks Lodge, 10137 Commerce Ave. Please visit the Village Poets blog to read poems of this month’s featured poets and former features: https://villagepoets.blogspot.com/.

Beverly Lafontaine has enjoyed four productions of her plays in the Los Angeles area and has had her poetry published in various online and print poetry journals and anthologies, including Waves, the anthology published by the AROHO Foundation, MORIA, Poets Reading the News, Blue Satellite, Spillway, the Anthology of the Valley Contemporary Poets, So Luminous the Wildflowers: An Anthology of California Poets, and Beyond the Lyric Moment. As a collaborative artist she has worked with composer Tom Flaherty to create “Scenes from Sarajevo,” a prize-winning chamber music piece. Additionally, she was commissioned to create six poems that are incorporated into the sculptural work of Walk a Mile in My Shoes, a public art project dedicated to Martin Luther King sponsored by the City of Los Angeles – Dept. of Cultural Affairs. As a journalist she has written for publications as wide-ranging as Essence Magazine, Soul Magazine and Caesura: the Journal for the San Jose Center for Poetry and Literature.

Recently retired from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, David W. Parsley now lives part-time in Pasadena and with his family in southwest Utah on the doorstep of Zion National Park, Grand Canyon and other places of interest. He is using the newly-found free time to write more actively. His poems have appeared in Poetry LA, London Grip, Amethyst, Ghost City Review, Tiny Seed, Lothlorien and other journals and anthologies.  

Among his more recent honors, Kyoto: A Cycle was a semi-finalist for the Able Muse Award. He was also an invited poet in the online poetry project, Lament for the Dead. His tribute to the Cassini mission to Saturn, Paean for a Spacecraft, is a finalist for the Charter Oak Award for historical poetry at Flatiron Foothills Press, slated for publication this coming year in the annual journal Footnote.