Village Poets of Sunland-Tujunga welcomes featured poets Mary Fitzpatrick and Ella Czajkowska on Sunday, June 22 at 4:30 p.m. at Bolton Hall Museum. There will also be an open reading and poets are invited to sign up to participate. 

The reading starts at 4:30 pm and goes till 6:30 p.m. Refreshments will be served. Free parking is available on the street and also at Elks Lodge, 10137 Commerce Ave. 

Mary Fitzpatrick’s poems have been finalists for the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize and the Slapering Hol Chapbook Award; short-listed for the Fish Publishing Prize; featured in Mississippi Review, Atlanta Review and North American Review as contest finalists; and published in such journals as Agenda (UK), Briar Cliff Review, The Paterson Review, Pratik, Red Canary, Silver Birch Press, Terrain, West Trestle Review, plus 10 anthologies. A graduate of UC Santa Cruz with an MFA from UMass Amherst, she is a fourth-generation Angeleno who lives in Pasadena and feels at home in Ireland.

Alchemy of Words is the first English-language poetry book of Ella Czajkowska who previously published a book of poems in Polish. Her love of creative writing was born in high school where she started writing poetry and short stories. In 2015, Ella started to write poetry in both Polish and English, and from 2017 she writes only in English. Her book of Polish language poetry, entitled “Tam, gdzie umierają marzenia,” was published in Rzeszów by Sowello in 2019. Her English-language poems appeared in the California Quarterly and the Crystal Fire anthology (Moonrise Press, 2022). She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2022 by the California State Poetry Society for her poem “The Calling.”

Visit the Village Poets blog for poems of the featured poets at https://villagepoets.blogspot.com/.

Bolton Hall is a Los Angeles Historical Landmark built in 1913. The Bolton Hall Museum is located at 10110 Commerce Ave. in Tujunga.