Village Poets features Joe DeCenzo and Judith Pacht on the fourth Sunday of the month. Village Poets will host its poetry reading on June 28. The reading will take place at Bolton Hall Museum at 4:30 p.m. and will feature two Los Angeles poets. 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/.

Joe DeCenzo is an LA native and graduate of the Los Angeles City College Theater Academy. His education in music built the foundation for his appreciation of the poetry of lyrics.  He was elected poet laureate of Sunland-Tujunga and served from 2004-06. While laureate, he produced the “Shouting Coyote” Performing Arts Festival and was a Dept. of Cultural Affairs grant recipient. It was renowned for drawing local writers, musicians, dancers and artists together in prominent festivals that celebrated the creativity of the foothills. His published works include The Ballad of Alley and Hawk and the Study Guide and Poetry Primer for the same. Since 2004, both are being taught and performed annually at Vineyard Junior High in Rancho Cucamonga by his collaborator Jenna Vandegrift. He has been published in several anthologies: Meditation on Devine Names (Moonrise Press 2012), We Are Here, the Village Poets Anthology (Moonrise Press 2018) and Crystal Fire (Moonrise Press 2022). The latter earned him a Pushcart nomination. He was inspired to pursue creative writing as a child after hearing a recitation of Rudyard Kipling’s If. His greatest influences were the playwrights he studied and performed; e.g., Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter. For 10 years he served as the chair of the Sunland-Tujunga Arts Recreation and Culture Committee helping artists and organizations connect with funding, venues and volunteers. He regularly emcees the Village Poets monthly reading at Bolton Hall Museum. His proudest achievements are the connections he’s made with the foothills communities and the programs he’s worked to build and maintain.

Judith Pacht’s book Summer Hunger won the PEN Southwest Book Award for Poetry. Her third book, Precarious, New & Selected Poems (Giant Claw Press) was published in the fall of 2025. A three-time Pushcart nominee, Pacht was first place winner in the Georgia Poetry Society’s Edgar Bowers competition. Her poetry appears in journals that include Ploughshares, Runes, Nimrod and Phoebe, and has been translated into Russian where it was published in Foreign Literature (Moscow, Russia). Her work is in numerous anthologies. 
Pacht reads at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, at Charleston’s Piccolo Spoleto Festival and has read and taught political poetry at Denver’s annual LitFest at the Lighthouse.