Village Poets of Sunland-Tujunga will bring two well-known Los Angeles poets, Lory Bedikian and Mary Torregrossa, to the podium for an exciting and inspiring event on Sunday, Oct. 27 at 4:30 p.m. In addition, two segments of open mic will be available and refreshments will be served. Free admission ($5 donation suggested). Guests are encouraged to bring their best poems for the open mic and enjoy the Bolton Hall Museum, 10110 Commerce Ave. in Tujunga. Bolton Hall is a Los Angeles historical landmark built in 1913.

The reading starts at 4:30 p.m. and goes till 6:30 p.m. This will be Village Poet’s last reading of 2024. All are invited back on Jan. 26 when we feature poets Shahe Mankerian and Jackie Chou. Visit our blog: https://villagepoets.blogspot.com/ for poems of the features and 2025 calendar of future events.

Lory Bedikian’s second book Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body won the 2023 Prairie Schooner/Raz-Shumaker Book Prize in Poetry forthcoming September 2024 from the University of Nebraska Press. Her first collection The Book of Lamenting won the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. She was recently chosen for the Poets & Writers Get the Word Out Poetry Cohort 2024. Several of Bedikian’s poems received the first prize award in the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry as part of the 2022 Nimrod Literary Awards. Her work is published in Tin House, Gulf Coast, The Los Angeles Review, BOULEVARD, The Adroit Journal, Orion, wildness and was featured on Pádraig Ó Tuama’s Poetry Unbound podcast. Her poem “The Mechanic” is included in the anthology Border Lines: Poems of Migration, KNOPF, 2020. Bedikian’s manuscript-in-progress received a 2021 grant from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. Her work also appears in Massachusetts Review’s “Revisiting WOMAN: An Issue, 50 Years Later.” Bedikian earned an MFA from the University of Oregon. She teaches poetry workshops in Los Angeles and elsewhere.

Mary E. Torregrossa, often noted as a storyteller, is more importantly a story-listener, a practice honed by her job as an ESL teacher in Southern California. Originally from Rhode Island, she blends images and experiences of both coasts into her poetry. Also a collage artist, Torregrossa feels that assembling a collage of images has a natural similarity to assembling a poem. Her first chapbook, My Zocalo Heart, is published by Finishing Line Press. Poems appear in Bearing The Mask: Southwestern Persona Poems, in Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond, in Voices From Leimert Park Redux, and Miju Poetry & Poetics: Korean Poets Society of America. Torregrossa is a winner of the Arroyo Arts Collective Poetry In The Windows and named Newer Poet of Los Angeles XIV by the Los Angeles Poetry Festival. Other publications include The Altadena Poetry Review, the SoCal Haiku Study Group Anthology, and websites for Verse-Virtual, Ekphrastic Review and Dime Show Review.