Beyond Baroque

We are a little less than a week away from our fall fundraiser dinner! 🍂🍁🍽️

We’re kicking off our fundraiser season with an intimate dinner gathering. The evening will be full of food, drinks, literature, art, and community. Listen to readings from poets Donna Spruijt-Metz, Shahé Mankerian, Rhonda Mitchell, Gustavo Hernandez, and Michelle Bitting.🍂
The dinner will take place at a private residence in Los Angeles. Address will be shared with those who purchase a ticket. Limited seating, please arrive early.
If you are unable to attend this fundraiser, please consider attending No Fest: Poetry Marathon Fundraiser, an all-day fundraiser with marathon-style poetry readings from the Beyond Baroque family and community, with a Book Fair, Open Mic, and more! 🫕

Reminding you that Saturday, October 3rd, The LatinXorcists will be at Beyond Baroque for a special evening of horror cinema. We will be screening nine short films by Latinx filmmakers based in Los Angeles, followed by conversations with cast, directors, and writers. 🎃💀🎬

Check out this article to read more about the event and The Latinxorcists journey helping writers develop scripts to bring their ideas to life in the horror genre 👉
https://www.latimes.com/delos/newsletter/2026-10-02/latinos-horror-latinxorcists-halloween-movies-representation-screenwriting

Purchase your tickets through the link in our bios. We hope to see you there!

This Saturday, join us in person at Beyond Baroque for a generative workshop with .CHISARAOKWU. on the use of photograph archives to create poetry! 🎞️📸
we have two spots left for this workshop so RSVP TODAY!

Participants will generate new work through a series of prompts and be invited to use their own photographs to create new (or revise existing) poems.📝
CHISARAOKWU., MD (she/her) is an Igbo transdisciplinary poet artist and scholar. Her practice weaves archive, collage, film, and her experiences as a physician to explore memory and identity in the African diaspora. Her poetry and visual art has been featured in Michigan Quarterly Review, ANMLY, Beloit Poetry Journal, Transition and Obsidian, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of Net, and Best New American Poets. Her chapbook “This Wake Holding, Mmiri” received the 2023 Evaristo Poetry Prize’s Honorable Mention from the Africa Poetry Book Fund. She’s a been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, Cave Canem, Anaphora Arts, The Poetry Foundation, Torch Literary Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and Ucross. From 2010-2017, she served as a US Commissioner to UNESCO. She is currently working on two poetry collections and a novel. 📷✍️

Tickets are linked in our bio. See you there! 📚📖

In this marathon-style reading, Beyond Baroque gathers poets and members of the Beyond Baroque family in the Wanda Coleman Theater for a full day of poetry and art. The event will also include a community Open Mic hosted by Joseph Paulson, a Small Press Fair in the Poets’ Garden, the closing of the exhibition X: On The Road and At The Crossroads, and a special performance by L.A. rock band Lawndale, led by former Beyond Baroque Programming Curator, Jack Skelley. Guests can purchase tickets for individual segments or as an all-day No Fest pass!

Help us raise funds for Beyond Baroque and purchase a ticket at the link here https://www.eventbrite.com/e/no-fest-poetry-marathon-fundraiser-tickets-1999125872299?aff=ebdsoporgprofile

Join us for an evening celebrating new books by Robert Hass and Brenda Hillman in The Wanda Coleman Theater at Beyond Baroque 🪴

Robert Hass’s A Third Commonness: Essays on Poetry, Poetics, and the Natural World, published by Copper Canyon Press, traces a literary and ecological lineage through poets, writers, landscapes, and traditions. In A Third Commonness, U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass follows a literary river through time and topography—from Zen Buddhism to California ecopoetics, from Barry Lopez to Walt Whitman, and even through an unlikely fellowship between Kentucky poet-priests. Told through essays and lectures, A Third Commonness is as much a love letter to landscape as it is a sprawling exploration of poetic heritage.

Brenda Hillman’s Still House in the Desert: An Eco-Contemplation, published in the Wesleyan Poetry Series, brings together meditations on time, domestic spaces, childhood, family, and non-human life. Each of Brenda Hillman’s books has been transformative for her readers, and her twelfth collection is no exception. Building on previous volumes about seasons, days and minutes, Hillman concludes her masterful quartet about time with an ecological journey into a family home of the mid-twentieth century 📚

Doors open at 7pm, we hope to see you there!

Join us for a celebration of the book-length poem, Padre Tierra (Artepoetica Press), by Mariano Zaro, translated from Spanish by Blas Falconer 🪶

This bilingual edition moves between the rooms of a childhood home in rural Northern Spain and the body of a father becoming, by degrees, the land itself. The poets will be reading excerpts from the book in The Wanda Coleman Theater followed by a reception and book signings 🍷

Mariano and Blas are long time members of the Beyond Baroque community. We are excited to have them in our space, and we hope to see you there 🙂‍↕️

Join us in an afternoon of readings with Paul Vangelisti and Vincent Katz at Beyond Baroque!

Katz will be reading from his books Daffodil and Accounts—a collaborative book with painter Richard Bosman, while Vangelisti will be reading from his recent book Traveling. Both poets are prolific writers and translators whose work has been influential in contemporary poetry and the arts. 📚🪻

For more information and tickets, click the link in our bio.

Join us at Beyond Baroque for the screening of the documentary “The Figures” and a Q&A with director Nadia Szold and poet Geoffrey Young. 🎬🎥

A lively portrait of poet, publisher and artist Geoffrey Young, The Figures traverses the studios of artists & writers in his orbit as they dive into a freewheeling volley on the art making practice, lineages and the essence of time & language itself. The Figures began as a small literary press but it continually charted new territory, championing one of the most influential movements in latter 20th century literature—“language poetry.” And The Geoffrey Young Gallery always shined a light on young artists just breaking onto the scene. ✒️🎞️

Tickets are available through the link in our bio. 🎟️

What makes a story feel haunted long before a ghost appears? Why do familiar places, forgotten objects, and half-remembered stories linger in our minds long after we’ve left them behind? 💫

In this three-hour generative workshop, we’ll examine how contemporary writers evoke the eerie and create emotional tension through absence, memory, and longing. Drawing on the work of Carmen Maria Machado, Angela Carter, Helen Oyeyemi, and their reimaginings of familiar folktales, we’ll translate literary theory into practical craft techniques through close reading, discussion, and a sequence of interconnected writing exercises. ✨

Designed for writers of all genres and experience levels, each prompt builds upon the last, allowing participants to leave with the beginnings of a new story or a deeper understanding of an existing project while discovering new craft tools for creating atmosphere, emotional resonance, and narrative tension. 🌌

This workshop supports writers of all stages. 👩🏽‍💻

Atina Hartunian is a writer, independent scholar, educator, and first-generation Armenian American based in Los Angeles. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific University in 2023. Her honors include a Teaching Fellowship from Anaphora Arts (2024), the Pacific University MFA Merit Scholarship (2021), and residencies with the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop, Rockvale Writers’ Colony (2025), and the Carolyn Moore Writing Residency (2026).

Hartunian’s work explores horror, perception, memory, diasporic identity, and the unseen through fiction, flash nonfiction, and craft scholarship. Her chapbook Love at First Sipwas shortlisted for the C&R Press Summer Tide Pool Chapbook Awards (2025), and her flash piece I’d Rather Lose My T**s Than My Hair received an Honorable Mention in the 2026 Plentitudes Flash Fiction Prize 🩸