Wanda Coleman: winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2012 Shelley Memorial Award!
In this collection of articles, essays, interviews and columns, Wanda Coleman, Los Angeles’ noted satirist, poet, and journalist, recounts three decades of the growth of her city and herself. Gleaned from the Los Angeles Times, L.A. Weekly, The Free Press and other publications, Coleman says that these pieces offer “a tour through the restless emotional topography of Los Angeles as glimpsed through the scattered fragments of my living memory.”
We find the author laboring as waitress, bartender, editor of a sleazy men’s magazine while engaged in militant revolutionary politics and witnessing the Watts and Rodney King riots.
While Coleman’s life has been one of unique accomplishment, Publisher’s Weekly notes, “Her extraordinary eye for detail and personal perspective universalizes her experience and makes her observations both trenchant and reliable.”