FOREWORD: 8 LA POETS

The first book HINCHAS published was a collection of ghazals for James Foley; I titled the collection "Ghazals for Foley" in honor of Jim's conversion to Islam, but also to highlight the rot, the void left in the world by Jim's graphic murder. This was 2016, almost 18 months after Foley's murder, and most of the ghazals that were published were from former classmates from the UMASS-Amherst Poets & Writers Program. One of the people that didn't go to school with Jim or I, but that submitted ghazals was radio journalist, Adolfo Guzman Lopez. He submitted a ghazal that added leagues to the collection, and solidified our burgeoning friendship.


In 2019, Adolfo invited me to be a part of a ragtag group of poets, writers, and thinkers called Project 1521. The group was called Project 1521 in an attempt to fight the erasure of the 500 years that had passed since Cortes plundered Tenochtitlan. The poets in this group were people like Adolfo and Adrian Arrancibia, two former poets from the Taco Shop Poets, and Linda Ravenswood, the mera mera of the Los Angeles Press, and the bawse behind the Melrose Poetry Bureau and several other literary incubators, and Gloria Enedina Alvarez, the most known unknown poetry matriarch in SoCal. For an interloper like myself (east coast douchebag and such) to be among working-class writers in Los Angeles that are wrestling with art in the pursuit of better rendering their aesthetic has been a major gift.


Linda and I initially geeked out over typewriters, and ended up with the legacy of Miriam Matthews, the first African-American credentialed librarian in California. She plied her trade for the Los Angeles Public Library at a time when she was probably the only person of color in every room all of the time. As a librarian of color in SoCal, I can attest to the peculiar ways in which patrons interact with librarians and vice versa (are YOU the librarian?). Linda and I were going to build an index of libraries that hire performers and build a super femmed out volume so that women of color were not only highlighted, but emphasized. We thought a print edition would be keen since we were going for maximum usability.

And then, the pandemic hit and body slammed our poor, poor mice plans. All of a sudden, all budgest were being contested, especially the print collection budgets of libraries. The demand for online books, services, and materials has literally upended most library systems in the U.S. leading to major library system layoffs in cities like Portland and Kansas City, MO. In other words, it's not that print is dead, but the symbiosis the library world has entertained for the last ten years, between print and online books, just tipped over dramatically into the half destined to be prey. I spoke with Linda and we decided to put the project with the namesake on hold, or at least switch it over to the digital world, and proceed with another project: 8 LA Poets.

Because the future is Female, or at the very least the future is super-less Testosteronny, I decided to publish only women poets in Los Angeles County and to prioritize wonen of color poets. Because Armine and Linda and I are in the same workshop, I have been front and center when they have read original pieces they've crafted on the spot. I have glimpsed their ferocity and basked in their analysis and feel in every sense of the word that they are the real deal. And that's because these bad ass ladies have built their houses from the ground up and never got the motherloving permits and didn't think to ask any government agency for permission. For example, Armine runs her own press and is so ovaries-to-the-wall that she left her steady job as an English teacher to stick her neck out and fight the good fight one word at a time.

Thank you for coming to this book and for drinking a little from its lip. We hope you like the sensory feast Linda has curated for you, and we hope to see you on the inside of this book where space has purposefully been alloted for you, dear reader.