LA Artcore is pleased to announce “Five Voices” an evening of poetry (held in conjunction with Downtown Artwalk and the ongoing exhibition West Southwest: ABQ-LA Exchange), featuring Los Angeles poets Jamie O’Halloran, Doraine Poretz, Fernando Castro, Rafael Alvarado and Corrie Greathouse will read their latest literary compositions.

This event is curated by Richard Modiano - features editor of Poetix (an on-line poetry journal) and board member of the Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Venice. 

Music provided courtesy of DJ Emilio Mauge.

ABOUT THE POETS:

The Long Island native Jamie O’Halloran received her M.A. in English from the University of Washington through its Creative Writing Program. Her work has appeared in more than 40 journals, including Prairie Schooner, The Cream City Review, ART/LIFE, Solo, The Blue Moon Review, Poetry Flash and Yankee, and in several anthologies, most recently Mischief, Caprice and Other Poetic Strategies (Red Hen Press, 2004). Her chapbooks include Sweet To The Grit (The Inevitable Press, 1998) and The Landscape From Behind, with Jim Natal, (VC Press, 1997.) Honors include winning the Ann Stanford Poetry Prize, and awards from The Academy of American Poets, Verve Magazine, Red Dancefloor Press and The Sacred Beverage Press. She is three-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Her stints as editor and reading series curator include seven years with the reading series she founded for the Sunland-Tujunga Branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, co-director of the Valley Contemporary Poets, and editor for VC Press. She was on the inaugural editorial board of PoetryBay.com for its first decade. These days, her literary attention is held by the poetry club at Fairfax High School which she is honored to co-sponsor.

Poet and playwright Doraine Poretz teaches a poetry writing series for adults “Writing Down the Music of Your Life”, conducts monthly seminars in writing and curates an on-going series of poetry readings at the Bodhi Tree Bookstore in West Hollywood. Ms. Poretz has taught thousands of students as poet-in-residence in various schools in California during her twenty year career and has served on the faculty of the California Summer School for the Arts. She has been a guest instructor at SCI-ARC (Southern California Institute of Architecture), where she taught poetry appreciation to college freshman. Doraine Poretz has published five books of boetry, and her short stories have appeared in both Doubleday and Dutton editions. Her poems can be found in such magazines as Onthebus, Harbinger: Fiction and Poetry of Los Angeles Writers, and Grand Passion: The Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond. A new book of her poems, This Alchemy, is due out in the fall of 2008. 

Orange County native and Los Angeles resident poet Corrie Greathouse has performed her work throughout Southern California and the Bay Area. She has been featured in Falling Star Magazine, The Toronto Quarterly, Poetix and others. Her spring 2008 collection Portraits: Invisible Ink on Parchment is both a collection of prose and a peek into the past and present of characters never defined by name.

Hollywood native Rafael Alvarado is the producer of the World Wide Radio Network Poetry programs and host of the Moe Green Poetry Hour. He is both a writer and avid marathon runner. Rafael writes about the experiences of running marathons and believes there’s a Zen to running. His works explore the thoughts and emotions of the runner during such arduous sporting events.

Colombian poet Fernando D. Castro holds a B.A. in Architecture from Columbia University in New York City and an M.Arch. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA. Fernando has branched out from the rigors of architecture and into poetry, play writing, journalism, teaching and cultural activism at a later age. His publications include Fernando’s Café, from the Inevitable Press, 1998, and contributions to more than a dozen anthologies. His newest book is “The Nightlife of Saints”. Fernando is also responsible for 25 anthologies of creative writing by youth and adults. For more than a decade, he has been an artist-in-residence in programs sponsored by such agencies as the California Arts Council, the City of Los Angeles’ Department of Cultural Affairs, the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division. He is a co-founder of TA’YER Multicultural Performance Collective, a non-profit organization that works with youth-at-risk, recent immigrants and the LGBT community.Fernando lives in Pasadena.