David St. John & Anna Journey: Farewell LA

Arguably Southern California's highest profile poetry couple, DAVID ST. JOHN and ANNA JOURNEY, departed their long-time home in the Spring of 2023 and moved to Virginia. The event was marked by a 5/25/2023 "Farewell L.A." reading at Beyond Baroque Literary | Arts Center in Venice, CA, attended by many of the poets whose lives they have touched. This video provides extended excerpts from that evening.
DAVID ST. JOHN is a prominent national poet, scholar, former chair of the USC English Dept., and mentor to many SoCal poets. His honors include many prestigious poetry prizes, including the Rome fellowship and the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and the George Drury Smith Lifetime Achievement Award. He has authored ten collections including "The Window" (Arctos Press, 2014) and "The Auroras: New Poems" (Harper, 2012). With Cole Swenson, he co-edited "American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry" (W.W. Norton, 2009). In 2014, he became Chair of the USC English Dept.
ANNA JOURNEY is the author of four collections: "The Judas Ear" (LSU Press, 2022), "The Atheist Wore Goat Silk" (LSU Press, 2017), "Vulgar Remedies" (LSU Press, 2013), and "If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting" (Univ. of Georgia Press, 2009), which was selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, FIELD, The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Yaddo. She holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from the Univ. of Houston, as well as a B.F.A. in Art Education and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, from Virginia Commonwealth University.