Book Launch: Mike Sonksen and Teresa Mei Chuc

Celebrate their recent book releases!

Join us for an evening of honest, humorous, and raw takes on LA life with Mike Sonksen and Teresa Mei Chuc.

"Mike sings the history, people, dreams, and even shadows of LA […] What everyone forgets, Mike remembers.”

—Luis J. Rodriguez, author of Always Running

“Teresa Mei Chuc’s heart-shaking poems will carry any wayfaring reader home with their beauty, bravery and wisdom.”

--Susan Deer Cloud

Over decades, Mike Sonksen has paid tribute to the Southland’s people, topographies, cultures, and histories. His latest collection of poems and essays, Letters to My City, continues that legacy, demonstrating once again the poet's keen eye for beauty—and struggle—in the place we call home.

The poems in Incidental Takes by Teresa Mei Chuc are personal and visceral; human and political; haunting and healing. The ebb and flow of the poems in English and Vietnamese translations mimic the movement of water and the interleaving of the poems mimic the oceanic ecosystem.

The poets will share and discuss their new works, take audience questions, and sign books.

Mike Sonksen, a third-generation Angeleno, is a poet, an essayist, and the author of Letters to My City. He teaches at Woodbury University.

Teresa Mei Chuc was born in Sài Gòn, Việt Nam and fled her Vietnamese homeland with her mother and brother shortly after the American war in Việt Nam. She teaches literature and writing at a public school in Los Angeles and is the Poet Laureate Emerita of Altadena.

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