Thursday September 20th is the next Wine+Words poetry night featuring Charlotte Innes. The open mic begins at 7:45PM at Mari’s Wine Bar, 8222 Firestone Blvd in Downey, across from Porto’s. The monthly series on the third Thursdays is curated by Lorine Parks, and this month will occur after the “Taste of Downey” event at the civic center.
Charlotte Innes’ new chapbook of poems Licking the Serpent was published in September 2011 by Finishing Line Press. Her first collection was Reading Ruskin in Los Angeles (Finishing Line Press, 2009). A former newspaper reporter and freelance writer, she now teaches creative writing classes at Hey Tutor and tutors students in Los Angeles.
Charlotte Innes is a native of England; the daughter of a Jewish refugee from Germany; a New Yorker for 12 years, and for the last 22 years, a Southern Californian, happily ensconced in Silver Lake. “I was first drawn to poetry through literary fiction. I remember distinctly: it was when I was reading Rikki Ducornet’s gorgeous (terrifying!) novels that I realized I was in love with words more than anything else in the world. And that, I think, is step one, a love affair with language. If you feel that way, you might well be a poet…. Who knows? That’s what’s exciting to me about poetry. You don’t always know what’s coming next, and then something builds in you, and you write it!” – from Connotation Press, an online magazine.