Note: If you are interested in attending this event, please RSVP here or select the "Register" button on this page.

In celebration of Banned Books Week, please join us for a moderated conversation and poetry reading with writer Lynne Thompson.

Lynne Thompson served as Los Angeles’ 4th Poet Laureate (2021-2022) and received a Poet Laureate Fellowship from  the Academy of American Poets. She is the author of four collections of poetry, "Beg No Pardon," winner of the Perugia Press Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award; "Start With A Small Guitar; Fretwork," winner of the 2019 Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize; and, "Blue on a Blue Palette," putblished by BOA Editions in April 2024. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Thompson is the recipient of multiple awards including the George Drury Smith Award for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles, the Tucson Literary Festival Poetry Prize, and the Steven Dunn Poetry Prize.  She represented the City at the Marathon Poetiqúe at the 23rd Olympiad in Paris in 2024. Thompson’s recent work can be found or is forthcoming in the literary journals Best American Poetry 2020, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, and Gulf Coast, among others. Thompson serves on the Boards of Directors of The Poetry Foundation, Los Angeles Review of Books, and is President of Cave Canem, a literary arts nonprofit organization serving African American poets.