Now Available !
Tales of an Inland Empire Girl
Jenny, her barely-younger twin Jackie, and their baby sister Annie try to navigate their parents’ troubles. The story zooms in on Jenny as she descends from stellar student to angry punk rock dropout, hiding shame under the high school bleachers as her twin sister graduates from high school. It’s the story of Jenny hitting rock-bottom, and finally, slowly picking herself up and starting to put the pieces of her live back together.
Read More
Now available here or at your favorite on-line retailer.
Purchase Here
Acts of Contrition
Claremont resident Victoria Waddle has created a gripping short story collection about the complex lives of modern women. Now available here or at your favorite on-line retailer, this is a collection that will keep you captivated and wanting more.
“ Acts of Contrition is a great collection, one I read in a single sitting, the stories sly and engaging, hilariously dark and always surprising. The women of Victoria Waddle’s fiction are characters I’d spend much more time with – they are brutally honest, have excellent talents at remembering, and they soldier on with grace and humor and wine.”
—Susan Straight, author of eight novels, including Highwire Moon, and one memoir, In the Country of Women
Read More
Behind the Red Curtain: a Memoir
“With Behind the Red Curtain, Hồng-Mỹ Basrai has rendered a compelling and courageous story of her life and survival during the fall of South Vietnam. In gripping prose, she recounts her family’s repeated desperate and dangerous efforts to emigrate afterwards, and even harsh imprisonment under the post-war communist regime. With a deft writer’s hand and eye for detail, Basrai brings us into the intimacy and beauty of her Vietnamese culture and her family’s heritage, and then launches us into a journey that is heartbreaking, hopeful and triumphant all at the same time. Behind the Red Curtain is a must-read book that will keep readers glued to the page and change their lives forever.”
—Ms. Ruth Nolan, M.F.A., M.A., professor of English at College of the Desert, editor of No Place for a Puritan: the Literature of California’s Deserts and author of Ruby Mountain.
Purchase Here
Star Chasing
Los Nietos Press is pleased to announce the publication of
Star Chasing, the latest poetry collection from Long Beach poet Thomas R. Thomas.
“Thomas R. Thomas’ new collection Star Chasing is like a telescope that brings its own sky. These passionate and formally innovative poems chart new constellations, celebrating childhood, marriage, death, and the gods of America.”
—Brendan Constantine (Dementia, My Darling )
Read More Purchase Here
Dancing in the Santa Ana Winds: New and Selected Poems y Cuentos
Los Nietos Press is proud to announce the release of Dancing in the Santa Winds: New and Selected Poems y Cuentos, the latest poetry collection from author liz gonzález.
A fourth generation Southern Californian, liz grew up in the San Bernardino Valley. She writes poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, and her work has been published widely.
Read More Purchase Here
California Trees
Los Nietos Press is proud to announce the release of California Trees, a collection of new poems by Southern California poet and photographer Kit Courter.
Accentuated by Courter’s photography, this book about trees magically becomes about the lessons passed down from mother to son, our relationship to nature, and who we become because of it all.
Dutch Girl From Jakarta: From Indonesian Concentration Camp to Freedom
After years of working with a grief counselor, Maria Zeeman, now eighty-four years old, took the advice of her daughter Loretta and joined a writing class for seniors. Loretta felt that putting thoughts on paper would help her mother soothe the emotional scars left from childhood experiences as a prisoner of war during the Japanese occupation of Indonesia during World War II.
Wingless
Linda Singer poems persuade that all poems are love poems, either by inclusion or difference. Her poems of love lived, gathered, and survived, extract the sweetness of the water of life whether it be in the form of cruel ice or evasive vapor. While mapping the strange dances between angels and crows, she convinces that in passion, loss, and struggle, selfless ‘wingless’ love is the only true reward.
— Gary Jacobelly, playwright and poet
The Beatle Bump
The Beatle Bump takes us back to the world of the Fab Four. This is not just a love letter to the band, but an exploration of what it was like to be alive and in love with the Beatles. He takes us on a journey from the time of the Cavern Club all the way through to the years after we lost John. This was an emotional journey, a retelling of my early life. Snider might be one of the best poets alive today. He’s certainly one of my favorites.
—John Brantingham, The Green of Sunset
With a combination of history and whimsy, Clifton Snider impressionistically captures the essence of being a Beatles fan.
—G. Murray Thomas, My Kidney Just Arrived
More Info on “The Beatle Bump”
Sharing Stories: Global Voices Coming Together
This collection of 39 stories by members of the The Creative Writing for Seniors class, held at the Norwalk Senior Center, is a celebration of the stories that have poured out of this class over many years. The anthology contains the work of 39 authors, selected from the “Shared Stories” columns that have appeared over the last three years in The Downey Patriot and The Norwalk Patriot.
So Cali
“Trista Dominqu’s collection, So Cali, reads like a family photo album … with childhood moments of trolley rides, anthills, avocados, pool dives, and June bugs. It zooms out to baseball caps and flannels, young mothers and gutter kids. … You will close these pages with images so tangible, vibrant, and immediate, you will confuse them with memories of your own.”
– SARAH THURSDAY
Persons of Interest
Los Nietos Press is proud to present this second collection of poems from Lorine Parks, curator of Poetry Matters
“Wonderful, Parks weaves her signature extensions of metaphor and mystery, geography and myth” – RICK SMITH
“Persons of Interest is a fascinating, chilling and remarkably clear-eyed navigation along the tightrope world that we all must walk.” –FRANK KEARNS
“Among these poems we get, as part of the bargain, the wonderful “Old Woman”
series. Women of all ages will empathize. Women writers of all ages will be jealous they hadn’t thought of it first. I know I am.” – SUZANNE LUMMIS
Yearlings
Los Nietos Press is proud to present this second collection of poems from Frank Kearns, co-founder of Los Nietos Press.
“Poems of memory, music, love and relativity, from New England to Southern California and back again. A wonderful second collection from Frank Kearns.”
The Gift
Long-time Downey resident Rosalie Desimone Sciortino shares her poems, stories and other writings.
“Rosalie Sciortino’s ‘gift’ is pure time travel. Journey to the 1890’s to the Mediterranean island of her origin, lush with wild flower fields. Sail to America to meet the unrepentant Colorado Magpie bandit. Savor a robin sweeten the morn, or let mourning render you deaf- blind and lead you to a Morpheus garden path lined with sleeping flowers. Rosalie Sciortino’s poems and short stories transport you to a shared, silvery place, and do not hurry you past regrets. Her gift is the transformation of the common to the uncommon.” — Zaida Ramos
But Who’s Counting
This Poetry Matters Anthology collects Poems from some of the best poets in Southern California who have read in this on-going monthly poetry reading in Downey, California in the years 2013 -14.
Edited by Lorine Parks