Long before Divine, Charles Pierce, Craig Russell, Jim Bailey, or any contestant on ‘Drag Race’ brought the art of drag performance to mainstream audiences, there was Julian Eltinge. Although…
After Ann Forst, the Black Widow, was sentenced to serve time for pandering, one of her protégés, Brenda Allen (born Marie Mitchell and going under a number of aliases including Brenda Allen Burns…
When we mention yoga in Western society, many of us envision young leggings-clad men and women in a yoga studio getting into impossible postures. While this may be the reality in some yoga classes, it…
June is LGBTQIA Pride Month, a time to remember the challenges that the LGBTQIA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual) community has faced and to commemorate the contributions…
C. L. Polk wrote her first story in grade school and still hasn't learned any better. After spending years in strange occupations and wandering western Canada, she settled in southern Alberta with her…
And now, a bit of real life noir compliments of the photo collection of the Los Angeles Public Library and the real lives of two L.A. femme fatales – the Black Widow and the Vice Queen.No matter what…
The library has recently added its first scores by the Korean composer Yun Isang (윤이상 / 尹伊桑) to our collection. There are currently seven scores and three books on Yun in our system, and several more…
Memorial Day is officially observed on the last Monday of May, honoring the men and women who lost their lives while serving in the U.S. military. It was originally known as Decoration Day because…
At some point in 1889 the president and (later) chairman of the board of the Farmers and Merchants National Bank of Los Angeles, Jackson A. Graves, decided that his Alhambra residence simply wasn’t as…
Born in Louisiana in 1922, Rolland J. Curtis came to Los Angeles with his wife in 1946 after serving in the Marines during WWII. He worked as an LAPD officer for four years before attending USC where…
In the United States, Mother's Day is always celebrated on the second Sunday of May. In some countries, it was changed to dates that were significant to the majority religion, or to historical dates…
The prom in all its drama has been around a lot longer than I thought. Originating somewhere in the1870s as a college tradition called the Promenade, it was a debutante coming out kind of thing. The…
John Kessel holds a B.A. in Physics and English and a Ph.D. in American Literature. He helped found and served as the first director of the MFA program in creative writing at North Carolina State…
Claire L. Evans is a writer and musician. She is the singer of the pop group YACHT, founding editor of VICE’s science-fiction vertical Terraform, and the co-founder of the Los Angeles-based events…
Cinco de Mayo is a holiday commemorating just one event: The Battle of Puebla, which was a day of victory for the Mexican army against the French in 1862. Over 150 years later, people still mistake…
“Where are your Star Wars books?” This is a very popular question librarians receive from children and their caregivers at the library. When a 5-year-old asks this question, I can’t help but smile and…
If you're an Angeleno with even a casual interest in the Dodgers, you've probably heard of veteran baseball writer Jon Weisman. Since 2002, Weisman's blog Dodger Thoughts, his self-described "outlet…
In the spring of 1942, the City of Los Angeles experienced a population exodus triggered by a presidential executive order. Images in the Los Angeles Public Library's Herald Examiner Collection and…
The Avengers, Teen Titans, Deadpool, and Aquaman are all coming to a movie theater near you. The inspiration for these movies comes from decades of material published by the “Big Two” comic book…
"It happened in New York, April 10th, nineteen years ago. Even my hand balks at the date. I had to push to write it down, just to keep the pen moving on the paper. It used to be a perfectly ordinary…
Linda Addison is an award-winning poet and author writing in the genres of Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction. In 2001, she became the first African-American writer to win a Bram Stoker Award for her…
“Poems are made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree.”—Trees by Joyce Kilmer Hard as it might be to imagine now, a majestic tree once stood on this forlorn strip of concrete wedged between…
The best way to celebrate the National Park System in America is to stand on the hallowed ground of any one of them and just look around. They never fail to fill you with wonder and genuine pride in…
Sarah Kendzior is a writer, journalist, and researcher who has studied authoritarian states in Central Asia. She is a former columnist for Al Jazeera English and is credited with being one of the…
