Writing the Golden State: A New Literary Terrain
Thursday, February 13, 2025
12:00 – 1:00pm PST
Join ICW for a discussion about California’s past and present with Jennifer Carr, David Ulin, David Helps, and Wendy Chang, contributors to the new book Writing the Golden State: The New Literary Terrain of California. Writing the Golden States explores California through twenty-five essays that look beyond the clichés of the “California Dream,” portraying a state that is deviant and recalcitrant, proud and humble, joyful and communal. Join us for a multi-faceted and exciting dialogue as we explore the individuals, communities, and events that have made California a richly diverse state.
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Jennifer Carr is a writer from San Pedro, California, and is a USC alumna (class of 2001). Her fiction and nonfiction grapple with what life in a globalized, automated world means for union towns like San Pedro, where immigrant families have come to live and work and stay for generations. Aside from her essay in Writing the Golden State, Jennifer’s work has appeared in Zócalo Public Square, Boom California, and Baltimore Review, among others. She teaches creative writing at Chapman University.
Wendy Cheng is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at University of Southern California. She is the author of Island X: Taiwanese Students, Campus Spies, and Cold War Activism (University of Washington Press, 2023) and The Changs Next Door to the Díazes: Remapping Race in Suburban California (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), and coauthor of A People’s Guide to Los Angeles (University of California Press, 2012).
David Helps is an urban historian and writer from Southwestern Ontario, Canada and the territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishnaabe peoples. His research has been published in the Journal of Urban History and American Quarterly and his essays and reportage have appeared in The Nation, Public Books, and the LA Review of Books, among other places. Currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Southern California, he is writing his first book: a people’s history of global Los Angeles.
David Ulin is Professor of the Practice of English, and editor of the journal Air/Light. He is the author or editor of nearly 20 books, including the novel Thirteen Question Method; Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, shortlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay; and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award. The former book editor and book critic of the Los Angeles Times, he has written for The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Paris Review, and The New York Times; his essay “Bed” was selected for The Best American Essays 2020.
A Machine to Move Ocean & Earth: A Discussion with James Tejani
Friday, April 4, 2025
12:00 – 1:00pm PST
Join ICW for a discussion with James Tejani about his new work, A Machine to Move Ocean & Earth. This groundbreaking work dives into the history of the Los Angeles Port, charting the port’s rise out of the mud and salt marsh of San Pedro estuary and showing how the story of the port is the story of modern, globalized America itself. Interweaving the natural history of San Pedro into this all-too-human history, Dr. Tejani will share with us how a wild coast was made into the engine of American power. In Discussion With Elizabeth Logan.
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James Tejani is associate professor at California State University in San Luis Obispo. After growing up in Long Beach, he studied at the University of California, San Diego, and Columbia University. His writings have appeared in Western Historical Quarterly, Southern California Quarterly, Dispatches Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times. His debut book A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth was published by W. W. Norton in July 2024.
Western Edition Season 4 Podcast
More than 50 million viewers begin each new year looking to Pasadena, tuning into the Rose Parade to see flower and seed-coated floats cruise slowly down Colorado Boulevard. But to nearly 1450,000 of those viewers, the “City of Roses” is home, a complex suburb of downtown Los Angeles with a deep history. Pasadena has played a greater role in American and Pacific histories than most of its residents even know.
This new season of Western Edition digs deep into the “Crown City” of the San Gabriel Valley with six little-known Pasadena stories, from Simons brickyard to Vroman’s bookstore, St. Barnabas church to the Shoya House at The Huntington. It also considers Pasadenans from the past, from John Brown’s children to John Birch’s followers.