Annual RUSKIN BIRTHDAY BASH at Telescope Studio (downtown LA arts district) featuring poets Suzanne Lummis, Judith Pacht, and former LA City Poet Laureate Lynne Thompson. Cellist Allan Hon and pianist Alex Zhu will perform music by Rachmaninoff, Frank Bridge, Alex Zhu, and John Ruskin!
Suzanne Lummis' fourth collection, Crime Wave (Giant Claw), is included in Literary Hub's end-of-year 100 Notable Small Press Books, 2025, where reviewer Angela Chaidez Vincent called it "Savvy, Robust, Relentless." She edited Poetry Goes to the Movies (Pacific Coast Poetry Series/Beyond Baroque Books) with well-known poets of L.A. and across the nation. Both books were included in Mike Sonksen's 25 Best L.A. Centric Books of 2025 on the significant website L.A. Taco. Her poems have appeared in noted literary journals and in The New Yorker.
Judith Pacht’s book Summer Hunger won the PEN Southwest Book Award for Poetry. Her books include Precarious (Giant Claw Press), Infirmary for a Private Soul (Tebot Bach Press) and five chapbooks. A three-time Pushcart nominee, Pacht was first place winner in the Georgia Poetry Society’s Edgar Bowers competition. Her work appears in numerous anthologies and journals such as Ploughshares, Runes, Nimrod and Phoebe. Her poems have been translated into Russian where they were published in Foreign Literature (Moscow, Russia). Pacht reads at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, at Charleston’s Piccolo Spoleto Festival and has read and taught Political Poetry at Denver’s annual LitFest at the Lighthouse, and in Los Angeles at Beyond Baroque.
In addition to serving as Los Angeles’ 4th Poet Laureate, Lynne Thompson is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Blue on a Blue Palette (BOA Editions). She represented Los Angeles at the Marathon Poétique during the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. A lawyer by training, Thompson serves on the Boards of Scripps College, the Poetry Foundation, Los Angeles Review of Books and is President of Cave Canem. Recent work can be found or forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Georgia Review, and The Common.
The annual toast to Mr. Ruskin and a festive dessert reception following. An in-person event, open to the public. Parking available in front of the studio and in the valet parking lot across the street. Address: 2125 Bay Street, Los Angeles 90021.