August will mark 13 years of the monthly reading series, Tongue & Groove!

But first things first.  Another unique mix of writers performers that you’d be hard pressed to assemble anywhere else will be at The Hotel Cafe, 1623 1/2 N. Cahuenga Blvd. Hollywood, CA 90028, on Sunday July 31 at 6-7:30 pm.  Admission is $7.00

A monthly literary variety show with music produced by Conrad Romo. This  month Tongue and Groove  has the following lineup:

Pam Ward is an author/artist and L.A. native. An art advocate as well as an instructor and mentor at Art Center College of Design, Pam has designed for politicians, community organizations and corporate America.  A former board member of Beyond Baroque Literary Foundation, Pam was also an artist-in-resident for the city of Los Angeles, Venice and Manhattan Beach.  After publishing two novels, Want Some Get Some and Bad Girls Burn Slow, and working on merging writing and graphic design, Pam produced the recent installation, My Life, LA: The Los Angeles Legacy Project, a poster project blending graphics with story/facts documenting the impact of Angelenos on the actual land. Her play, I Didn’t Survive Slavery for This has played throughout L.A. Currently she is working on the true story of her aunt a real Black Dahlia suspect.

David Darmstaedter lives in Topanga and travels the hills dressed in tinfoil underwear to summon ideas from the wild. He has written plays, screenplays, short stories and novels. His memoir My Monster; is in eternal development with Mark Ruffalo and Ethan Hawke. He will be reading from his most current book in the works – Solly’s Shangri -La.

Beth Marquez stumbled into a spoken word tent at Lollapalooza when she was 13 and it changed her life. She co-hosted Java Gardens reading in Huntington Beach and attended the National Poetry Slam as an alternate for the Laguna Beach team. She’d been  published in the Moontide Press, Valley of Contemporary Poets, and Ugly Mug anthologies and elsewhere. She will be debuting a show based on her poetry at The Victory Theater in Burbank in September.

Rios de la Luz is a queer-xicana/chapina living in Portland, Oregon. She is brown and proud. She is the author of, The Pulse Between Dimensions and The Desert (Ladybox Books, 2015). Her work has been featured in Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Entropy, The Fem Lit Magazine, World Literature Today and St. Sucia.

Kristina Wong  is a performance artist, comedian and writer who has created five solo shows and one ensemble play that have toured throughout the United States and UK. She was recently featured in the New York Times’s Off Color series highlighting artists of color who use humor to make smart social statements about the sometimes subtle, sometimes obvious ways that race plays out in America today.  She’s been a frequent ommentator/guest with, xoJane, Playgirl Magazine, Huffington Post  and The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore to mention but a few places. She has been the recipient of numerous prestigious grants and residencies and not to brag, but Kristina has twice given the commencement speech at UCLA, her alma mater.  Her most recent solo show The Wong Street Journal navigates privilege and economic disparity and premieres in June 2015.

Linda Ravenswood with an aim towards inquiry, tantalization,  and uncovering, she speaks, stands, beckons, and reminds  viewers to hold memory, history, place and lineage as holy, yet available markers.  In these ways, Linda has evolved  an arts practice holding a strong and defining spatial, and theatrical course.  Recent work (2014¬2016) has appeared,  or been commissioned at The Broad Theatre, AWP/Pen Centre USA, Cornell University, The Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, The Angel’s Gate Cultural  Centre, The Artery, The Bootleg Theatre, Gallery 16 (San Francisco), The Lancaster  Museum, The Hollywood Fringe Festival, and Craftswoman House.  She has been published in 30 literary journals, her music has appeared in 3  documentary films (PBS), she has 4 books in print (Sybaritic Press, Mouthfeel Press, Gallery 16 Press, LACMA Press – forthcoming), and she is a 2016 Vermont Studio Centre fellow in Poetry.  Twice nominated for The Pushcart  Prize for Poetry, Linda is a lecturer, dramaturg and workshop presenter, most recently teaching at Occidental  College.  Linda Ravenswood is NDN, First Nation, (Pokanoket Nation) a Mayflower descendant on her mother’s  side, and an Indigenous Mestiza from Baja California Sur on her father’s side.  She was raised by Holocaust  survivors from WWII.

Photo provided by Conrad Romo, Tongue & Groove