Smith, Sarah Bixby — My Sagebrush Garden and Pasear
A California ranch heiress, civic reformer, gardener, memoirist, and poet records a landscape changing under her feet.
Madge Morris Wagner — Collected Poems
She climbed San Jose’s electric tower to write, helped inspire a new Liberty Bell, edited a legendary western magazine, and found her fiercest language in the desert heat.
Newkirk, John Martin — Wild Clover
A gifted student and minister-in-training wrote poems of nature, faith, love, and disability before tuberculosis ended his life at thirty.
Charles Fletcher Lummis — Collected Poems
He walked across a continent, built a stone castle, battled federal policy, founded a museum, ran a library, and turned the Southwest into a lifelong poem.
Leroy E. Mosher — Collected Poems
A fourteen-year-old cavalry bugler became a railroad telegrapher, the comic “Hank Wagoner,” and the editor trusted to run the Los Angeles Times during war. Mosher’s recovered poems and literary prose sound his battered bugle again: patriotic, satirical, tender, topical, and inseparable from the noisy machinery of the nineteenth-century press.
Grace Ellery Channing — Collected Poems
A Whitman devotee, California lyricist, Roman expatriate, and front-line correspondent, Grace Ellery Channing wrote poems that move from poppy fields and Tuscan graveyards to the flags, wounds, and fierce public feeling of the First World War.
Eliza Ann Otis — Collected Poems
A Civil War diarist, Alaska traveler, newspaper owner, children’s poet, and tireless singer of California, Eliza Ann Otis turned a life lived beside national upheaval into an immense poetry of sunlight, mountains, missions, patriotism, childhood, grief, and spiritual survival.
Neeta Marquis — Collected Poems
Born in a frontier Orange County settlement, Neeta Marquis became a poet, reporter, teacher, art critic, club organizer, historian, and opera librettist at the center of Los Angeles literary life. Her poems turn fog, poinsettias, redwood forests, city flower stalls, crickets, and California rain into precise instruments for measuring memory, beauty, and change.
Olive Percival — Collected Poems
Insurance clerk, bibliophile, gardener, photographer, collector, cat lover, and fiercely independent poet, Olive Percival built a handmade world of beauty in Los Angeles on a working woman’s salary. Her delicate books and sharp diaries reveal an artist of miniatures whose wit, discipline, and eccentric passions were anything but small.
John Steven McGroarty — Collected Poems
John Steven McGroarty was poet, newspaperman, lawyer, congressman, regional mythmaker, and author of The Mission Play, once among America’s most frequently performed historical dramas. His verse helped turn California’s missions and Spanish past into public spectacle—a legacy at once theatrically powerful, culturally influential, and open to necessary reappraisal.