Yda Hillis Addis — Collected Poems
A teenage Los Angeles poet became a border-crossing journalist, translator, folklorist, and one of the strangest missing-person stories in American letters. These poems recover the astonishing beginning of that life.
Mary C. F. Hall-Wood — Sea-Leaves
She edited a Santa Barbara newspaper, taught herself the machinery of print, and turned the Pacific, the mountains, wildflowers, missions, drought, and civic life into one of Southern California’s earliest substantial books of poetry.
Curtis, Louis F. — Story and Song
A California educator’s sweeping book of Norse story, Christian legend, romance, faith, and song.
Dantés — Poemas
A vanished Santa Barbara poet speaks through love songs, cemetery meditations, satire, religious visions, and a fierce dream of Spain—sixteen remarkable poems surviving under one unexplained name.
Rosalie W. Kercheval — Poems
The complete forty-poem sequence that Rosalie W. Kercheval published beside her father in 1883, restored from the original book with contemporary reception, archival documents, and the first evidence-based account of her life.
William Andrew Spalding — Collected Poems
William Andrew Spalding helped build the Los Angeles Times while writing poems about oranges, newspapers, civic ambition, belief, and the unruly companions he called his “vagabonds.” Printer, editor, historian, and rationalist, he caught a booming city between booster confidence and the comic disorder of daily life.
Albert Fenner Kercheval — Dolores; and Other Poems
A Forty-Niner, Los Angeles horticulturist, public official, and indefatigable newspaper poet, Albert Fenner Kercheval wrote California as he helped cultivate it. His work moves from mining-camp comedy and Civil War politics to botanical observation, family grief, civic argument, and the haunting Spanish romance of Dolores.
Samuel Hawkins Marshall Byers — Collected Poems
A Civil War prisoner wrote his most famous song behind Confederate lines, then watched it escape in an officer’s artificial leg and sweep the Union army. Samuel Hawkins Marshall Byers carried that astonishing beginning into a ninety-four-year life of diplomacy, civic verse, California legend, and restless reworking of war memory.