John Brantingham

John Brantingham is Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park’s first poet laureate. His work has been featured in hundreds of magazines and The Best Small Fictions 2016. He has ten books of poetry and fiction including The L.A. Fiction Anthology (Red Hen Press) and A Sublime and Tragic Dance (Cholla Needles Press). He teaches at Mt. San Antonio College. (Photo by Alexis Rhone Fancher.)

Latest

Poetry

Carlos Andrés Gómez’s Fractures

By John Brantingham on March 24, 2021

The wide ranging and devastating effect of toxic masculinity is one of the topics that Carlos Andrés Gómez’s Fractures explores deeply and... Read more →

Poetry

Beth Ruscio’s Speaking Parts

By John Brantingham on March 17, 2021

In Speaking Parts, Beth Ruscio explores among other ideas the link between appearance and reality especially as it relates to women. Ruscio, who has... Read more →

Poetry

Jason Irwin’s The History of Our Vagrancies

By John Brantingham on February 10, 2021

Jason Irwin’s new collection hits me where I live. He is facing middle age and the loss of his parents as I am, so that’s no surprise. This is... Read more →

Poetry

David A. Romero’s My Name Is Romero

By John Brantingham on January 27, 2021

I have never attended one of David A. Romero’s spoken word performances, but when the quarantine is lifted, it will be one of the first things that... Read more →

LiteraturePoetry

Kareem Tayyar and the Complexities of Joy

By John Brantingham on January 13, 2021

I had my students study the work of Kareem Tayyar in my Introduction to Modern Poetry class this last semester, and in it we wrestled with the... Read more →

Art

Brantingham on Brantingham: The Art of Ann Brantingham

By John Brantingham on December 2, 2020

When I met Ann in our early twenties, she was studying architecture, doing good work in the estimation of my young eyes, and I asked her what it was... Read more →

Literature