David Kipen on Dear California

January 23, 2024. Tuesday, 2 PM on KPFK 90.7 FM in Southern California. My guest today is David Kipen.  He needs no introduction because he is himself the introducer, the anthologizer, the cultural historian, the literary booster and all-around celebrant of writers and literary culture for our state and our region. Book review editor, Director of Literature at the NEA, critic at large at the Los Angeles Times and, of course, founder-director of Libros Schmibros Lending Library. He’s one of a handful of go-to spokespersons for literary California, but he’s done that by being a sort of scholarly medium, a reviver, a teller of stories told by others, sometimes forgotten, urgently needing to be told.  He wrote the introductions to four classic WPA Guides and edited the now landmark Dear Los Angeles: The City in Diaries and Letters, 1542 to 2018. For this show he talks about and reads from the brand-new Dear California: The Golden  State in Diaries and Letters.  It’s a moment of celebration for readers, and for Bibliocracy. 

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