Lynne Thompson will read from her latest collection of poetry, Blue on a Blue Palette. Thompson has been celebrated as “…an outspoken force who uses words to tell stories, bring communities together, and open up new avenues of art and thinking.”

Lynne Thompson served as the 2021-22 Poet Laureate for the City of Los Angeles and received a Poet Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. She is the author of four collections of poetry, Beg No Pardon (2007), winner of the Perugia Press Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award; Start With A Small Guitar (What Books Press, 2015); Fretwork, winner of the 2019 Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize selected by Jane Hirshfield; and, Blue on a Blue Palette, published by BOA Editions in April 2024. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Thompson is the recipient of multiple awards including the George Drury Smith Award for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles, and she was a representative of that City to the Poetic Games of the Paris 2024 Cultural Olympiad. She currently serves on the Boards of the Poetry Foundation, Cave Canem, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. Thompson’s recent work can be found or is forthcoming in the literary journals Best American Poetry 2020, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, as well as the anthology Dear Yusef: Essays, Letters, and Poems For and About One Mr. Komunyakaa, among others. Thompson’s website can be found at www.lynnethompson.us.