Poetry Book Launch: Penguin Noir by Nicelle Davis

Join us at Village Well Books & Coffee for the launch of Penguin Noir, a novel-in-verse by Nicelle Davis!

To celebrate the launch, ten poets will slip into character, channeling voices beyond their own. Each will read two persona poems, exploring the world through borrowed masks, imagined selves, and shadowy alter egos.

Featured readers include Kathleen Florence, Rich Ferguson, Armine Iknadossian, Zachary Jensen, Victoria McCoy, Hanna Pachman, Jeremy Ra, Jose Rios, Aruni Wijesinghe, and Nancy Woo.

About Nicelle Davis:

Nicelle Davis is a California poet, collaborator, and performance artist. Her poetry collections include The Language of Fractions (Moon Tide Press 2023), The Walled Wife (Red Hen Press, 2016), In the Circus of You (Rose Metal Press, 2015), Becoming Judas (Red Hen Press, 2013), and Circe (Lowbrow Press, 2011). Penguin Noir recently won the Changing Light Novel in Verse Prize from Livingston Press and will be released Summer of 2025. Her poetry film collaborations with Cheryl Gross have been shown across the world. She has taught poetry at Youth for Positive Change, an organization that promotes success for youth in secondary schools, MHA, Volunteers of America in their Homeless Youth Center, Red Hen’s WITS program, and with MEP. She currently teaches Middle School in the High Desert.

About the book:

Penguin Noir offers “a view of life under a man-made ego-system,” The Sea of Wonders, in which poet Nicelle Davis queries the implications of preserving (penguin) lives when the world that would support them is becoming unlivable and our relationship to them increasingly mediated (“So many images of nature, we struggle ever to make it outside”). Wry, yearning, exasperated, this play-in-verse with bold paintings by artist Cheryl Gross and dramatic monologues of individual Emperor, Gentoo, and other penguins dares us to look penguins (and, by extension, the world) in the eye and ‘fess up to the mess we’ve made. Sharp, eviscerating wit will keep you rubbernecking the spectacle Davis walks us through.

Also check out other Arts events in Culver City, Literary Art events in Culver City, Entertainment events in Culver City.