Scripps College will host Songlines, a unique performance six-part series of eclectic poetry and music by Southern California artists, on Wednesday evenings February through April 2003. The first piece in the series will be “East L.A. Days, Fellini Nights,” featuring poetry written and performed by Marisela Norte and music by DJ Josh Kun, and will take place on Wednesday, February 26, at 7:30 p.m. in Balch Auditorium on the Scripps campus. All events in the SONGLINES series are free and open to the public; seating is limited and will be available on a first-come, first-served basis. A reception in the Hampton Room at the Malott Commons will follow the performance. Songlines is sponsored through the Alexa Fullerton Hampton Speaker Series at Scripps College; for more information, please call the Malott Commons Office at (909) 607-8508.
Recently named Poet Laureate of Boyle Heights and dubbed the “Muse on the Bus” by Buzz magazine, Marisela Norte is an East Los Angeles-born writer who has been documenting the contemporary urban scene for over 20 years, most prevalently inspired by her longtime experience riding the No. 18 bus into downtown L.A. Her work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Interview, Salon, and Wire magazines, as well as local journals L.A. Weekly and the Los Angeles Times, among others.
Norte’s unique creative expression also led to a public project for the Los Angeles Metro Transit Authority, where she noted: “As a writer, the bus has been my transportation and my inspiration for the past 30 years. It has become my ‘mobile office,’ the space where I write about the daily lives of Angelenos that ride the bus to and from work. My writing circulates as I do through economically marginalized parts of the city in spoken word form… .My work is an ethnography of post-industrial Los Angeles culture viewed through a bus window.”
Josh Kun is best known throughout the Los Angeles scene as the host of “Rokamole,” the LATV Latin music video program; as current resident disc jockey at L.A. nightclubs La Leche and Dulce; and previously as radio DJ on Y107 FM. As a music and cultural critic, Kun has authored articles and reviews for Spin, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, L.A. Weekly, and La Jornada (Mexico City), among others, and he writes a weekly arts column, “Frequencies,” published in the San Francisco Bay Guardian and the Boston Phoenix. Kun is currently completing his first book, Strangers Among Sounds: Music, Race, and American Culture for UC Press.
Kun is also on the faculty at the University of California, Riverside, where he teaches courses on Los Angeles, 20th-century inter-American popular music, the US-Mexico Border, and 20th-century African-American and Latino/a literatures.
The Alexa Fullerton Hampton Speaker Series is made possible through the generous bequest of Alexa Fullerton Hampton, who was a member of the Class of 1942 at Scripps College.