Author Readings Celebrate Release of Spring 2025 Santa Monica Review on April 6

Author Readings Celebrate Release of Spring 2025 Santa Monica Review on April 6

SANTA MONICA, CA — Santa Monica College (SMC) announces the release of its spring 2025 edition of the Santa Monica Review (SMR), SMC’s esteemed national literary arts journal. Published twice yearly, the Review showcases the work of established authors alongside emerging writers, with a focus on narratives of the West Coast. The journal is the only nationally distributed literary magazine published by a U.S. community college.

To celebrate the spring 2025 edition, Santa Monica College will hold an issue launch party featuring readings by Review authors. The party — “Santa Monica Review Presents...A Celebration of the Spring 2025 Issue with Readings by Recent Contributors” — will be held from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. on Sunday, April 6, in The Edye at the SMC Performing Arts Center, 1310 11th Street (at Santa Monica Boulevard), Santa Monica.

Tickets for the launch party — available at smc.edu/tickets (opens in new window) — cost a suggested donation of $10. Refreshments will be served. Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center will have a variety of author titles available for purchase at the party. Abundant free parking available on premises. Seating is on a first-arrival basis.

The celebration, to be introduced by Review editor and Emcee Andrew Tonkovich, features a special welcome by Los Angeles Review of Books Executive Director Irene Yoon and readings by four contributors to the current issue: Dawna Kemper, Steven D. Guttierez, Miles Parnegg, and Sean Bernard.

The spring 2025 issue — edited by Tonkovich, also host of the weekly show Bibliocracy Radio on KPFK (90.7 FM) — features cover art by writer and painter Peter Carr.

The issue includes 13 original short stories and essays, most by West Coast writers. “This issue seems to be about revelation and redemption,” says editor Tonkovich, “with unshy confession, imaginative sharing, and secrets reconsidered.”

The issue opens with a short story by frequent contributor Dawna Kemper about a grieving public librarian who has lost not only her child — to the pandemic — but also her job, due to reactionary political pressure. Other returning contributors include Jeffrey Bills-Solomon (So Famous and So Gay), with the story of the scion of a disgraced family, and a personal essay of both recuperation and reunion by JM Hollwig. Sean Bernard (Studies in the Hereafter), Stephen D. Gutierrez (Captain Chicano Draws a Line in the American Sand), Michael Guista (Brain Work), and Gary Amdahl (The Creative Writers) deliver their respective elaborations on family, politics, and self-interrogating dreams in reliably character-rich stories, realistic and meta-fictional. “The surprising range of people, place, and thing offered in these short and long stories by SMR veterans shows engagement with both history and our weird present, often with vigorous humor and wild imagining,” says Tonkovich.

First-time SMR contributors include novelist and memoirist L. Annette Binder (Rise), with a story about memories manipulated for torture; Amy Dawson Robertson exploring the consequences of a military academy’s honor code; Miles Parnegg offering revelatory coming-of-age episodes; Jake Zucker spinning a fable of workplace ethics and the limits of empathy; Abby Walthausen sending up neighborly eco-ethics and responsibility; and Seth Gannon taking apart the expectations of an unexpected and unlikely friendship.

“This issue,” says Tonkovich, “features the return of familiar SMR writers often doing unfamiliar things, and new writers whose work fits nicely into the magazine’s mission of presenting surprising, provocative, smart, and funny work. Sometimes it’s hard to tell realism from irrealism, perhaps just right for our times.”

Additional events scheduled to celebrate the new issue are listed on the SMR website and include hosting a booth April 26-27 at this year’s Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, offering complimentary copies of the magazine to visitors at Booth #072 at the USC campus, as well as distributing information on SMC’s abundant academic and cultural opportunities.

Santa Monica Review was founded by novelist and SMC English instructor Jim Krusoe (The Sleep Garden). Published twice yearly, the Review has presented readers experimental, thoughtful, and funny original writing — including essays and short stories by Michelle Latiolais, Lisa Teasley, Alice Mattison, Keenan Norris, Ismet Prcic, and Gary Soto — in 36 years of publication, and is a celebrated national magazine. Recent stand-out work published in the Review appears in the annual Pushcart Prize, Best American Short Stories, and PEN/O. Henry anthologies.

Santa Monica Review is sold online at the SMR website (smc.edu/sm_review (opens in new window) ), and in print editions at the SMC Campus Store (SMC Main Campus, 1900 Pico Blvd., Santa Monica), at Beyond Baroque and Small World Books in Venice, and at other area booksellers. Copies may also be ordered by mail. Details are available at smc.edu/sm_review (opens in new window) .

The publication costs $14 per issue or $25 for the two issues each year.

More information is available at the Santa Monica Review website (smc.edu/sm_review (opens in new window) ) or by calling 949-235-8193. All events subject to change or cancellation without notice.

Santa Monica Review is a project of Santa Monica College, part of its mission to promote literacy and engagement with the literary arts in Southern California. Santa Monica College is a California Community College accredited by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC).

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