A definite departure from the series of 29 chapbooks between 2016-2025 (see www.magrabooks.com), Magra’s first three, full-length book projects, Dennis Phillips’ The Cartographer’s Lament and Bruce Boyd’s Toward Morning (ed. Bill Mohr) and Jessie McCarty’s Pretty Punks: Poems, Portrait & Play, are featured in this inaugural presentation.

With chapbooks by such notable American and European poets like Martha Ronk, Amelia Rosselli, Martial, Ray Di Palma, Corrado Costa, Gillian Conoley, Robert Crosson, Milli Graffi, Neeli Cherkovski. Douglas Messerli, David Lloyd, Art Beck, Paul Celan, Avery Burns, Amy Allara, Lorenzo Mari and Gianluca Rizzo, we now embark on a new course of independent publishing, featuring four to five titles a year, primarily of poetry and other forms of innovative writing. As our motto states on the back cover of our chapbook series: unique works by important writers. Or as our statement of purpose reaffirms, Magra presents writers who are up to the challenge of producing books that strive to make “news that stays news.” Writers who are passionate about language, language that knows no borders.

The series’ debut, Saturday, December 6, at 2pm, at Beyond Baroque, will highlight readings and discussion by Phillips, Mohr and McCarty, as well as introductory comments by Magra’s editors, S.E. Pessin and Paul Vangelisti. Books will be available for signing by the authors.

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Bill Mohr

Bill Mohr is a professor emeritus at California State University, Long Beach, where he has taught since 2006, after receiving his Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California, San Diego in 2004. In 2011, the University of Iowa Press published Hold-Outs: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance 1948-1992. His reviews, articles, and commentary have also appeared in the Bloomsbury Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry, Poetry Flash, Journal of Beat Studies, Chicago Review, William Carlos Williams Review, Poetry Project Newsletter, Hungry Mind Review, New Review of Literature, OR, Los Angeles Review of Books, Los Angeles Times, and Beyond Baroque NEW.

Mohr has a chapter on L.A. poetry forthcoming in a volume entitled “L.A.: A Literary History” from Cambridge University Press in 2026 as well as an essay forthcoming in a CUP volume celebrating the centenary of Allen Ginsberg’s birth. Prior to his career as an academic, Mohr made his living at various occupations, including working as a blueprint machine operator and typesetter. During this time, he was the editor and publisher of Momentum Press, which he founded in 1974 (www.koankinship.com)

In addition to being translated into Spanish, Italian, Croatian, and Japanese, Mohr’s poems have appeared in over 20 anthologies. Mohr’s most recent full-length collection of poems is a bilingual edition, The Headwaters of Nirvana / Los Manantiales del Nirvana (What Books, Los Angeles, 2018). What Books will publish Remiges: Collected Longer Poems in the fall 2026.

Mohr has been a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute and been honored with Beyond Baroque’s George Drury Smith Award. His literary and editorial archives are at the Archive for New Poetry in the Special Collections Library at the University of California, San Diego.

Dennis Phillips

Dennis Phillips (born 1951) is a U.S. poet & novelist. He co-edited the poetry-section of the New Review of Literature, was a founding editor of Littoral Books, the first Book Review Editor of the magazine Sulfur and the L.A. Weekly's first poetry-editor, as well as a director of the Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center. Phillips attended the California Institute of the Arts, where he studied with Clayton Eshleman. He then attended graduate school at New York University. He is a professor in the Humanities and Science Department at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, the city where he lives with his wife, artist Courtney Gregg, and their daughter.

Jessie McCarty

Jessie McCarty is an Irish-American writer from Shreveport, Louisiana. Their poetry, in English and Gaeilge, uses images of the Louisiana South and Midwest as memory tools. Their poems can be read in Dublin’s Bog Bodies Press, Sarka Journal, The Minnesota Review, Charm School, The Documentarian, Don’t Submit Lit, Thick Press, and more.

Jessie’s writing has been published as research chapbooks for the following theatrical productions: The Sarcoma Cycle (11:11 Press, 2024), the Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions: A Homo-Turgy ode to Larry Mitchell (Jack Bowes, 2024), and Perforated Play (Dir. Miles Sennett, 2022). They have taught writing at Index Space, The Center for Fiction, and more. Previous collections include The Bovine Huff (Track and Field Studios, 2021) and the self-published artist book, Our Fairy Diary (2023). Their poem, “Loving you is ordinary heaven,” was featured in Only Poems Daily under Best New Poems in August 2025. They were nominated as Best New Poetry Book by a Chicagoan and Best New Poet for the Chicago Reader’s Best of Arts and Culture in 2022, for their work, The Bovine Huff.

Jessie McCarty has a BFA in Creative Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They hold certifications in systems migration and rare book cataloging (DCRMB).

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Paul Vangelisti

Paul Vangelisti is the author of more than thirty books of poetry and a noted translator from Italian. Some recent books of poems are Solitude (2015), Border Music (2016), and Just in Time (2024).

S. E. Pessin

S.E. Pessin is adjunct faculty at California State University, Northridge, where he is the faculty advisor for Northridge Review, the campus’s oldest literary magazine, and director of the Book Arts Lab in the Department of English; a Ph.D. student in Information Studies at UCLA and the Associate Director of Publishing and Pedagogy for the UCLA Library, Ethics, and Justice Lab; and a humanities professor at Colburn School. Pessin’s research interests include pedagogy, digital humanities, book history, book arts, publishing and distribution, and the relationship between ‘the public’ and print culture. His chapbook of TED Talk eavesdropping poems, Thank You for Listening, was published by Mindmade Books in 2017; his fairy tale tryptic, Three Stories, was published by Magra Books in 2021.

His work is always fabulous and strange and queer.

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