Village Poets will celebrate the Month of Love with featured poets Sarah Maclay and Cindy Rinne in a presentation of original work on Sunday, Feb. 23 at 4:30 p.m. at Bolton Hall Museum in Tujunga.  

Maclay will be returning to Los Angeles from Montana for this performance and renowned fiber-artist/poet Rinne will come from her home in San Bernardino. There will also be an open mic, so attendees should bring their best poems to participate. 

Cindy Rinne is an experimental storyteller and record-keeper of many cultures. Her ethnopoetry is rich with texture and description connecting the ancient/present and the sacred within. Rinne creates art and writes in San Bernardino.She was poet in residence for the Neutra Institute Gallery and Museum in Los Angeles. She is a founding member of PoetrIE, an Inland Empire-based literary community and a finalist for the 2016 Hillary Gravendyk Prize poetry book competition and a Pushcart nominee. Rinne creates using poetry, drawing, photography, painting and fiber art. She attended a residency at Desert Dairy Artist Residency in Twentynine Palms. She performed “Dancing Through the Fire Door” during the PAMLA conference at UCLA. She was on a panel and participated in three readings at the Twentynine Palms Book Festival in 2024. Rinne is the author of Dancing Through the Fire Door, Today on Two Planets, The Feather Ladder and six other books. Her upcoming volume is entitled Structures Break Down.

Sarah Maclay’s fifth collection is Nightfall Marginalia (What Books Press), which is a 2023 Foreword INDIES finalist for poetry. Her fourth chapbook, The H.D. Sequence – A Concordance, was recently released from Walton Well Press. Her poems and essays, supported by a Yaddo residency and a City of Los Angeles (COLA) Individual Artist Fellowship and awarded the Tampa Review prize for poetry and a Pushcart Special Mention, have appeared in APR, FIELD, Ploughshares, The Tupelo Quarterly, The Writer’s Chronicle, The Best American Erotic Poems and Poetry International where she served as book review editor for a decade, and elsewhere. She has taught creative writing at USC and LMU and she offers periodic workshops at Beyond Baroque and privately. She can also be found on “The Poetry of Night,” Poetry.LA’s newest video series.

The Bolton Hall Museum is located at 10110 Commerce Ave. in Tujunga. Bolton Hall is a Los Angeles historical landmark built in 1913. The reading starts at 4:30 p.m. and continues until 6:30 p.m. Refreshments will be served. 

This reading is sponsored by Poets & Writers.