A room
for spoken
verse.

Conney D. Williams arrived in Los Angeles in 1981 — an Air Force veteran from Shreveport, Louisiana, the sixth of eleven children, and a former Pentecostal minister still searching for his voice. He found it in Leimert Park.

For more than two decades, Conney has been a foundational presence in the Los Angeles literary community. He served as Artistic Director of The World Stage Performance Gallery in Leimert Park and facilitated its legendary Anansi Writers Workshop, where generations of LA poets have come up. In 2014, he co-founded World Stage Press with Hiram Sims — the Southern California small press that now anchors his most recent collection.

He is the author of three books of poetry — Leaves of Spilled Spirit from an Untamed Poet (2002), Blues Red Soul Falsetto (2012), and The Distance of Observation (World Stage Press, 2021) — and has released two CDs of poems set to music, River & Moan and Unsettled Water. His work has aired on KJLH and KPFK, been performed at USC, UCLA, the Black Arts Festival, and the Leimert Park Village Book Fair, and was featured on the L.A. Public Library's Poems on Air by City Poet Laureate Lynne Thompson.

That Conney holds the mic in this room each month is a rare honor and a long friendship made visible. We could not have asked for a more fitting voice to open the night.

"Every day is an opportunity to live, breathe, create — to love." — Conney D. Williams