You're Invited to the official L.A. Book Launch!

Hello Beauties!

You’re invited to the official LA book launch for Random Experiments in Bioluminescence!

When: Saturday, May 3, 2:00 pm

Where: Beyond Baroque 681 Venice Blvd., Venice, CA 90291

Register Here

Join Amy Shimshon-Santo, Àkpà Árinzèchukwu, and Karen Llagas — for an afternoon of eco-poetry and community conversation at the LA launch of Amy’s book Random Experiments in Bioluminescence. Choral, cryptographic, and exhilarating, her work is a homecoming to the body and the planet, cultivating respect for multiple languages, and awe for life in our pluriverse. The poems ask us to become attentive to multi-species, biotic and abiotic phenomena, and welcome plurilingualism into our everyday lives. Expect a playful space for fresh thinking for people of all ages.

Author Biographies

Amy Shimshon-Santo is a writer, educator, and culture maker who believes that creativity is a powerful tool for personal and social transformation. She was born on Tovaangar land in current day Los Angeles, and has immediate family in the Southwest, the Middle East, and South America. Amy is the author of Random Experiments in Bioluminescence (Flowersong Press, 2024), Catastrophic Molting (Flowersong Press, 2022), Even the Milky Way is Undocumented (Unsolicited Press, 2020), the limited edition chapbook Endless Bowls of Sky (Placeholder Press, 2020). Her essays have appeared in GeoHumanities, Urban Education, and Imagining America, and come together in her forthcoming collection Piecework: Ethnographies of Place (Unsolicited Press, 2025). She has been nominated for an Emmy Award, two Pushcart Prizes, a Rainbow Reads Award, Best of the Net (Poetry), and was a finalist for the NightBoat Poetry Prize. She has performed and taught throughout the Northern Territories, Latin America, West Africa, and Southeast Asia.

Karen Llagas

Karen Llagas’s chapbook, All Of Us Are Cleaved, was published by Nomadic Press/Black Lawrence Press in 2023. Her first collection of poetry, Archipelago Dust, was published by Meritage Press in 2010. Karen has recently translated Dancing Hands: A Story of Friendship in Filipino Sign Language (Chronicle Books, 2023), which won a Schneider Family Book Award, and How Do You Eat Color? (Eerdmans Books for Young Readers, 2025). A recipient of the 2022 RHINO Founder’s Prize, Filamore Tabios, Sr. Memorial Poetry Prize, an Elizabeth George Award and a Hedgebrook residency, her poems, translations & prose have also appeared in various journals and anthologies. She has an MFA from Warren Wilson College and teaches Filipino/Tagalog at UC Berkeley.

Àkpà Árinzèchukwu

Àkpà Árinzèchukwu is a 2023 Oxbelly Writing Retreat Fellow, a winner of the 2021 Poetry Archive Worldview Prize, a Best of the Net nominee, Pushcart, and Geoffrey Dearmer Prize, shortlisted for the FT/Bodley Head Prize, and a finalist for the 2020 Black Warrior Review Fiction Prize. His works appear in Kenyon Review, Adda, Transition, Black Warrior Review, Prairie Schooner, The Rumpus, Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He is the curator of Muqabalal, a bilingual conversation series, co-host of Muqabalal’s Poem a Day in Translation, and the Church of Poetry.

Praise of Random Experiments in Bioluminescence

“Amy Shimshon-Santo’s poetry is an exploration of the deeper connections between the selves and identities molded by languages, cultures, and the land(s) we inhabit."

-Leonora Simonovis, Study of the Raft

"Words dance across the page. These pages bring us back to our most embodied, enmeshed selves, bring us back to the Earth and its abundant wonders."

-Gayle Brandeis, The Art of Misdiagnosis

“This book is fire! It reads like a score. A choreography of creatures. It raises questions of how radical poetic forms can make environmental poetry more sharp and true.”

-Lydia Liu, The Problem of Deer

"Amy Shimshon-Santo is the most organic poet I have ever read. Her polylingualism extends beyond our species, feeding us meaning from panoramic angles."

-Mamle Wolo, Flying Through Water

“Amy Shimshon-Santo’s poems are the words of a survivor, a warrior, and a creator. Time and time again, across borders and languages, she takes us into sensuous and deeply emotional places, finding beauty and rootedness and meaning in everyday moments and extraordinary landscapes.”

-Héctor Tobar, Our Migrant Souls