By Lookout Staff

March 27, 2025 -- Santa Monica College (SMC) next month will release the Spring 2025 issue of its literary review featuring the work of familiar West Coast writers tackling intimate topics.

To celebrate the latest biannual issue, the school will hold a launch party featuring readings by Santa Monica Review authors on Sunday April 6 from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.

The event, which will be held in The Edye at the SMC Performing Arts Center at 1310 11th Street, will be introduced by Review editor and Emcee Andrew Tonkovich and will feature readings from four of the issue's contributors.

“This issue seems to be about revelation and redemption, with unshy confession, imaginative sharing, and secrets reconsidered,” said Tonkovich, who is host of the weekly show Bibliocracy Radio on KPFK (90.7 FM).

The latest issue “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,” Tonkovich said.

Reading at the event are Dawna Kemper, Steven D. Gutierrez, Miles Parnegg and Sean Bernard. Kemper, a frequent contributor to the Review, opens the issue with a short story about "a grieving public librarian" who has lost her child to the pandemic, as well as her job.

Other returning contributors include Jeffrey Bills-Solomon with the story of the scion of a disgraced family and JM Hollwiga with a personal essay of both recuperation and reunion.

Gutierrez, Sean Bernard, Michael Guista and Gary Amdahl "deliver their respective elaborations on family, politics, and self-interrogating dreams in reliably character-rich stories, realistic and meta-fictional," Tonkovich said.

“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.”

First-time SMR contributors include novelist and memoirist L. Annette Binder with "a story about memories manipulated for torture" and Amy Dawson Robertson with a story "exploring the consequences of a military academy’s honor code,"

In addition, Parnegg offers "revelatory coming-of-age episodes" and Jake Zucker spins "a fable of workplace ethics and the limits of empathy."

The issue also includes pieces by Abby Walthausen "sending up neighborly eco-ethics and responsibility" and Seth Gannon "taking apart the expectations of an unexpected and unlikely friendship."

Tickets for the launch party are available at smc.edu/tickets and 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.

For additional events scheduled to celebrate the new issue visit the SMR website.