Author
Teka Lark is a poet, essayist, journalist, artist, and public intellectual born in Los Angeles and now based in Newark. Her first full-length collection of poetry, “Queen of Inglewood” was released on Word Palace Press in 2017.
In 2004 she founded The Bus Bench the first Los Angeles editorial blog on urban planning, transportation, class and race. At the Bus Bench she broke the story that only 1.6% of Metro Los Angeles employees use their own public transportation system.
In the mid-aughts she wrote for L.A. Eastside and founded the Brickbat Revue, a literary and political broadsheet in the tradition of Hunter S. Thompson’s Wall Poster and Wallace Thurman’s Fire!!
In 2006 she was the first to publish Wanda Coleman’s poem, My Crowning Glory later published in “Jazz and Twelve O’Clock Tales” on Black Sparrow Press in 2008.
From 2006-2012 she ran an unnamed art performance space out of the Brewery LA Arts Colony and produced the Little Dear Reading series and Southern California Gothic reading.
In 2012 she founded the newspaper the Morningside Park Chronicle. She broke the story of an $18 million giveaway to Madison Square Gardens in the Forum/Inglewood deal. In 2014 she founded the Blk Grrrl Book Fair an anti-capitalist fair in the spirit of the Anarchist Book Fair. Funded by the people.
In her poetry and fiction, she explores capitalism, using satire, her journalism and essays are in the tradition of social criticism.
Her writing can be found at the LA Weekly, ROAR Magazine (UK), LA City Beat, Time, USA Today, Counter Punch, Truth Dig, The Pensive Quill (Ireland), Montclair Local, and the Annares Project for Alternative Futures.
Cited in “Nuevo Activismo Negro” by Ezequiel Gatto (Tinta Limón, 2016) and “From #Blacklivesmatter to Black Liberation” by Keeanga-Yamahtt Taylor (Haymarket Books, 2016).
BLK GRRRL BOOK FAIR 