Recipient of the 2018 North Street Book Prize in Literary Fiction
Angela's debut novel sets itself on a single day in the life of four Los Angeles musicians, who each struggle to make their living as such, and who are faced with a plight to which each must seek a resolve. By the end of the business day, their lives will have intersected in ways much like the intersection of a musical "trading fours" that builds to a dramatic cadence.
* Trading Fours has also been excerpted in David Rife's book of essays "Jazz Fiction: Take Two," and in
Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz & Literature.
Shortlisted for the 2022 North Street Book Prize in Literary Fiction
This modernist tale of the rarely depicted Los Angeles art scene explores themes of violence and redemption. Setting its stage in the diverse boroughs of pre-millennial L.A. and climaxing in the feverish streets of Paris, this work is a kaleidoscope of violent mood and memory, a meditation on art and artists, and an existential, atmospheric, and sometimes brutal parable on the complex nature of love, which asks the question: What can be forgiven?
A lesson in brevity. Tiny starbursts. In Aleatory on the Radio, Angela uses the exacting 100-word-story form, variously known as flash fiction, postcard fiction, microfiction, drabbles, short-shorts, and bite-sized fiction, to create miniatures that manage to turn their own worlds inside out. And they do it in the span of what essentially amounts to a paragraph, where each word is scrutinized, and secrets are wrenched from the spaces between. They illustrate the ironic and sometimes cruel nature of perspective, and that we never truly know the whole story. Weaving through the vista of artists, loners, lovers, losers, dreamers, those lost, those found, this collection of microstories explores a world as baffling as it is beautiful.
* After the Thousandth Time Singing Lush Life and Jazz have also appeared in Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz
and Literature.
* Splenic Descent, Alms, and Intersection have also appeared in MacQueen's Quinterly.
* And in 2021, a concert of choral music was designed and produced around several of Angela's 100-word
stories by the award-winning Los Angeles-based METROPOLITAN MASTER CHORALE, entitled "Short Stories."
Bones is a poetry collection written in 2017, a year of great personal trials for Angela's family, and the first year of a Donald Trump presidency. The collection's turbulent poems juxtapose the personal with the national, as they traverse the broad landscape of loss, grief, upheaval, and transformation. The cubist cover artwork was painted by artist Ted Brown.
* Holy Order and Female Nude from the Rear View have also appeared in Flapper Press Poetry Café.
Desperate, hungry, angry, hangry, and slaphappy, with this tiny, jet-fueled chapbook Angela dives in without a life vest, to primally scream, through poetry, about a kidney, a rallying cry, and a young man named Hans. Viscera wades around in it, for certain, memoir in narrative verse, spinning a taut, lyrical suite of survival and the inexplicable life force of the young. The surrealist pencil cover portrait was commissioned to artist Paulina Franco.
Postscript: Viscera released on December 29, 2019. On August 29, 2020, Hans San Juan successfully received his second kidney transplant.
On July 22, 2008, Angela successfully donated a kidney to Hans San Juan at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California, during quite possibly the most profound spell of depression she had ever experienced. This trilogy of essays takes on Angela's own dark times and the surprising leaps of faith it sometimes takes to be delivered, as it depicts an extraordinary and life-altering adventure that turned out to save not one life ... but two.
* Standing Ajar and Belligerent Romance originally appeared on Kidney.Org
With a wink to dimestore pulp fiction and film noir, Angela's playful novelette The Night, the City, and Miss Thing follows the adventures of Elvis Schoenberg's Orchestre Surreal (a real-life Los Angeles orchestra that Angela has fronted as lead singer under the moniker The Fabulous Miss Thing for nearly three decades). The Orchestre Surreal is a deranged, seductive, Felliniesque-German-Expressionist-John-Waters-circus-of-a-wild ride, and The Night, the City, and Miss Thing is no less a wayward midnight odyssey of playful mood, mystery, and shadow, as it unfolds the antics of femme fatale Miss Thing, conductor Elvis Schoenberg, and ultimate-fighting-champion-turned-opera-singer Dangerous Dan. Read it if you dare, Palooka.
Two Digi-Fest Temecula Awards in Multimedia
Buddha International Film Festival Award for Best Multimedia Film
Indo Global International Film Festival Award for Best Multimedia Film
In this unique children's VIDEOBOOK, Angela narrates her tale on the indwelling nature of friendship. Featuring over a hundred colorful illustrations, and underscored with whimsical music, The Richest Girl in the World sets the stage for a timeless and quintessentially fable-istic tale. Lessons in gratitude and seeing beauty everywhere are taught by the story's two characters. In this new age where turning inward, soul-tending, and mindfulness are no longer fringe flower-child ideas but are in our everyday lexicon, The Richest Girl in the World is right on time to offer Kid-Lit for a risen consciousness. With playful references to Van Gogh, Banksy, and Munch, The Richest Girl is for kids ages 8 to 108!
Watch FREE on YouTube!