Most people in the publishing business who know Kim Dower know her as the force behind Kim from L.A., a Los Angeles-based expert in getting publicity for books and in preparing authors for media appearances. Turns out she’s also a poet who had been published in literary magazines like Ploughshares and The Seneca Review—and the most recent participant in Guerrilla Reads, an “online video literary magazine” that showcases footage of writers reading from their work out in “the real world,” as opposed to a formalized reading.
“I started out many years ago as a poet at Emerson College,” Dower emailed us when we asked about the video. But she put the poetry aside to focus on her PR business and other writing projects until two years ago, when, “like magic, like a dream,” she began writing again, up to two or three poems a week. Since then, she’s taken several intensive writing workshops with Thomas Lux (her former mentor at Emerson) and also participates in a weekly writing group led by L.A. poet Terry Wolverton.
“This was my first ‘submission’ after all these years,” she says of the video, shot in one of the canyons of Mulholland Drive—four poems from a collection called Air Kissing on Mars she’s been working on since she resumed writing. We asked her if the poems had an overarching theme; “no theme I’m aware of except I write about things in every day life,” she told us… “things that happen to all of us.”