Saturday, August 29, 2026 at 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
**Sumarr**, a seasonal reading series curated and hosted by Diana Arterian, continues its season with **Raffi Joe Wartanian**, **Sandra Doller**, **Claire Stanford** and **Natalie Shapero**, with music by **Bashiro Bryan**. ∆ **Raffi Joe Wartanian** is a writer, musician, and educator who teaches writing at UCLA. As the inaugural Poet Laureate of Glendale, he is a Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, supports poetry programming with communities impacted by the Eaton Fire. His essays and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. Raffi has taught writing to veterans at the Manhattan VA, incarcerated writers at Rikers Island, youth in Armenia, and undergraduates at Columbia University, where he earned an MFA. He is the recipient of grants and fellowships from The Fulbright Program, Eurasia Partnership Foundation, and Humanity in Action. **Sandra Doller** is the author of several books of poetry, prose, translation, and the in-between from the most valiant and precarious small presses. Her newest book, Not Now Now, is newly out from Rescue Press. Doller is the founder of an international literary arts journal and independent press called 1913, where she remains l’éditrice-in-chief. She lives in the USA, for now, and has always already been Canadian. **Claire Stanford** is the author of the novel Happy for You, which was named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and awarded the 2023 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. Her writing has appeared in Black Warrior Review, The Rumpus, Lit Hub, Electric Lit, The Millions, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The American Scholar, among other publications. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Loyola Marymount University and also teaches in the low-residency MFA program at the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe. **Natalie Shapero**'s most recent book is Stay Dead, longlisted for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. Her poems appear in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches writing at UC Irvine. **Bashiro Bryan** is a duo of Ryan McWilliams & Tamzin Elliott. **Tamzin Elliott** is a composer and harpist based in Los Angeles. Tamzin’s music stems from their love of immersive, world-building experiences and the process of learning music by rote, often incorporating elements of early European music and living folk music such as polyphony from the Republic of Georgia. As a harpist, they specialize in historical performance practice, performing European Renaissance repertoire as well as 17th- to 18th-century Irish and Scottish repertory on the wire-strung cláirseach. The work, reconstructing this repertory from Ireland and Scotland, with the tutelage of harpist and scholar Siobhán Armstrong, has played a major role in the development of Tamzin’s current composition project, Meidelant: an opera on the Maidenhood of Morgan le Fay. Tamzin holds a doctorate in composition from the University of Southern California, studying under Ted Hearne, Don Crockett, and Sean Friar. **Ryan McWilliams** is a Los Angeles-based composer, performer, and educator. His music plays with ideas of attention and difference as perceived through instrumental timbre, gesture, and form. Ryan’s music at times also reflects his scholarly work in Early Music and its relationship to the music-making of today. As a guitarist, Ryan is interested in the composition and performance practices of both Renaissance lute and acoustic steel-string guitar. He is currently an Adjunct Lecturer and DMA candidate in composition at the USC Thornton School of Music.