“Five Voices” was an evening of poetry held in conjunction with Downtown Artwalk and the exhibition “West Southwest: ABQ-LA Exchange”.

This event was curated by Richard Modiano, the features editor of Poetix (an on-line poetry journal) and board member of the Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Venice.

Los Angeles poets Jamie O’Halloran, Fernando Castro, Doraine Poretz and Corrie Greathouse read their latest literary compositions. Check out these short videos of Jamie O’Halloran, Fernando Castro, Doraine Poretz and Corrie Greathouse's works.

DJ music was provided by Emilio Mauge.

The Long Island native Jamie O’Halloran received her M.A. in English from the University of Washington through its Creative Writing Program. Her work has appeared in more than 40 journals, including Prairie Schooner, The Cream City Review, ART/LIFE, Solo, The Blue Moon Review, Poetry Flash and Yankee, and in the anthologies And What Rough Beast: Poems at the End of the Century and Grand Passion: Poets from Los Angeles and Beyond. Her chapbooks include Sweet To The Grit (The Inevitable Press, 1998) and The Landscape From Behind, with Jim Natal, (VC Press, 1997.) She has won the Ann Stanford Poetry Prize, received awards from The Academy of American Poets, Verve Magazine, Red Dancefloor Press and The Sacred Beverage Press, and her poems have been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. Since 1993 she has coordinated a literary reading series for the Sunland-Tujunga Branch of the Los Angeles Public Library. She is a former co-director of the Valley Contemporary Poets and editor for VC Press.

Poet and playwright Doraine Poretz teaches a poetry writing series for adults “Writing Down the Music of Your Life”, conducts monthly seminars in writing and curates an on-going series of poetry readings at the Bodhi Tree Bookstore in West Hollywood. Ms. Poretz has taught thousands of students as poet-in-residence in various schools in California during her twenty year career and has served on the faculty of the California Summer School for the Arts. She has been a guest instructor at SCI-ARC (Southern California Institute of Architecture), where she taught poetry appreciation to college freshman. Doraine Poretz has published five books of boetry, and her short stories have appeared in both Doubleday and Dutton editions. Her poems can be found in such magazines as Onthebus, Harbinger: Fiction and Poetry of Los Angeles Writers, and Grand Passion: The Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond. A new book of her poems, This Alchemy, is due out in the fall of 2008.