Writ Large Press is a downtown LA based small press. Founded in 2007 to publish overlooked Los Angeles writers, WLP continues to experiment with the idea of publishing and explore the role of the book in society with DTLAB, a pop-up bookstore and performance space project, PUBLISH!, a continuing underground publishing project, and Grand Park Downtown BookFest, a festival for LA writers and publishers.
(Writ Large Press, as of June 2017, is in a partnership with Civil Coping Mechanisms and Entropy. The three publishing entities are known as The Accomplices.)
OUR TEAM
Chiwan Choi
Chiwan is a writer, editor, teacher, and publisher. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including ONTHEBUS, Esquire.com, and The Nervous Breakdown. His first major collection of poetry, The Flood, was published by Tía Chucha Press in April, 2010. His second collection, Abductions, was published by Writ Large Press in April, 2012.
Chiwan has been a featured poet in places such as Beyond Baroque, Los Angeles Central Library, Hunter College, KGB Bar, and McNally Jackson Books in NYC, Elliott Bay Books in Seattle, Make Out Room in San Francisco. His books have been taught in classes at Berkeley City College and Riverside City College.
As an editor and teacher, he has helped writers who have had their works published by Simon & Schuster, Penguin, RA, Noon, Bombshelter Press, Full Fathom Five, KCET, and many others.
Chiwan received an MFA in Dramatic Writing from the Tisch School at NYU. Once back in Los Angeles, he co-founded Writ Large Press with Judeth Oden in 2008, after a short and beautiful 6-issue run of a literary quarterly called Wednesday.
Judeth Oden Choi
Judeth is a playwright and a teacher of Creative Writing and Theater, currently teaching middle school and high school Theatre at Rolling Hills Prep School. She is a teaching artist at Shakespeare Center Los Angeles, where she has served as Playwriting Mentor for the award winning Will Power to Youth program and is founding Program Director of an after-school poetry, songwriting and performance program called Play On!
Judeth has an MFA from NYU’s Tisch Department of Dramatic Writing and a BA from Yale University, where she was on the executive board of the Yale Children’s Theater. Her play, Hattie Horner’s Rose, was a finalist for the Jane Chambers Award with the Association for Theatre in Education (2001), and at NYU her full-length play, Ain’t Got Jack, helped earn her the Rita and Burton Goldberg Fellowship (2003). New York credits include Spoilt Milk (Manhattan Theatre Source and Flamboyan Theater), Folk Story (Festival of New Works, NYU and Brave New World Productions Festival) and Hattie Horner’s Rose(staged reading – Estro Tribe).
She was a co-editor of Wednesday, a short-lived literary journal that featured some of the best writers in Los Angeles. Judeth designed solely and in collaboration each of the handmade limited edition issues, before she became one of the founding editors of Writ Large Press, where her bold design and style sensibility has helped create a definite identity for the press.
Judeth is currently working on her PhD at the HCII in Carnegie Melon University.
Peter Woods
Peter has contributed over a decade of service as a one of LA’s most prolific producers, with events ranging from music and culture to education and literary arts, and in a wide range of unique venues— from guerilla spaces such as auto body shops and lofts, to renowned galleries, exquisite locations, and large format venues. His productions reflect a need to address the shortage of creative events accessible to the community as displayed by his continued work with his own Quality Collective, a grass roots movement created in 2000 with a manifesto to create alternative stages, increase artist visibility and offer free art to the public.
He also serves as the Event Director of The Last Bookstore in downtown LA. In the short time he has been there, the venue has become a cultural and events hub, having moved from a small 1,000 square foot storefront on Main Street, to an 18,000 square foot flagship building in the Spring Arts Tower with accolades from the LA Times and a Flavorwire listing as one of the 20 Most Beautiful Bookstores in the World. After executive producing a sold-out run of A Record of Light by Jesse Bliss at The Last Bookstore, Peter joined forces with the 501c3 non-profit theatre company, The Roots and Wings Project, bringing his experience and expertise to the role of Development Director. Perhaps these endeavors are due to the influence imparted on Peter at an early age from his grandfather, Harold L. Patton, stage manager for Ray Charles and owner of the largest collection of Black literature in the United States.
Judeth (Judy) Choi | Human-Computer Interaction Institute