You’re invited! The Jack Kerouac Festival celebrates the restless spirit of the Beat era through poetry, sound, and live creation, honoring the past while letting new voices roam freely down the open road of language. Presented by Typewriters Anonymous, the festival pays tribute to the legendary novelist and poet whose words helped ignite a cultural movement that still echoes through contemporary art, storytelling and performance.
location:
Secret Typewriter Museum at the Brewery Artist Lofts
650 A South Avenue 21, Los Angeles, CA 90031
(To the left of the Stronghold Climbing Gym)
Street parking is available just outside of the main entrance gate on South Avenue 21—please do not park inside the loft lot.
schedule:
12 to 4pm—Analog Hangout & Custom Typewriter Poetry Engagement
Drop into the museum for an open, come-as-you-are creative hangout where typewriters hum and language takes on a life of its own. Spend time with resident typewriter poets, watch words come alive in real time, or roll up your sleeves and create your own piece—part poem, part collage, part artifact.
There’s no pressure, no script—just the quiet magic of making. Ink, paper, and imagination meet in a shared space where even a single word can spark something unexpected.
4: 30 to 5:30pm—Jack Kerouac Lecture
Step into the living legacy of Jack Kerouac through a dynamic lecture by Daniel Dissinger—poet, podcaster, and Associate Professor in The Writing Program at University of Southern California.
Blending literary insight with contemporary perspective, Dissinger will focus on what he likes to call, the Kerouac We Ignore. Drawing from his work as host of Writing Remix and The Nostalgia Test, he invites audiences to look at the father son relationships in Kerouac’s pre-On The Road work and to examine his lifelong and failed search for love of self.
Part lecture, part conversation, this is an evening for writers, readers, and seekers curious about where spontaneity, memory, and voice meet on the page—and beyond.
6 to 8 pm—Tender Hearts Club, Volume One: Love Poetry Anthology Reading
Tender Hearts Club makes its Los Angeles debut with an evening that honors love in all its wild, unpolished forms. Presented by @featherpressbooks, this launch for Volume One gathers a constellation of poets whose work refuses to flatten love into something simple or sweet. Instead, these voices let it breathe as it is—honest, tangled, luminous, and alive.
The night features intimate readings from Phillip T. Nails, Elisabeth Nails, Elizabeth Shanaz, Jennifer Barone, Jonathan Siegel, Lam Khong, Natasha Dennerstein, and Ingrid Keir, along with time to connect, celebrate, and gather around the shared pulse of the work.
8 to 9 pm—Phillip T Nails & Richard E's The Rhythm - Music & Poetry Performance
The Rhythm unfolds as a live collision of sound, space, and language. Phillip T. Nails reads directly from the living manuscript on the museum walls, his words moving in pulse and breath with the room itself, while Richard E. weaves an original sonic landscape beneath and around the poetry.
What emerges is less a performance and more an atmosphere you step inside of, where beats become language, language becomes texture, and the two artists orbit each other in a kind of improvised gravity. Intimate, immersive, and slightly otherworldly, The Rhythm invites you to listen not just with your ears, but with your whole nervous system.