About Julia Stein

After earning a B.A. from UC Berkeley, Julia Stein in 1973 at the Los Angeles Women’s Building produced the city's first oral reading of 1000 years of women’s poetry. She was editor/writer for Sister, a monthly feminist newspaper out of Los Angeles and producer-reporter for a women’s TV news Luna Video reporting on women’s news and then broadcasting the news on Mscellany show on KVST TV in 1975-6. 

Stein handset type for Plantain Press, the best fine press in Los Angeles, and was an writer/oral historian of Los Angeles doing original research of Los Angeles 1900-1940. She was the first to teach creative writing to teenage girls in the Los Angeles country delinquency system at Camp Scott.

During the early 1980s Stein was associate editor and then editor of Electrum, Los Angeles's first multi-cultural poetry magazine. She published her first book of poetry Under the Ladder to Heaven (finalist in the Whitman competition) as well as produced an anti-war broadcast on KPFK radio Flowers for Central America with six hours of poets and Central American music. She was editor for West End Press helping them become the first multi-cultural literary press in Los Angeles.







Also Stein helped found the Los Angeles local of the National Writers Union.  Throughout the 1980s she was an journalist publishing book and movie reviews in the Los Angeles Weekly, Los Angeles Reader, Village Voice, Daily News, High Performance, American Book Review, etc.  

Stein published four more books of her own poetry; published literary criticism; and spoke at conferences nationwide. After getting an M.A. in English from UC Irvine, she has taught English at community colleges for 24 years and also taught writing at UCLA Extension writers program. Besides reading her poems from Honolulu to Paris, she edited two books of poetry--Walking Through a River of Fire:  100 Years of Triangle Fire Poetry, which had readings across the U.S., and Carol Tarlen's book of poetry Every Day Is an Act of Resistance.

In 1995 she produced for Common Threads an anti-sweatshop literary reading Midnight Special bookstore in support of workers at Guess--she and Common Threads were sued for $1 million.  In 2010 she cofounded Los Angeles Laborfest and helped organized a series of six literary/art events around the Triangle Fire centennial in March 2011.

2018-19 Stein wrote a three-generation memoir of her grandmother's life in Russia, her mother's life, and her own life.  She worked with Arts Express, WBAI radio New York, to introduce and interview writers. She also reviewed for Rain Taxi literary review and wrote on housing shortage and gentrification for Counterpunch online site and magazine and Citywatch LA online site. She is editor of the book The Many Voices of The Los Angeles Novel--essays about recent L.A. novels published April 2022.