In her Cakewalk column for the KCET website, journalist Erin Aubrey Kaplan writes about a poetry reading held in Doheny Memorial Library. Kaplan discovers the library, which opened in 1932, for the first time, characterizing it as "all high ceilings, tiled floors and dark wood, with that hushed solemn atmosphere particular to libraries that you could almost describe as literary."
At the reading, the fourteen student poets from Animo Film & Theatre Charter High School were as inspiring as the library's space, says Kaplan:
Their invocations and evocations of Anne Sexton, Miles Davis and Van Gogh cast new light on themselves; the largely Latino parents, many armed with cameras, seemed more than slightly awed by the mere sight of the students taking the podium, one by one, and sharing their most intimate thoughts via poetry. Some were a bit too mumbly, others lost their places on the page, but none of that mattered because their words remained. Their words were what filled the venerated space of Doheny and what made them all more than rise to the occasion of USC - a USC I had missed my whole life. Until Monday.