photo: Alexis Rhone Fancher
Linda J. Albertano grew up with strangers in Wheatridge, Colorado, where the back acre was full of fresh corn, and they killed a chicken for every Sunday dinner. But, as a teen, she managed to hang with her extremely cool mother. Shortly after her mom issued her a cheap guitar, Linda J. Albertano’s real life began. Failure to conform, however, bred rejection from the world of songwriting. Being a pigheaded girl, she ultimately refused to rhyme even her verses and finally abandoned melody altogether in favor of spoken word.
Albertano was among five poets who represented Los Angeles in Amsterdam’s One World Poetry Festival, a ten-day multinational bash underwritten by the Dutch government. She’s been featured frequently at Beyond Baroque, SPARC, LACE, Highways and other literary/spoken word meccas in L.A. She’s unleashed her text on MTV, and in such Festivals as LA Poetry, South by Southwest (Texas), and Lollapalooza. And she’s represented on the Poetry Wall with such notable Venice poets as Jim Morrison, Viggo Mortensen, Exene Cervenka and Wanda Coleman.
The LA Theater Center selected her to write, direct, and perform an original, full-length inter-media and spoken-word piece, Joan of Compton, Joan of Arcadia (long before the TV show took part of the name) complete with a cast of poets and artists as well as a 30-member marching band from South-Central LA. Then for the Santa Monica Arts Council, she wrote, directed and performed Calisaladia — a History of California — with a large multi-cultural cast.
She also appeared in Alice Cooper’s revival tour of “The Nightmare Returns.” By night she was the Evil Nurse and Executioner. But by day she read her work in her own Radio Tour of America in Chicago, Miami, Nashville, El Paso, New Orleans and other U.S. hotspots. Recently she was recognized as “Best Female Performer-Poet” by the LA Weekly. Currently she is performing solo and with such dynamic spoken word groups as Gynomite, Nearly Fatal Women, and WordWomen — A New Alliance.
“Skin,” her solo CD offering, is produced by Harvey Kubernik and Dennis Eveland, on New Alliance, a division of SST Records.