PREVIEW : Kate Braverman and her ‘Dangerous Persona’

She’s a best-selling novelist. And, according to her, she is “the most famous female poet in Los Angeles.”

But Kate Braverman’s life as a writer has not been easy.

In a Times interview last year, her mother remembered Braverman telling a group of UCLA writing students: “The pain you suffer is enormous. If you can be anything else but a writer, be it.” You’d better want to “spend 10 years like I did in a bathrobe because that’s what it takes.”

Braverman will appear Wednesday night at the University of Judaism to read and discuss her poetry, through which she has carved out what one writer called a “wild, dangerous and daring persona.”

In her personal life, friends and colleagues have called Braverman restless, prone to bitchiness and selfish. Even Braverman has admitted that during certain periods in her life, she “did not behave in a reasonable manner.”

She was talking about the period when she couldn’t get her second novel, “Palm Latitudes,” published. Despite the success of her first book, “Lithium for Medea”--described by the New York Times as being about a “shrewd, passionate, tough survivor in Hollywood’s rat race”--it took four years for Braverman to get “Palm Latitudes” into print. Book editors didn’t like it; her agent didn’t like it; even her friends didn’t like it.

Finally, someone at Simon & Schuster adopted the manuscript. “Palm Latitudes,” about the lives of three Chicana women living in East Los Angeles, was published last year and received mixed but not devastating reviews. (Because Braverman is white, there has been some criticism of her assumptions about a culture that she is a tourist to.)

Braverman’s poetry is also controversial. Some see it as excessive and overwrought. Others think that it is the work of a misunderstood genius. But one thing never lacking in a Braverman poem, or poetry reading for that matter, is raw nerve.

Kate Braverman will appear with poet Jack Grapes at the University of Judaism, 15600 Mulholland Drive, Bel-Air, at 7:45 p.m. Wednesday. Tickets are $15, $12 students and seniors . For information, call (213) 476-4177.