Category: check me out

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I’m Teaching a Poetry Workshop in Denver

I’m teaching an 8-week Advanced Poetry Writing course with the Lighthouse Writers Workshop. Registration is limited to 8 participants:

Equal parts salon, curiosity incubator, and a community of practice, this workshop invites members to dive into the questions we are most engaged with as writers in the world. How is our writing a necessary intervention to salvage our collective humanity?

This advanced workshop is for writers who have a solid sense of craft and are interested in developing a personal poetics. Though members will have the opportunity to share work and receive collective feedback, our time together will look more like a salon focused on discussion and conversation rather than critique. In addition to developing a poetics statement and small portfolio of work for responses, members in this workshop will be invited to design and lead some of our meetings’ themed discussions. Sessions may include somatic exercises, off-site adventures, and non-literary assignments. Best for: experimenters, cross-disciplinary junkies, those open to being pushed and committed to digging in.

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Annex Series: Inherited Trauma

eohippus labs (los angeles) has released a small collection by Korean/American authors exploring inherited trauma. I’m incredibly thankful to be included in this collection, which was edited and introduced by Janice Lee, with essays by Don Mee Choi, Chiwan Choi, and Saehee Cho.

When I saw the galley proofs last month, a tremor moved through me reading these essays. It’s hard to articulate han, it literally overwhelms me. I’ve tried in other spaces, but seeing this shared effort with my literary kin opened something inside me. Such gratitude.

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PEACE LIGHT from May 3-June 3 in Philadelphia

Peace Light Promo 2

I’m crazy excited to share that my new work, PEACE LIGHT, will be featured in Philadelphia from May 3-June 3 as part of Asian Arts Initiative’s 25th Anniversary exhibition series, (ex)CHANGE.

Motivated by urgent issues of Korea’s well-being and a desire to bridge what happens on the Korean Peninsula and our lives here, PEACE LIGHT features an installation of paper lanterns designed by Kai-wei Hsu covered in my writing. A large weather balloon will float overhead, against which I’ll project a video piece dedicated to crossing impossible spaces, connection, and peace. In collaboration with Philadelphia-based choreographer and dancer Jungwoong Kim, the installation will be incorporated into a site-specific performance piece.

For opening weekend, we’ll be hosting two live performances on Thursday May 3rd at 7pm and Sunday May 6th at noon, both located at 448 N. 10th Street on the second floor. Performances are wheelchair accessible, and free and open to the public.

The lantern texts feature my own writing with excerpts from Leo Hwang,  Erinrose Mager, Asialee Drews, Chiwan Choi, Janice Lee, Sun Yung Shin, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, Bekhyon Yim, and Lee Herrick. These fellow Korean writers and friends responded thoughtfully to a survey I had sent them asking about longing, crossings, and peace. Their friendship and support fills my heart with a perfect kinship light. 

I’m grateful to Asian Arts Initiative for this amazing opportunity, and to the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage (PCAH) for financing this series. My life has been utterly changed by PCAH’s immense support over the years. I’m immeasurably thankful!

 

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Smithsonian Institute’s Asian American Literature Festival

It’s happening! The Smithsonian Institute’s Asian Pacific American Center is hosting its first ever Asian American Literature Festival next week in DC. I’ll be participating, as weill an incredible roster of artists, writers, publishers, and scholars. This is a historic event, and not to be missed. My participation is three-fold. I’ll be reading poetry as part of the Poetry Journal’s Asian American themed issue launch on Thursday night. On Friday, I’ll be making a Literary Address. The title of my remarks is “Awarding Abjection.” It’s likely to be a somewhat provocative conversation, and I’m looking forward to it. I’m also hosting a salon on Experimentalism and Community Building. It should be a busy but amazing time! I’m so grateful to the organizers, most especially Lawrence Minh-Bui Davis for his selfless organizing efforts and immensely generous imagination for community. Click the image above to visit their program site. 

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My new book is now available!

NO-COMET-cvr-frnt

It happened! My fourth book, No Comet, That Serpent in the Sky Means Noise, is now available to order from Kore Press. I can’t believe I get to join their family! I love this cover, designed by my dear friend and incredible poet, James Meetze. After reading his book, Phantom Hour, I knew we spoke the same language of loss. He also wrote a statement for the back of the text. I felt enfolded by such love and insight with Lisa and Ann at Kore, and with James. Cynthia Arrieu-King and Ruth Ellen Kocher also wrote statements for the book. Their spirits are simpatico with mine on so many levels. Cindy truly has become family to me over the years. Right now, I feel so gently held.

The cover art (and a few images internal to the text) were generously made available by Finnish photographer J-P Metsavainio. I am a huge fan of his incredible astral photographs, and found them to display an incredible subtlety and brilliance. I can’t wait for him to get a copy!

Some of them were the very first poems I wrote when I decided that I was a poet, back in my early 20s, astonishingly. One thing I will say about these poems is that they came from a space of grief. And yet, when I look these poems over, I feel solace. I think you will, too. I’ve been preoccupied with devastation the last many years. Solar Maximum explored a monster light–the last light of the sun before it destroyed the earth, and leaned into something strange. I feel like this new book of poems hold devastation a bit differently. They’re very human, these poems. Solar Maximum tended towards what we are moving into as we became other than human; with this new book, we’re still ourselves, miraculously.

 

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SUBLEVEL

I am incredibly honored to have been included in this inaugural issue of SUBLEVEL, a new digital journal launched by the CalArts MFA Creative Writing Program. I shared some of my work that I composed while in the grasslands of Wyoming in 2015. I’ve also allowed them to release one of my full videopoems, “Grasslands, No Wilds.”

I can’t believe I get to to be in the company of Janice Lee Candice Lin, Mel Y. Chen, Jih-Fei Cheng, Solmaz Sharif, Rickey Laurentiis, Hilton Als, Litia Perta, Aisha Sabatini Sloan, Simone White, Andrew F Giles, Steven Karl, Muriel Leung, Asiya Wadud, and Nicholas Wong.

CalArts is an amazing art space to me–a brilliant community of experiment, social engagement, and risk. I’ve loved everyone I’ve intersected with there. I’m honored to be in their digital family, to launch–or burrow–with sublevel.

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Apogee Journal, when the world is too much

I just received my author copy of issue 8 of Apogee Journal. I am so grateful to Joey De Jesus and Muriel Leung for inviting me to send work, for including me with such an amazing cohort of writers. I wept reading Justin El-Khazen’s “Hummingbird Effect,” which responds so eloquently to the outrage we all felt at the public and ongoing police brutality across the country. I loved the vibrant reproductions of photographs and installations, the intelligence of their critique and social reach. So many of these pieces describe a haunting, the traumatic post-memory of an Event that is seared into us from a distance, and how we continue. If you want to see how art connects us, how it urgently speaks, then please order a copy and subscribe to this journal. apogee_issue8_design_cover-1

My piece is a short selection from a personal essay/lyric study/photo series titled “Relinquish the Sky.” It explores cultural orphaning and light.