Multiple Dates: 10/6, 10/20, 11/3, 11/17, 12/1, and 12/15
Time: 12 – 3 PM
Cost: $20-50 Sliding Scale
Location: ARTogether Center, 1200 Harrison St., Oakland
“Asian American Poetry as a Radical Possibility” is a series of six generative poetry workshops. In each workshop, we will consider work by scholars in the field of Ethnic Studies alongside the work of Asian diasporic poets. We will attend to the ways Asian diasporic poets mobilize poetic form to address the psychic and material conditions of their lives. We will respond to prompts in and out of class, share our work with one another, and discuss how we might begin to heal and better equip ourselves to respond to the pressures of diasporic life in the imperial core.
We will look to writing by poets such as Brynn Saito, Jason Bayani, and K-Ming Chang, alongside scholars such as Rey Chow, Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, and erin Khuê Ninh, in order to examine what it truly means to be an Asian American subject living under empire, how this sort of living feels, and how that feeling manifests as language within a literary canon of our own making.
- Accessibility: This course is open to all, regardless of writing ability or background. We ask that you wear a mask at all times during our meetings. ARTogether is a wheelchair-accessible location,
- Each of our sessions will be $20-$50, sliding scale. There is a scholarship option for those unable to pay.
- We will be meeting 10/6, 10/20, 11/3, 11/17, 12/1, and 12/15. Each workshop runs from 12:00 PM to 3:00 PM.
- Courses will be held in-person at ARTogether (1200 Harrison St., Oakland, CA).
- Each of our sessions will have a different theme: 10/6 Names; 10/20 Anxiety; 11/3 Refusals; 11/17 Mitski; 12/1 Mothers; 12/15 Freedom. For more information, please see the syllabus.
Enrollment Deadline: September 29, 2024.
Email questions to: flowersandfields@proton.me.
Instructors
Jessica & Kazumi are the co-stewards of Flowers & Fields. We are two poets deeply invested in fostering a more radical Asian American politics, and in creating new fields of possibility for a liberatory Asian American poetics. We stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine, and believe in an Asian American politics that holds abolition and decolonization at its core, and exceeds the Asian American subject (and so, we really do wish to learn about all the ways we can meet one another, be in relation to one another).
Jessica Yuru Zhou / 周玉茹 is a poet rooting in San Francisco. She enjoys theorizing at the club, ambling in-and-out of the panopticon, and reveling in summery autumns in California. Her poems and essays flit amidst a hydra of Tumblr/Twitter accounts, and have found perches with exhibitions at the Asian Art Museum, Gray Area, Southern Exposure; performances for Litquake, Berkeley Poetry Festival, Pride Poets Hotline; publications with/forthcoming in The Seventh Wave, Inverse, Kernel, and The Ecopoetry Anthology: Volume II. She thinks of how old her younger child selves have felt, and hopes for all that you feel tenderly toward to be a source of resolute fierceness in turn. Talk with her about networked/corporate subjectivities, bell hooks’ love ethic, Fred Moten’s undercommons, Audre Lorde’s skeleton architecture, queer interdiasporic relations, and finding one another, on-and-offline.
Kazumi Chin is the author of Having a Coke With Godzilla (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017) and Leymusoom Bible (2023, Sming Sming Books), a project developed in collaboration with Heesoo Kwon. Their latest writings can be found in the Offing and the Brooklyn Rail. A PhD candidate at UC Davis, Kazumi is currently working on a dissertation examining Asian diasporic art and performance working towards more ethical modes of relation to Turtle Island and Indigenous communities. They have over ten years of experience teaching in university and community spaces, having taught workshops and courses locally through Kearny Street Workshop and San Francisco Arts Commission, and in official positions with UC Davis and the University of Pittsburgh. Together with Jessica Zhou, they co-steward Flowers & Fields, a collective dedicated to a more radical Asian American politics and poetics.
