VIDEO + AUDIO In Common Writers Series: Janice Lee and Brenda Iijima, reading at Alley Cat Books

Saturday, December 1 - 4:00 pm PS to 6:00 pm PST
Alley Cat Books, 3036 24th Street, San Francisco
Janice Lee and Brenda Iijima

Full-program video: Brenda Iijima and Janice Lee: December 1, 2018
Video highlight clips: Brenda Iijima reads from her work-in-progress play, Daily Life in China | Janice Lee reads an excerpt from her unpublished novel, Imagine a Death

The Poetry Center's In Common Writers Series, supported by a generous grant from the Walter & Elise Haas Fund, continues with the second event in our premier program. Prolific essayist, fiction writer, and editor Janice Lee, visiting from Portland, Oregon, is joined by poet, editor, and publisher Brenda Iijima, here from Brooklyn, New York, each reading from their own works. This event takes place in collaboration with local landmark Alley Cat Books, currently one of our finest bookstores and cultural centers—featuring its remarkable, community-curated art gallery and among the best-selected shelves of books in the Bay Area. This event is free and open to the public. 

Brenda Iijima’s involvements occur at the intersections and mutations of poetry, research movement, animal studies, ecological sociology and submerged histories. She is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry and numerous chapbooks and artist’s books. Her most recent book, Remembering Animals was published by Nightboat Books in 2016. She is also the editor of the eco language reader (Nightboat Books and PP@YYL). She is the editor of Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, located in Brooklyn, NY. Currently she is working on the collected works of Charley Shively that include his luminous and radical Fag Rag essays, poems, ephemera, photos and letters. She is also researching the phenomena of extinction.

Janice Lee is a Korean-American writer, artist, and editor. She is the author of KEROTAKIS (Dog Horn Press, 2010), Daughter (Jaded Ibis, 2011), Damnation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013), Reconsolidation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2015), and The Sky Isn’t Blue (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016). She writes about the filmic long take, slowness, interspecies communication, the apocalypse, and asks the question, how do we hold space open while maintaining intimacy? She is Founder & Executive Editor of Entropy, Co-Publisher at Civil Coping Mechanisms, Contributing Editor at Fanzineand Co-Founder of The Accomplices LLC. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon where she is an Assistant Professor of Fiction at Portland State University.

Related event:

In Common Writers Series
Janice Lee
reading and in conversation with Brenda Iijima
Thursday NOV 29
7:00 pm @ The Poetry Center
HUM 512, SFSU, free and open to the public
supported by the Walter & Elise Haas Fund

In Common Writers Series Thanks to a generous grant from the Walter & Elise Haas Fund, The Poetry Center will present six double-programs (twelve events in all) during 2018–19, featuring a series of remarkable writers from across the US, paired in conversation and performance with, for the most, local area writers with whom they share strong affinities. Each featured guest writer appears at The Poetry Center—we're doing outreach in particular to students and faculty in SF State's College of Ethnic Studies—reading and in conversation with their paired guest writer and the audience. Then, moving off-campus, both writers read their work at one of the Bay Area's local bookstores. We want to recognize our bookstores as crucial cultural centers and, paradoxically maybe, among the most long-lived and durable cultural sites in this violently gentrified region. Details on our six 2018-19 programs and featured artists here.
Event contact: 
The Poetry Center
Event email: 
poetry@sfsu.edu
Event phone: 
415-824-1761
Event sponsor: 
The Poetry Center and Alley Cat Books