Janice Lee and Brenda Iijima

Janice Lee

“How do we hold space open while maintaining intimacy?” Korean-American writer, artist and editor Janice Lee asks. She writes about the filmic long take, slowness, interspecies communication, plants and personhood, the apocalypse, architectural spaces, inherited trauma and the concept of han in Korean culture.

Her books include KEROTAKIS (Dog Horn Press, 2010), a multidisciplinary exploration of cyborgs, brains and the stakes of consciousness; Daughter (Jaded Ibis, 2011); the experimental novel Damnation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013); Reconsolidation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2015), a lyrical essay reflecting on the death of Lee’s mother; and The Sky Isn’t Blue (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016). Lee’s chapbooks include Red Trees, Fried Chicken Dinner (Insert Blanc Press), The Other Worlds (eohippus labs) and The Transparent As Witness (Solar Luxuriance), a collaboration with Will Alexander. She also edited the pamphlet Inherited Trauma for the eohippus labs annex series.

Lee is co-publisher at Civil Coping Mechanisms, contributing editor at Fanzine, founder and executive editor of Entropy, contributor at HTMLGIANT and co-founder of The Accomplices LLC. She is an assistant professor of fiction at Portland State University.

Brenda Iijima

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. Iijima 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, New York.

Iijima 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.

Related events

Janice Lee, reading and in conversation with Brenda Iijima, November 29