UB Poetics + Just Buffalo Present: Brenda Iijima, Janice Lee, + Robin Lee Jordan

Join us for an evening of readings from poets & writers Brenda Iijima, Janice Lee, & Robin Lee Jordan.

Books from the poets will be available for purchase from Fitz Books.

ABOUT THE POETS + WRITERS

Brenda Iijima is a poet, novelist, playwright, choreographer and visual artist. She is the author of nine books of poetry. Her involvements occur at the intersections and mutations of genre, mode, receptivity, and field of study. Her current work engages submerged and occluded histories, other-than-human modes of expression and telluric awareness in all forms. She is the author of A roundtable, unanimous dreamers chime in, a collaborative novel co-authored with Janice Lee (Meekling Press, 2023). A novel, Presence (Georgia Review Press, 2024) and a play, Daily Life in China (forthcoming from elis press, 2024). Iijima is the founding editor-publisher of Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs. She lives in Brooklyn.

Janice Lee (she/they) is a Korean American writer, teacher, spiritual scholar, and shamanic healer. She is the author of 8 books of fiction, creative nonfiction, & poetry, most recently Imagine a Death (Texas Review Press, 2021), Separation Anxiety (CLASH Books, 2022), a finalist for the 2023 Oregon Book Award, and A roundtable, unanimous dreamers chime in, a collaborative novel co-authored with Brenda Iijima (Meekling Press, 2023).

She writes about interspecies communication, plants & personhood, the filmic long take, slowness, the apocalypse, architectural spaces, inherited trauma, and the Korean concept of han, and asks the question, how do we hold space open while maintaining intimacy?

Lee teaches workshops on inherited trauma, healing and writing, and facilitates guided meditations bringing together elements from several different lineages as a mesa-carrying practitioner of the Q’ero tradition of medicine work and as a practitioner of Engaged Buddhism (in the tradition of Plum Village and Thich Nhat Hanh). She also incorporates elements of Korean shamanic ritual & traditional folk practices, plant medicine & flower essence work, and divination. She currently lives in Portland, OR where she is the Operational Creative Director at Corporeal Writing and an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Portland State University. Follow her online at @diddioz

Robin Lee Jordan is a poet, teaching artist, zine-maker, & collage-based visual artist with an interest in multimodal, interactive, & collaborative creation. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Oregon State University and wrote the chapbooks Morning Blessing Poems (Foundlings Press) and THEY ATE EACH OTHER UP (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs). She occasionally maintains the (B)uffalo (A)rt (D)ispensary, a coin-operated, micro-art dispenser. Robin has worked with Just Buffalo since 2012 as a teaching artist and now acts as the Director of Just Buffalo’s Writing Center, a creative writing program for teens.

JUST BUFFALO PRESENTS is supported by NYSCA & Erie County.