Portland Lit Crawl: An Evening of Environmental Unknowns

Portland Review and The Accomplices (Entropy, Civil Coping Mechanisms, and Writ Large Press) join Lit Crawl Portland to co-host Unchartable: An Evening of Environmental Unknowns. It is the nature of the human mind to seek, to touch, to understand and occupy vast unknowable terrains, but which of our daily environments resist comprehension? Our readers will present unknowable psychological landscapes, confounding emotional habitats, the shapeless environs of both speculation and perception, those territories where mind and body, physical and psychological, human and nonhuman, meet and cohabitate without reconciliation.

Our readers for the evening are Samiya Bashir, M. Allen Cunningham, Anne-Marie Kinney, and Janice Lee.

Samiya Bashir’s books of poetry: Where the Apple Falls, Gospel, and Field Theories, winner of the 2018 Oregon Book Award, and anthologies, including Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social & Political Black Literature & Art, exist. Sometimes she makes poems of dirt. Sometimes zeros and ones. Sometimes variously rendered text. Sometimes light. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with a magic cat who shares her obsession with trees and blackbirds and occasionally crashes her classes and poetry salons at Reed College.

M. Allen Cunningham is the author of several books including the new novel Perpetua’s Kin, for which he was awarded a 2018 Project Grant from the Regional Arts & Culture Council. His work has appeared in many publications, including Tin House, Glimmer Train, and The Kenyon Review, and he is the recipient of an Oregon Literary Fellowship, two Oregon Arts Commission Fellowships, and residencies at Yaddo. He recently joined the English Department at Portland State University to teach creative writing.

Anne-Marie Kinney is the author of two novels, Radio Iris (2012, Two Dollar Radio) and Coldwater Canyon (2018, CCM). A New York Times Editor’s Choice pick, Radio Iris was called “a spiky debut” and “‘The Office’ as scripted by Kafka” by the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Her shorter work has been published in journals including Alaska Quarterly Review, The Rattling Wall, The Collagist, Fanzine and Black Clock, for which she also served as Production Editor from 2011-2016. She lives in Los Angeles, where she co-curates the Griffith Park Storytelling Series.

Janice Lee 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 Fanzine, and Co-Founder of The Accomplices. She is an Assistant Professor of Fiction at Portland State University.

[from the Facebook event page][from the Sched official site]