Brian Komei Dempster and Jennifer Perrine

Brian Komei Dempster’s latest book of poems Seize focuses on his experience of raising a son who suffers from intractable epilepsy and pervasive developmental delays. Moreover, the book explores wartime incarceration, domestic/familial/racial tensions, and legacies of trauma and violence—along with paths towards resolution. Through juxtaposition, the poems link seemingly disparate events through a central metaphor: seizure.

Dempster will be interviewed by Portland author Jennifer Perrine. Jennifer is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Again (Airlie Press, 2020).

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Brian Komei Dempster’s debut book of poetry, Topaz, was published by Four Way Books in 2013 and received the 15 Bytes 2014 Book Award in Poetry. His most recent book is Seize. He is the editor of both From Our Side of the Fence: Growing Up in America’s Concentration Camps (Kearny Street Workshop, 2001), which received a 2007 Nisei Voices Award from the National Japanese American Historical Society, and Making Home from War: Stories of Japanese American Exile and Resettlement (Heyday, 2011). He is a professor of rhetoric and language and a faculty member in Asian Pacific American Studies at the University of San Francisco, where he received the Distinguished Teaching Award (along with Ronald Sundstrom) in 2010. Currently, he divides his time between teaching and serving as Director of Administration for the Master of Arts in Asia Pacific Studies.

Jennifer Perrine is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Again (Airlie Press, 2020). Their other books include No Confession, No Mass, winner of the Publishing Triangle Audre Lorde Award and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize; In the Human Zoo, which was selected for the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize; and The Body Is No Machine. A recipient of fellowships from Literary Arts and the Vermont Studio Center, Perrine lives in Portland.