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Family Portrait Poetry Reading

August 18, 2019 @ 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm

Free
View Venue Website, 8 NE Killingsworth St, Portland, OR 97211 + Google Map

Hello wonderful poetry people! We’re doing ‘family portrait’ again! I miss you. It’s been too long.

This reading is at:

Turn! Turn! Turn!
8 NE Killingsworth St

6pm doors open
6:30 reading starts

The lineup:

Jake Vermaas
KMA Sullivan
manuel arturo abreu
Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner

This is an all-ages, accessible venue. Food and drinks are available, including alcoholic/non-alcoholic beverages. Please let us know if you need accommodations to attend.

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Jake Vermaas is a 1.5 or 0.5-generation immigrant or a natural-born citizen, depending on who you ask. A poet and engineer in Portland, OR, he co-founded (with friends) the Whitenoise Project, a reading and discussion series aiming to center writers of color and underrepresented voices. He has won a couple contests and been published in the occasional literary journal, but none of those was more meaningful than getting asked to read with 9 rockstar Filipinx poets at this spring’s AWP conference.

KMA Sullivan is the author of two poetry collections: Inclined to Riot (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019) and Necessary Fire, winner of the St. Lawrence Book Award (Black Lawrence Press, 2015). Her poems and essays have appeared in Boston Review, Southern Humanities Review, diode, The Rumpus, Forklift, Ohio, The Nervous Breakdown, Gertrude, and elsewhere. She has been awarded residencies in creative nonfiction and poetry at Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and Summer Literary Seminars. KMA is coeditor in chief of Vinyl and the founder and publisher of YesYes Books.

manuel arturo abreu (b. 1991, Santo Domingo) is a poet/artist from the Bronx. They received their BA in Linguistics from Reed College, 2014. They use what is at hand in a process of magical thinking, with attention to ritual aspects of aesthetics. Recent projects at AB Gallery, PSU, Portland; Yaby, Madrid; MoMA and MoMA PS1, New York; NCAD Gallery, Dublin; AA|LA Gallery, Los Angeles; Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva; Veronica, Seattle; Rhizome and the New Museum, online. abreu is the author of two books of poetry, List of Consonants and transtrender, and one book of critical art writing, Incalculable Loss (Institute for New Connotative Action Press, 2018). They also co-run home school, a free pop-up art school in Portland.

Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner is a poet of Marshall Islands ancestry. She received international acclaim through her performance at the opening of the United Nations Climate Summit in New York in 2014. Her writing and performances have been featured by CNN, Democracy Now, Huffington Post, and more. The University of Arizona Press published her first collection of poetry, Iep Jāltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter. She has created art installations and performances for the Honolulu Biennial, ‘Ae Kai: A Culture Lab on Convergence presented by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, and the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial in Australia. Kathy also co-founded and directs the Marshall Islands based non-profit Jo-Jikum, dedicated to empowering Marshallese youth to seek solutions to climate change and other environmental impacts threatening their home island. She has been selected as one of 13 Climate Warriors by Vogue in 2015 and the Impact Hero of the Year by Earth Company in 2016. She received her Master’s in Pacific Island Studies from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

Venue

Turn! Turn! Turn!
8 NE Killingsworth St
Portland, OR 97211
+ Google Map
Phone
503-284-6019
View Venue Website

Organizer

Amie Zimmerman