Kenji C. Liu Poetry Workshops Keynote Speaker Manuscript Consultation
Test description here
Kenji C. Liu [he/him/his] is author of Monsters I Have Been (Alice James Books, 2019) and Map of an Onion, national winner of the 2015 Hillary Gravendyk Poetry Prize (Inlandia Institute). His poetry can be found in US and Canadian journals such as American Poetry Review, Anomaly, Arc Poetry Magazine, Barrow Street, Gulf Coast, The Rumpus, The Volta, and Poetry Northwest, and magazines such as The Feminist Wire and The Progressive. His work is also featured in numerous anthologies, including Resisting Arrest, and two chapbooks, Craters: A Field Guide (2017) and You Left Without Your Shoes (2009). He has received fellowships from Kundiman, VONA/Voices, the Djerassi Resident Artist Program (where he received the Bessie Schönberg Memorial Endowed Fellowship), and the Community of Writers. His work has been featured in NBC Asian America and TaiwaneseAmerican.org, and he has given readings in Japan, México, and throughout the US.
Liu’s classes and workshops always offer an integrated blend of interactive, participatory, creative, and critical thinking activities. He has taught or presented on creative writing, mindfulness, ethnic studies, activism and social change theory, and multicultural alliance-building in community colleges, public universities, non-profits, national conferences, meditation centers, and local grassroots spaces throughout the US. He currently teaches at Occidental College.
As a longtime vipassana and mindfulness practitioner, he also collaborated with Buddhist teacher Mushim Ikeda to develop a popular mindfulness and creative writing workshop, which they presented at Spirit Rock Meditation Center and the East Bay Meditation Center.
Available for Workshops • Craft Talks • Keynote Speeches • Readings & Multimedia Presentations • Panel Participation • Interviews • Classroom Visits • Interdisciplinary Collaborations • Manuscript Consultation • Graphic & Book Design • Editorials & Think Pieces
Topics include Masculinity • Experimental & Hybrid Poetics • Frankenpo • Poetry & Activism • Mindfulness & Creativity • Visual Poetry • Multicultural Alliance-Building • Asian American Poetics & Politics • Migration & Diaspora • Theatre of the Oppressed • Social Media Marketing for Poets
“The manuscript for my first poetry collection, God’s Will for Monsters, was rejected 25 times. After taking a long break from submission, I worked with Kenji on reshaping the organization of my poems as a book, in addition to revising individual poems and gathering enthusiasm for another round of submission. Not only does Kenji have a keen eye for craft and poetics, he made significant connections to the sociopolitical, to world mythologies, to critical race theory, gender and queer theory, and postcolonialism in my poems, which made our conversations about my work expansive and exciting. Kenji’s line edits and feedback were intuitive, incisive and challenging; and I felt like he truly understood the aesthetics and politics of my work, which gave me another push to submit the book one more time. Shortly thereafter, my book was picked up my publisher, and won a regional poetry prize, then the American Book Award a year later.”
“It is in the light of my own post-election identity exploration that Kenji Liu’s work changed me, in his capacity to articulate the complexities of modern identities in the hard-earned, yet magical way literature can change us. His book Map of an Onion deeply affected me as an Asian American immigrant — to see my experience reflected in art.”
“Kenji C. Liu’s Monsters I Have Been writhes knotty tentacles through textual boneyards, disturbing screenplays, theoretical works, and literatures in their coffined-off sleeps. What it draws back are parts through which the poet might, as Lucille Clifton wrote, make up ‘a kind of life’ in the global slaughterhouse of heteropatriarchy and racism. Sharp, protean, dexterous, and discontent—Liu’s collection shows where the bodies have been buried, and that many won’t stay dead. No doubt, this book is alive as all hell.”
“Colony, conquest, citizenship, language, place—the almost infinite severances of power and culture, ultimately, a ‘paper cut theater.’ Applaud [Map of an Onion] for its tough, serious, exacting pen and eye and mind, for its howl, its losses, findings and knife-thin metaphysical peeling gestures. I am in true awe of Kenji’s writing and poetics. Here, he gives us a 21st century read at ‘luminescent level.’ A groundbreaking giant, this collection.”