Brenda Iijima, Saretta Morgan, & Angela Tharpe

Lostintheletters is honored to present the work of three fantastic writers! A short conversation and audience Q&A will follow the reading.

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 expressiveness and telluric awareness in all forms. A novel, Shelter is Necessary for Existence is forthcoming from Two Dollar Radio in 2026. Iijima is the founding editor-publisher of Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs. She lives in Brooklyn.

Saretta Morgan's work engages ecologies and forms of connectivity that develop alongside processes of U.S. militarization. Over the past decade her critical practice has grown through participation in veteran-led demilitarization organizing; grassroots humanitarian aid in the U.S./Mexico borderlands; water protection; Black community healing initiatives; and grassroots conservation. Lately she has been drawing inspiration from revolutionary movements and their intimacy with the earth. She thinks about birds. Their intensity of focus, and clarity of voice. They teach us so much.

Her debut poetry collection, Alt-Nature (Coffee House Press, 2024), received the Southwest Book Award and was a finalist for both the Lambda Literary and Publishing Triangle awards in lesbian poetry.

*Saretta's photo credit: Diana Solís

Angela Tharpe is a writer and teacher living in Atlanta, Georgia. She received her BA in English: Professional Writing from Baylor University, her MFA in Creative Writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and her PhD in English from Emory University, where her research focus was on Black American culture. When she’s not writing or getting ready to teach, you can find her overwatering her houseplants or going on a walk in one of Atlanta’s many gorgeous parks. Her culture blog and other work can be found at angelatharpe.com, and you can find her gabbing about weird Black art @certifiedblackweirdo.

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