Emily Jungmin Yoon & Wo Chan: An afternoon with two poets at da Shop!

Spend an enchanting afternoon filled with poetry as Emily Yoon and Wo Chan read from new works and engage in a discussion about living the poet's path in contemporary times. Q&A and Book signing to follow.

About Find Me as the Creature I Am:

Find Me as the Creature I Am is a book full of tenderness and violence, longing and love. Ranging from inherited family tales to meditations on the body to animals’ display of love and grief alike, Emily Jungmin Yoon holds up a mirror to humanity to show that we are animal, too. In poems full of wonder and want, she showcases our tendencies to fight or fly, act with affection and cruelty, and ultimately, overflow with life itself.

More about Emily Jungmin Yoon:

EMILY JUNGMIN YOON is the author of Ordinary Misfortunes and A Cruelty Special to Our Species, a finalist for the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Yoon is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Ploughshares, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and The Sewanee Review. Yoon is the poetry editor for The Margins, the literary magazine of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and she is an assistant professor of Korean literature at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She splits her time between Honolulu and South Korea.

About Togetherness:

Togetherness sends out sparks from its electric surface, radiating energy and verve from within its deep and steady emotional core: stories of the poet’s immigrant childhood spent in their family’s Chinese restaurant, culminating in a deportation battle against the State. These narrative threads weave together monologue, soaring lyric descants, and document, taking the positions of apostrophe, biography, and soulful plaint to stage a vibrant and daring performance in which drag is formalism and formalism is drag—at once campy and sincere, queer, tender, and winking.

More About Wo Chan:

Wo Chan who performs as The Illustrious Pearl is a poet and drag artist. Winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize, Wo is the author of Togetherness (2022), which was a finalist for the CLMP Firecracker Award, and the winner of the Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature. Wo has received fellowships from MacDowell, New York Foundation of the Arts, The Asian American Writers Workshop, and elsewhere. As a member of the Brooklyn-based drag/burlesque collective Switch N' Play, Wo has performed at venues including The Whitney Museum of American Art, National Sawdust, New York Live Arts, and the Architectural Digest Expo. Find them at @theillustriouspearl.

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