Join us at our September EcoArt Salon with Pakastani American poet and ink painter Sophia Naz in conversation with Korean American writer and healer Janice Lee. Sophia’s paintings and writings from her new book of poetry Open Zero engage with the loss of her home, destroyed by the California wildfires and the erasures and displacements involved with the immigrant experience.

Janice's writings grapples with collective and inherited trauma and the present and impending eco crisis. Her new novel Imagine A Death explores loss, hauntings of the past and coping with apocalyptic futures. While both artists/writers work with the intimate costs of trauma and disaster, they also engage with the power and possibilities of healing.

This salon will begin with presentations from the artists that will also be streamed on Facebook Live on the EcoArt salon Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/EcoArtSalon/.

You can also choose to RSVP to the Zoom Room, which will allow you to be in close discussion with the artists after the presentations. There is a very limited amount of RSVPs to ensure a deeper discussion.

More about the artists

Janice Lee (she/her) is a Korean-American writer, editor, teacher, and shamanic healer. She is the author of 7 books of fiction, creative nonfiction & poetry, most recently: The Sky Isn’t Blue (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016), Imagine a Death (Texas Review Press, 2021), and Separation Anxiety (CLASH Books, 2022). She writes about interspecies communication, plants & personhood, the filmic long take, slowness, the apocalypse, architectural spaces, inherited trauma, and the concept of han in Korean culture, and asks the question, how do we hold space open while maintaining intimacy? She is Founder & Executive Editor of Entropy, Co-Founder of The Accomplices LLC, and an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Portland State University. She can be found online at http://janicel.com.

Poet, author, editor, translator and artist Sophia Naz has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize; in 2016 for creative nonfiction and in 2018 for poetry. Her work features or is forthcoming in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including Rattle, Singing In The Dark, Meridian, Extinction Violin, Poetry At Sangam, Poetry International Rotterdam, The Adirondack Review, The Wire, Chicago Quarterly Review, Blaze Vox, Scroll, The Daily O, Cafe Dissensus, RAIOT, Ideas And Futures, Chapati Mystery, Guftugu, Pratik, Gallerie International, Coldnoon, VAYAVYA, The Bangalore Review, Madras Courier, etc. She has authored the poetry collections Peripheries, Pointillism, Date Palms and Shehnaz, a biography. Open Zero, her fourth poetry collection, has just been published from Yoda Press. www.SophiaNaz.com