- This event has passed.
St. Paul – Our Ancestors Are Us: An Asian Adoptee Life Writing Workshop
October 1, 2023 @ 10:00 am - 12:00 pm CDT
Free
As part of the Minnesota Humanities Center’s writing and reflection offerings, we are excited to collaborate with Jennifer Kwon Dobbs to host Our Ancestors Are Us: An Asian Adoptee Life Writing Workshop, a project funded by the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council.
Adoption from Asia involves a child’s removal from their kinship of birth and oftentimes disconnection from their ancestral culture and ways of knowing. This interactive workshop creates a generative, adult adoptee-centered space in which to explore the unique ways that adoptee memory and experience can be empowering sources of creativity and literary witness. Participants will learn and share writing strategies to compose works of their own about their lives lived, unlived, and imagined otherwise as adoptees.
Lee Herrick – Special guest Lee Herrick is the California Poet Laureate. He is the author of three books of poems: Scar and Flower, finalist for the 2020 Northern California Book Award; Gardening Secrets of the Dead; and This Many Miles from Desire. Born in Daejeon, Korea and adopted as an infant, Lee teaches at Fresno City College and in the low-residency MFA program at University of Nevada Reno at Lake Tahoe.
Jennifer Kwon Dobbs 허수진 – Born in Wonju, Republic of Korea and adopted in Oklahoma, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs 허수진 is the author of Interrogation Room (White Pine Press, 2018), Paper Pavilion (White Pine, 2007), and the chapbooks Notes from a Missing Person (Essay Press, 2015) and Necro Citizens (hochroth Verlag, 2019). Her work has received the 2023 American-Scandinavian Foundation’s Lief and Inger Sjöberg Prize for literary translation among other honors. Currently, she is senior poetry editor of AGNI and professor and chair of English at St. Olaf College. www.jkwondobbs.com.
Registration
This event is open to all adult Asian diaspora adoptees who want to write or who identify as writers. Registration is limited to 40 participants.
Snacks are included, and a journal will be provided.
Registration Questions: registrations@mnhum.org
Funders and Supporters
