Join poets Joshua Gottlieb Miller and Rosanna Young Oh in a virtual tour reading to celebrate new poetry collections about labor: The Art of Bagging (Conduit, 2023) and The Corrected Version (Diode, 2023). Allison Pitinii Davis will join them for this special reading to share new poems about gender and deindustrialization. This even will be livestreamed via Lit Youngstown's YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@LitYoungstown/streams) on November 2, 2023 at 7pm.
Over the last few years retail workers shared a contradictory, ironized experience: on the one hand, the typically lonesome invisibility of retail work, and on the other, the hyper-visibility of being "essential" workers. Retail workers were talked about on the news and on Twitter, but rarely seen as individuals with a rich variety of interests. Instead they were subsumed into paradigms of heroism or victimhood, co-opted by arguments about our country’s values or the many aspects and manifestations of the word ‘essential.’ There's a growing resurgence of poetry at the nexus of radicalism, labor, and identity, (re)interpreting labor poetry for its politics and imaginative possibilities. These poets write about their work as grocers, hotel staff, and a variety of other professions, calling for socioeconomic justice and dignity for all workers.
Rosanna Young Oh is a Korean American poet and essayist who was born in Daejeon, Korea, and grew up on Long Island. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Best New Poets, Harvard Review Online, Blackbird, The Hopkins Review, and 32 Poems, and has received honors that include scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and New York State Writers Institute. Her poetry was also the subject of a solo exhibition at the Queens Historical Society, where she was an artist-in-residence. A graduate of Yale, the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she lives and writes in New York. The Corrected Version, winner of the Diode Editions Book Contest, is her first book.
Allison Pitinii Davis is the author of Line Study of a Motel Clerk (Baobab Press, 2017), a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and the Ohioana Book Award. The collection focuses on a trucking motel, a laundry, and diasporic culture in northeast Ohio. Her chapbook Poppy Seeds (Kent State University Press, 2013) examines relationships in Ohio while studying Yiddish in Lithuania. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, The New Republic, The Missouri Review, Dusie, and elsewhere, and are forthcoming from The Oxford American, The Arkansas International, and The Laurel Review.
Joshua Gottlieb-Miller received his PhD and MFA in Poetry from the University of Houston, where he also served as a Poetry Editor and Digital Nonfiction Editor for Gulf Coast. Joshua has published poetry, essays, scholarship, hybrid, and multimedia writing. His writing has been awarded fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Tent Writing Conference at the Yiddish Book Center, and elsewhere, and from 2018-2019 he served as an inaugural Post-Harvey Think Tank Fellow at Rice University's Humanities Research Center, representing folklore. His writing has won the Indiana Review Poetry Prize, the Inprint Barthelme Prize in Poetry, and the Inprint Robert J. Sussman Prize. His debut collection, The Art of Bagging, won Conduit’s Marystina Santiestevan First Book Prize, and is available now. His second book, Dybbuk Americana, is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press.
More information about their books can be found here:
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