Gabrielle Civil in Conversation with Janice Lee at PNCA

On October 5th, GABRIELLE CIVIL will read from her most recent work of performance prose, the déjà vu, published by Coffee House Press. The book is courageous and determined by freedom exploring dream space, black time, art's implications, and the role of the teacher in academic institutions... among other things. After the reading, she will be joined by the writer Janice Lee for a conversation about writing.

Gabrielle Civil is a black feminist performance artist, poet, and writer, originally from Detroit, MI. She has premiered fifty performance works around the world including Jupiter (2021) at the Salt Lake City Performance Art Festival and Vigil (2021) in Northern Spark. Her performance memoirs include Swallow the Fish (2017), Experiments in Joy (2019), ( ghost gestures ) (2021), the déjà vu (2022), and In & Out of Place (2022). Her writing has also appeared in Black in the Middle, Teaching Black, New Daughters of Africa, Kitchen Table Translation, and Experiments in Joy: a Workbook. She earned her Ph. D. in Comparative Literature from New York University, traveled as a Fulbright Fellow to Mexico, and was named a 2019 Rema Hort Mann Los Angeles Emerging Artist. She teaches creative writing, black feminism, and performance at the California Institute of the Arts. The aim of her work is to open up space.

Janice Lee (she/they) is a Korean American writer, teacher, spiritual scholar, and shamanic healer. She is the author of 7 books of fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry, most recently: Imagine a Death (Texas Review Press, 2021) and Separation Anxiety (CLASH Books, 2022). She writes about interspecies communication, plants & personhood, the filmic long take, the apocalypse, inherited trauma, and the Korean concept of han, and asks the question, how do we hold space open while maintaining intimacy? Incorporating shamanic and energetic healing, she teaches workshops on inherited trauma, healing and writing, and practices in several lineages, including the medicine tradition of the Q’ero, Zen Buddhism (in the tradition of Plum Village and Thich Nhat Hanh), and Korean shamanic ritual (Muism). She currently lives in Portland, OR where she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Portland State University. janicel.com / Twitter, Instagram: @diddioz

This event is co-sponsored by PNCA’s Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing and MA in Critical Studies programs.