Moss is proud to present the first annual PNW Mini Lit Fair.

Moss, an annual print journal deeply rooted in place, has rounded up other literary organizations from across the Pacific Northwest to present a marathon of poetry, storytelling, and lyrical cinema that you can enjoy from the comfort of your own home. Featuring readings from Poetry Northwest, Fugue, Pacifica Literary Review, and Moss. Interspersed with the best of the best from past years of Cadence Video Poetry Festival. Capped off with a panel discussion between the editors and curators who shape the literary outlets you love.

The event will be totally free and open to the public, and will take place on February 20th, from 1:30 to 5 p.m. PST. Snag your ticket today at https://bit.ly/3afy9r6

Schedule

• 1:30: Opening remarks & Poetry Northwest
• Shelley Wong
• Greg Wrenn
• Robin Myers
• 2:15: Fugue
• Emma DePanise
• Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
• 2:45: Cadence Video Poetry Festival interlude + intermission
• “Still Life with Small Objects of Perfect Choking Size” (Erin Lynch & Keetje Kuipers, Seattle, WA, 3 min)
• “Plasticnic” (Fiona Tinwei Lam & Tisha Deb Pillai, Vancouver, BC, 2018, 1 min)
• 3:00: Pacifica Literary Review
• Madeline Kinkel
• Sarah McEachern
• 3:30: Cadence Video Poetry Festival interlude + intermission
• “Resonance” (Adam Jabari, Seattle, WA, 2019, 3 min)
• 3:45: Moss
• Jess Walter
• Diana Xin
• 4:15: Cadence Video Poetry Festival interlude + intermission
• “Sara Kei” (Kamyar Mohsenin & Sara Kei, Seattle, WA, 1 min)
• “O Tired Love When I Look at the Water” (Dru Korab & Brandon Jordan Brown, Portland, OR, 4 min)
• 4:30: Panel discussion

About the contributors

Poetry Northwest

Shelley Wong is the author of As She Appears (forthcoming from YesYes Books in spring 2022), winner of the 2019 Pamet River Prize, and the chapbook RARE BIRDS (Diode Editions). She has received a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Kundiman, MacDowell, and Vermont Studio Center. She is an affiliate artist at Headlands Center for the Arts and lives in San Francisco.

Greg Wrenn is the author of Centaur, which Terrance Hayes awarded the Brittingham Prize in Poetry. His essays and poems have appeared in The New Republic, The Rumpus, The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, The American Scholar, The American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, AGNI, and elsewhere. A former Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, he is an assistant professor of English at James Madison University.  Wrenn is currently working on Row, a memoir about using the ocean to heal from childhood trauma, and Origin, his second poetry collection. An Advanced PADI Nitrox diver, he has been exploring coral reefs around the world for over 25 years. You can find more of his work at gregwrenn.com.

Robin Myers lives in Mexico City and works as a translator. Her poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly, Poetry Northwest, PANK Magazine, 32 Poems, and the Massachusetts Review, among other publications. Her book-length collections have been translated into Spanish and published in Mexico, Argentina, and Spain, though not yet in the US. She writes a monthly column on translation for Palette Poetry. Her website is robinepmyers.com.and though her own books of poetry aren’t readily available in the US, but several books she has translated are: Cars on Fire by Mónica Ramón Ríos (short stories), Animals at the End of the World by Gloria Susana Esquivel (novel), and Lyric Poetry Is Dead by Ezequiel Zaidenwerg (poetry).


Fugue

Emma DePanise’s poems are forthcoming or have appeared recently in journals such as River Styx, The Minnesota Review, Reed Magazine, The National Poetry Review, Passages North and elsewhere. She is a winner of a 2019 Association of AWP Intro Journals Award and the 2018 winner of the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. She is an MFA candidate in poetry and teaching assistant at Purdue University, a poetry editor for Sycamore Review and a co-editor of The Shore. You can find more of her work at https://www.emmadepanise.com/

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is a lesbian writer of essays, short stories, and pop culture criticism living in Miami. She is a fiction editor at TriQuarterly and a writer for Autostraddle. Her debut short story, published in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, was nominated for the 2021 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Her short stories have also been published or are forthcoming in Catapult, The Offing, The Journal, and Fugue. She attended the 2020 Tin House Summer Workshop for short fiction, and she is an upcoming fellow for Lambda Literary’s Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices.


Pacifica Literary Review

Madeline Kinkel is a writer and translator. Her work has appeared in Yemassee, Puerto del Sol, and Heavy Feather Review. She co-translated a book of Lida Yusupova’s poetry, forthcoming from Cicada Press. She was an Aspen Words Emerging Writers Fellow in 2020. Find out more at her website: madelinekinkel.com.

Sarah McEachern is a reader and writer in Brooklyn, NY. Some of her recent writing has been published or forthcoming in LARB,The Ploughshares Blog, BOMB, The Believer, The Rumpus, Split Lip Mag, and Full Stop. Personal essays and fiction have been published or are forthcoming in Entropy, Catapult, and Pigeon Pages among others. More recent works is linked in the bio of her Twitter: @amymarchinparis.


Moss

Jess Walter is the author of seven novels, most recently the national bestseller The Cold Millions (2020). His book Beautiful Ruins (2012) was a #1 New York Times bestseller. He was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award for The Zero and winner of the 2005 Edgar Allan Poe Award for best novel for Citizen Vince. His short fiction has appeared three times in Best American Short Stories. He lives in his hometown of Spokane, Washington.

Diana Xin’s work appears most recently in Electric Literature, The Missouri Review, and The Baltimore Review. She is a recipient of fellowships from Hedgebrook, Artist Trust, and the M Literary Residency. She holds an MFA from the University of Montana and moved from Missoula to Seattle in 2014 (but it feels like a long time ago).


Cadence Video Poetry Festival

“Still Life with Small Objects of Perfect Choking Size” (Erin Lynch & Keetje Kuipers, Seattle, WA, 3 min)
2020 Northwest Artist Award winner. Video poem by Erin Marie Lynch, based on the poem “Still Life with Small Objects of Perfect Choking Size” by Keetje Kuipers.

“Plasticnic” (Fiona Tinwei Lam & Tisha Deb Pillai, Vancouver, BC, 2018, 1 min)
Plasticnic is an animated short poem that wryly depicts the extent and impact of the accumulation of plastic in the environment as people ceaselessly continue to purchase, use and discard single-use plastics. We seek out and enjoy nature while simultaneously destroying it. Find out more at fionalam.net

“Resonance” (Adam Jabari, Seattle, WA, 2019, 3 min)
Resonance emerges from and ether, oceanic. Always will. Always was. Always is.

“Sara Kei” (Kamyar Mohsenin & Sara Kei, Seattle, WA, 1 min)
Written and conceptualized by Sara Kei directed and edited by Kamyar Mohsenin.

“O Tired Love When I Look at the Water” (Dru Korab & Brandon Jordan Brown, Portland, OR, 4 min)
We’d very much like to understand beginnings (even, or perhaps especially, unrealized beginnings) as orderly events—neat, picturesque, ordained; but what of the uncertainty, the risk, the chance for failure? How will (and do) these beginnings, as they gain speed and grow beyond our control, affect us in return?

About the Organizations

Cadence: Video Poetry Festival, presented by Northwest Film Forum, programmed in collaboration with Seattle author Chelsea Werner-Jatzke and artist Rana San, is a series of screenings, workshops, and discussions on the genre of video poetry, during National Poetry Month. The festival approaches video poetry as a literary genre presented as visual media that makes new meaning from the combination of text and moving image. Featuring screenings, an artist residency, generative workshops for youth and adults, and juried awards, Cadence fosters critical and creative growth around the medium of video poetry.
nwfilmforum.org/cadence

First established in 1959, Poetry Northwest honors poetry as an arena for both established and emerging writers. They strive to represent our vital corner of the continent to a broader audience, and to attract and sustain readers with the promise of discovery. While still holding true to their mission of honoring the printed poem, they have expanded their publication repertoire to include book reviews, essays on poetics and other cultural explorations, and visual arts features, both in print and online.

Founded in 1990 at the University of Idaho, Fugue publishes poetry, fiction, essays, hybrid work, and visual art from established and emerging writers. Fugue is managed and edited entirely by University of Idaho graduate students, with help from graduate and undergraduate readers. Currently, they publish one print issue each year (Summer/Fall) and one online issue (Winter/Spring), and hold an annual contest in both prose and poetry, judged by two nationally recognized writers.

Pacifica Literary Review began when two writers who did not have nice things decided that they would make their own nice thing. Now, after almost a decade of growth, Pacifica has made a very nice thing publishing poetry, fiction, creative non, photography, and art & design twice a year in print and all year ’round on the web. Writers from all backgrounds, races, orientations, occupations, and sports fandoms are encouraged to send them work. Professors and baristas will receive equal consideration. Sonnets and memes will receive equal consideration. If it is excellent and gives them the feels, they’ll print it.

Moss is a literary journal of writing from the Pacific Northwest. Published annually, Moss is dedicated to exploring the intersection of place and creative expression, while exposing the region’s outstanding writers to a broad audience of readers, critics, and publishers. Since its debut issue in the summer of 2014, Moss has received praise for its sharp design, strong editorial hand, and its commitment to supporting new and emerging writers.

To sign up for your free ticket to the PNW Mini Lit Fair, click here: https://bit.ly/3afy9r6