Reading with Brenda Iijima and Saretta Morgan presented by The Georgia Review

Join us for a reading with Brenda Iijima and Saretta Morgan
Q+A and book signing, reception to follow at The UGA Special Collections Library
 
This event is supported in part by the Building Southern Intersectional Futures grant from the Mellon Foundation and the Institute for Women’s and Gender Studies at UGA.

Brenda Iijima is a poet, novelist, playwright, choreographer, and visual artist. She is the author of nine books of poetry. Her involvements occur at the intersections and mutations of genre, mode, receptivity, and field of study. Her current work engages submerged and occluded histories, other-than-human modes of expression, and telluric awareness in all forms. She is the author of A roundtable, unanimous dreamers chime in, a collaborative novel co-authored with Janice Lee (Meekling Press, 2023), a novel, Presence (Georgia Review Press, 2024), and a play, Daily Life in China (forthcoming from elis press, 2024). Iijima is the founding editor-publisher of Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs. She lives in Brooklyn.
  
Saretta Morgan is the author of Alt–Nature (Coffee House Press, 2024) as well as the chapbooks Feeling Upon Arrival (Ugly Duckling, 2018) and room for a counter interior (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2017).
Her work engages ecologies and forms of connectivity that develop alongside processes of U.S. militarization. Over the past decade she has participated in veteran-led organizing with Veterans for Peace (NYC) and About Face: Veterans Against the War, as well as the humanitarian aid work of No More Deaths Phoenix, which provides direct support to address the death and suffering of migrants in the Sonoran Desert. Additionally, she has been fortunate to participate in, and learn from, Indigenous-led water protection and food sovereignty work, Black-led community healing initiatives, and trans-led support for detained migrants. She believes in a Free Palestine as part of the broader inevitability of LAND BACK for Indigenous peoples across the earth.

From 2018-2023 she lived between the Sonoran and Mojave Deserts, where she wrote her first full-length poetry collection, Alt–Nature (2024), and the chapbooks Feeling Upon Arrival (2018), and room for a counter interior (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2017).

She leads workshops and designs interactive language-based programs for public and private settings. As a practice, she no longer uses her bio to validate cultural arms of the carceral state. However, contractually: She is the 2025-2026 Black Mountain Institute-Kluge Fellow at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Born in Appalachia and raised on military installations, she is a daughter of the South (east & west). She lives on Muscogee lands in Atlanta, GA where she trains in Capoeira and wild bird rehabilitation.