On Dictee
Join us for an appreciation of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée. Jo Park will host a gathering of local poets and scholars — Julia Bloch, Laynie Browne, Elizabeth Kim, Jena Osman, and Syd Zolf — who will each riff on a single passage from Cha's epic. Let's see where our improvisations take us, and we'll invite you to add yours!
Julia Bloch is the author of Lyric Trade: Reading the Subject in the Postwar Long Poem and three books of poetry, including Letters to Kelly Clarkson. She is a recipient of a Pew Fellowship in the Arts and director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania.
Laynie Browne's recent books include: Everyone & Her Resemblances, Practice Has No Sequel, Intaglio Daughters, and Letters Inscribed in Snow. She edited the anthology A Forest on Many Stems: Essays on The Poet’s Novel and co-edited I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women. Honors include a Pew Fellowship and the National Poetry Series Award. She teaches and coordinates the MOOC Modern Poetry at University of Pennsylvania.
Elizabeth Kim is an Assistant Professor of English at Haverford College. She earned her PhD in English Literature from Temple University and her MFA in Poetry from the Creative Writing Program at Rutgers University-Newark. Her article, “‘Crammed with Tongues’: Cosmopolitan Creole in Cathy Park Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution” is forthcoming in College Literature. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Platform Review, The Stillwater Review, The Waiting Room Reader, and American Book Review.
Josephine Nock-Hee Park is School of Arts and Sciences President’s Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where she serves on the Steering Committee of the Asian American Studies Program and the Executive Committee of the James Joo-Jin Kim Center for Korean Studies. Her books include Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics (Oxford, 2008) and Cold War Friendships: Korea, Vietnam, and Asian American Literature (Oxford, 2016), and her most recent title is Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in Black and White (Cambridge Elements, 2023).
Jena Osman's latest book is A Very Large Array: Selected Poems. She often teaches Dictee to students in her Documentary Poetics classes at Temple University.
Syd Zolf’s interdisciplinary practice queerly enacts how ethics founders on the shoals of the political, imagining other possibilities of sociality, space, and time. They have published five books of poetry, including Janey’s Arcadia, Neighbour Procedure, and Human Resources; and a selected poetry, Social Poesis. Honors include a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, a Trillium Book Award for Poetry, several major grants, and finalist for several other prizes, including two Lambda Literary Awards. Zolf’s art films have screened at venues such as the International Film Festival Rotterdam and White Cube Bermondsey. Their theoretical text, No One’s Witness: A Monstrous Poetics (Duke, 2021) was a finalist for the 2022 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. Zolf teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.