PAMLA 2023 is proud to present “This Presents a Problem”: Three Northwest Poets. Please join us at the Hilton Portland Downtown, in the Atrium Ballroom, on Saturday, October 28, from 2:45 to 4:15 pm, for a poetry reading and discussion by three brilliant, riveting poets, Rae Armantrout, John Beer, and Janice Lee. This event is free and open to all.

Rae Armantrout has published books including Conjure, Wobble (finalist for a National Book Award), Partly: New and Selected Poems, Itself, Just Saying, Money Shot, and Versed, which received a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Critics Circle Award. Her latest, and eleventh book published by Wesleyan, was Finalists. Her forthcoming book, Notice, is the product of a life-long interest in natural sciences. The collection draws poems from her previous books calling our attention to how language frames and shapes our relationships to climate and kin. The title is a call to take heed of the signs coming to us daily. Armantrout is Professor Emerita of Writing at the University of California at San Diego. She has been published in many anthologies, including The Oxford Book of American Poetry and Scribner’s Best American Poetry, and in such magazines as Harpers, The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Chicago Review, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. She lives in Everett, Washington. We are proud to say this is Rae Armantrout’s third PAMLA conference presentation.

John Beer is the author of The Waste Land and Other Poems (Canarium, 2010), which won the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and Lucinda: A Poem (Canarium, 2016). A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he lived on the Greek island of Patmos for two years in the late 1990s, where he served as literary assistant to Robert Lax. He currently teaches creative writing at Portland State University; previously, he reviewed theater for Time Out Chicago. He edited a collection of poems by Robert Lax, Poems (1962-1997) (Wave Books, 2013). He is also a scholar of the Romantic poets.

Janice Lee is a Korean American writer, teacher, spiritual scholar, and shamanic healer. She is the author of eight books of fiction, creative nonfiction, & poetry: KEROTAKIS (Dog Horn Press, 2010), Daughter (Jaded Ibis, 2011), Damnation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013), Reconsolidation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2015), The Sky Isn’t Blue (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016), Imagine a Death (Texas Review Press, 2021), Separation Anxiety (CLASH Books, 2022), a finalist for the 2023 Oregon Book Award, and A roundtable, unanimous dreamers chime in, a collaborative novel co-authored with Brenda Iijima (Meekling Press, 2023). An essay (co-authored with Jared Woodland) is featured in the recently released 4K restoration of Sátántangó (dir. Béla Tarr) from Arbelos Films. Lee writes about interspecies communication, plants & personhood, the filmic long take, slowness, the apocalypse, architectural spaces, inherited trauma, and the Korean concept of han, and asks the question, how do we hold space open while maintaining intimacy? Her next book seeks to explore ties between the Korean cultural concept of han, narratives of inherited trauma in the West, the Korean folk traditions and shamanic practices of her ancestors (especially rituals around death), the history and creation of Korean script (Hangul), and revisions of the Korean myth of Princess Bari. She currently lives in Portland, where she is the Operational Creative Director at Corporeal Writing and an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Portland State University.