Featured Readers
Jamila Woods is a poet, songwriter, and performing artist from the South Side of Chicago. Her first solo album, HEAVN was released by JagJaguwar Records in 2017 to critical acclaim. Her sophomore offering, LEGACY! LEGACY! (2019), features 12 tracks named after writers, thinkers, and visual artists who have influenced the creator’s life and work — including James Baldwin, Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez.
Jamila surrounds herself with things she loves, things like Lucille Clifton’s poetry, her grandmother’s handwriting or the late 90s alt-rock of Incubus. “I think of songs as physical spaces,” Jamila says, “Writing a song is like decorating your apartment with things that comfort you and represent who you are.” Songwriting–like poetry– is a process of personal excavation. She says, “Poetry became a way for me to stop hiding, to be the most honest version of myself through my writing.” Her work is the culmination of two decades’ worth of vocal training, creative remixing, interdisciplinary performance and her unique “collage” writing process.
Emily Jungmin Yoon is the author of A Cruelty Special to Our Species, (Ecco|HarperCollins 2018), which was released in Korean as 우리 종족의 특별한 잔인함 (trans. Han Yujoo; Yolimwon 2020), and Ordinary Misfortunes, the 2017 winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize by Tupelo Press and selected by Maggie Smith. Also a translator, she has published Against Healing: Nine Korean Poets (Tilted Axis, 2019), a chapbook of poems by Korean women writers. Yoon is represented by Jin Auh at the Wylie Agency.
Yoon was born in Busan, Republic of Korea, and since the age of 10, she has lived in Victoria, BC, Philadelphia, and New York, and currently splits her time between Seoul and Honolulu. She received her BA in English and Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and MFA in Creative Writing – Poetry at New York University, where she served as an Award Editor for the Washington Square Review and received a Starworks Fellowship.
She has also accepted awards and fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Poetry Foundation, Devil’s Kitchen Reading Awards, Ploughshares’ Emerging Writer’s Contest, and elsewhere.
Individual works have appeared in The New Yorker, POETRY, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, Korean Literature Now, and elsewhere.
She currently serves as the Poetry Editor for The Margins, the literary magazine of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and is a PhD candidate in Korean literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago.