Portland Book Launch & Reading: Chen, Hasegawa, Macarty & Zdeb
Saturday, January 10, at 7pm
Mother Foucault’s Bookshop, 715 SE Grand Ave, Portland, OR
Join us in celebrating the release of four exciting new poetry books! This gathering of four dynamic voices promises an evening of expansive poetics, visionary storytelling, and community celebration.
The End of Welcome by Nicole Alston Zdeb (Airlie Press, 2025)
The Long Now Conditions Permit by Jami Macarty (University of Nevada Press, 2025)
NAOMIE ANOMIE: A Biography of Infinite Desire by Jennifer Hasegawa (Omnidawn, 2025).
Shiny City by Ching-In Chen (Airlie Press, 2025)
This event is free and open to the public! ~ masks & industrial-fragrance-free requested ~ for those who cannot mask, we request that you please test for COVID before coming to the event ~
Ching-In Chen is author of recombinant (2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry), and The Heart's Traffic: a novel in poems as well as chapbooks to make black paper sing and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Leslie Scalapino Finalist).
Chen's Shiny City examines the "real" and imagined history of Riverside, California's Chinatown, juxtaposed with a speculative shiny city of the global future which reconstructs its own kind of history with beauty that emerges from between the cracks. Chen collaborates with Cassie Mira on Breathing in a Time of Disaster, a performance, installation and speculative writing project exploring breath through meditation and environmental justice.
Jennifer Hasegawa is a poet and community archivist. Her latest poetry collection, NAOMIE ANOMIE: A Biography of Infinite Desire is an experimental poetic take on anti-memoir. Her debut collection, La Chica's Field Guide to Banzai Living, won the Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award and was long-listed for The Believer Book Award in Poetry. Her work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Bamboo Ridge, Bennington Review, jubilat, and Vallum. She was born and raised on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi and currently resides in San Francisco.
Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses, winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award-Poetry Arizona, and four chapbooks, including The Whole Catastrophe and Mind of Spring, winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Macarty’s 2025 collection, The Long Now Conditions Permit, offers an ecofeminist ethic of care as an antidote to extractive capitalism and patriarchal norms. Macarty supports other writers as an independent mentor, editor, and reviewer, and as a creative writing teacher at Simon Fraser University. Macarty lives in and learns from the arborescent desert around Tucson, Arizona, and the rain coast of Vancouver, British Columbia.
Nicole Alston Zdeb is a writer based in Portland, Oregon. Her debut poetry book, The End of Welcome, holds themes of grief, resilience, and joy as a shell held to the ear holds the sonic image of the sea, as the heart holds the fallout of a suicide, and the body holds defiant against and bends to the machinations of progress. She holds a MFA from Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Bedouin Press published her chapbook, The Friction of Distance. Recently, she’s had poems, photographs, and short stories accepted by Driftwood Press, Lana Turner, SWWIM, and other journals.