Muriel Leung Poetry Workshops Keynote Speaker
Muriel Leung is a queer Chinese-American multimedia artist who works across the genres of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. She is the author of the poetry collection Bone Confetti, winner of the 2015 Noemi Press Book Award. In collaboration with visual artist Kristine Thompson, she has also authored the image-text book, Images Seen to Images Felt through Antenna. A Pushcart Prize nominated writer, her work can be found in The Baffler, Gulf Coast, Drunken Boat, Cream City Review, The Collagist, Fairy Tale Review, and others. She is a recipient of fellowships to Kundiman, VONA/Voices Workshop, and Community of Writers where she was awarded the James D. Houston Memorial Scholarship. Her work has also been featured in Huffington Post and PBS NewsHour.
She is the current Poetry Co-Editor of Apogee Journal, a literary journal dedicated to uplifting the voices of marginalized artists. She was also a former contributing editor to the Bettering American anthology. She conducts interviews and reviews as the co-producer and co-host of monthly podcast The Blood-Jet Writing Hour with Rachelle Cruz.
A former teaching artist, she has taught or managed creative writing, multimodal art-making, and integrated curricula with organizations such as Community-Word Project, Elders Share the Arts, Sadie Nash Leadership Project, and Baton Rouge Youth Coalition, among others.
Currently, she is a Dornsife Fellow of Creative Writing and Literature at University of Southern California. She lives in Los Angeles, CA.
Key Topics: Queer/Asian American/Feminism • Critical Race Theory • Trauma and Affect • Multimedia Art-Making • Poetry and Illustration • Lyric Essays • Hybrid Genre • Experimental Poetics • Grief Poetics • Decoding Academia • Critical-Creative Scholarship • Literary Editing and Publishing
Services: Readings • Lectures • Writing Workshops • Manuscript Consultations • Interviews • Reviews • Roundtable Moderation • Panel Discussions
“Muriel Leung’s Bone Confetti is a ravishing fever dream of an elegy that mourns both a mother figure and history. Leung’s poems can be unbearably intimate yet also epic, traversing into the speculative and gothic, as she animates her grief into a macabre and exquisitely haunted underworld… Bone Confetti inaugurates a unique voice that will gain lasting prominence in American letters.”
“Bone Confetti houses something else: an activity of mourning. The book does this in place of the other things it could have done. Or housed. It struck the bone of my own heart. It made the words into a bell. And the bell made me stop what I was doing, just as certain events or thoughts or scenes do, and orient to that unexpected, powerful sound. Leung is this kind of writer, whose book makes you want to come up with a new language to describe what a book could be, could feel like, to read. I am grateful for the chance to encounter her work at this time, in this part of the real year.”
Text & Voice: Muriel Leung
Sound: Matt Orenstein
”In Absentia-Land: A Romance" originally published in Gigantic Sequins.