The Subversive Opportunities of Experimental Poetics, Sponsored by Blue Flower Arts & The Loft

Sun Yung Shin was born in Seoul, Korea, and raised in the Chicago area. She is a poet, writer, and cultural worker. Shin is the author of the poetry collections The Wet Hex (2022); Unbearable Splendor (finalist for the 2017 PEN USA Literary Award for Poetry, winner of the 2016 Minnesota Book Award for poetry); Rough, and Savage; and Skirt Full of Black (winner of the 2007 Asian American Literary Award for poetry), as well as the memoir Heart Eater (Black Lawrence Press). She is coeditor of Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption and author of the bilingual illustrated book for children Cooper’s Lesson. She is the editor of What We Hunger For: Refugee and Immigrant Stories About Food and Family (2021) and of A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota. She lives in Minneapolis, where she codirects the community organization Poetry Asylum with poet Su Hwang.

Photo Credit: Kyra Nygard

Interdisciplinary poet and sound artist LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs is the author of Village (Coffee House Press, 2023) and TwERK (Belladonna, 2013). Diggs has received a 2020 C.D. Wright Award for Poetry, a 2016 Whiting Award, and a 2015 NEA Literature Fellowship, as well as grants and fellowships from the Howard Foundation, Cave Canem, Creative Capital, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission. She received the 2025 Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and a 2026 United States Artists Fellowship. Diggs has presented and performed at many venues, from California Institute of the Arts and the Museum of Modern Art to the International Poetry Festival of Copenhagen and the International Poetry Festival of Romania. As an independent curator, artistic director, and producer, Diggs has presented events for BAMCafé, Black Rock Coalition, El Museo del Barrio, La Casita, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, and the David Rubenstein Atrium. She teaches at Brooklyn and Barnard College, and lives in New York City.

Layli Long Soldier is author of the collection Whereas (Graywolf, 2017), which won the National Book Critics Circle award and the 2018 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her poems and critical work have appeared in Poetry, The New York Times, American Poet, The American Reader, The Kenyon Review, and BOMB, among many others. In 2015, Long Soldier was awarded a National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation and a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry. She was awarded a Whiting Writers’ Award in 2016 and was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2018. In 2021, she received an Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature and the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize in the UK. Long Soldier earned a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Bard College. She teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the IAIA and served as the 2024–25 Endowed Chair at Texas State University. She resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Photo Credit: John Midgley

Douglas Kearney has published eight books ranging from poetry to essays. In 2023, Optic Subwoof, a collection of his Bagley Wright lectures, won the Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism and the CLMP Firecracker Award for Creative Nonfiction. His seventh, Sho (Wave Books), is a Griffin Poetry Prize and Minnesota Book Award winner. Kearney’s most recent collection, I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always, was published with Wave Books in April 2025. Kearney is a Whiting Writers and Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly awardee with residencies/fellowships including Cave Canem, the Rauschenberg Foundation, and the McKnight Foundation. He is a Samuel Russell Chair in the Humanities in the College of Liberal Arts and professor of English at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.

Arleta Little has worked for more than two decades in nonprofits and philanthropy in executive leadership, program officer, and consulting roles, including as director of artist fellowships for the McKnight Foundation; executive director for the Givens Foundation for African American Literature; and as an organizational development consultant, providing strategic planning, program evaluation, and grant writing services to nonprofits, academic institutions, and government agencies. She has graduate degrees in public affairs and social work and an undergraduate degree in English. Little’s writing has appeared in multiple journals and publications and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Minnesota Book Award. She is a coauthor, along with Josie R. Johnson and Carolyn Holbrook, of Hope in the Struggle: A Memoir about the life of Josie R. Johnson. Little’s 2024 book of poetry, Black Swallowtail, pairs her poetry with paintings by visual artist Ta-coumba T. Aiken in the African tradition of call and response.

Photo Credit: Ariana Lindquist