Poetry with Jennifer Kwon Dobbs and Diane LeBlanc

Content welcomes poets Jennifer Kwon Dobbs and Diane LeBlanc for a reading from their collections INTERROGATION ROOM and THE FEAST DELAYED, respectively, and new work. Join us on Sunday, June 22nd at 2 pm.

In INTERROGATION ROOM, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs’s second collection, poems that restore redacted speech and traverse forbidden borders suture together divided bodies, geographies, and kinships to confront the unending Korean War’s legacies of forced distances and militarized silences. Kwon Dobbs powerfully entwines uneasy, tentative reconciliations among South Korea’s relatives in the North, her birth family in the South, and the transnational diaspora to which she belongs to resist the war’s deprivations of language and imagination.

“No one wants to be lost forever. Just long enough,” Diane LeBlanc writes. The poems in THE FEAST DELAYED crave the fabric of home and ease. They seed within the natural world that lives beside us, and in the rich and mysterious “time when / we didn’t belong to each other alone.” LeBlanc pinwheels her attention to the landscape, waking us with her beautiful phrases. And she focuses, too, on the gravity of grief. These poems nest in it, but also emerge to travel through the repeating reminders of light and the aviary of seasons, history, and the horizon of love.

Jennifer Kwon Dobbs is the author of two poetry collections and two chapbooks, most recently Interrogation Room–mentioned in The New York Times and a recipient of the Asian American Studies Book Award in Creative Writing. She is senior poetry editor at AGNI and professor of English at St. Olaf College.

Jennifer Kwon Dobbs is a fiscal year 2024 recipient of a Creative Individuals grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.

Diane LeBlanc is a writer, teacher, and book artist with roots in Vermont, Wyoming, and Minnesota. She is the author of The Feast Delayed (2021) and four poetry chapbooks. Poems and essays appear in Bellevue Literary Review, Cimarron Review, Mid-American Review, Ploughshares, and Southern Humanities Review, among others. Awards include the 2024 RockPaperPoem Poetry Contest, the 2023 River Heron Poetry Prize, Mid-American Review’s 2019-20 Fineline Competition prize, and Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations. Diane is a professor of English at St. Olaf College.