Performance poets

Ed-Bok Lee

Juliana Pegues

Thien-Bao Thuc Phi

Thursday, October 20, 2005

Talk on craft
3:00 P.M.—CSU Ostrander Auditorium
Reading
7:30 P.M.—CSU Ostrander Auditorium

ED-BOK LEE, a poet, fiction writer, playwright and former North Dakota Grand Slam Poetry champion, is the author of Real Karaoke People: Poems and Prose, an award-winning collection published by New Rivers Press in 2005. Awards for his writings include support from the National Endowment for the Arts, Minnesota State Arts Board, Loft Literary Center, New York Theater Workshop, SASE: The Write Place, Millay Colony for the Arts, and the Jerome Foundation. He studied Russian Language and Literature at the University of California-Berkeley, University of Indiana, University of Minnesota, and at Kazakh State University in Almaty, Kazakhstan. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University. He now lives in Minneapolis.

Born in Taiwan and raised in Alaska, JULIANA PEGUES is a queer Asian American poet, playwright, and community activist. Her one-woman shows—Made In Taiwan, First the Forest, and Fifteen—were presented respectively by the Walker Art Center, the Jerome Foundation Performance Art Commission, and Intermedia Arts. Her poetry has been published in several anthologies and in the Asian American Renaissance Journal, Mizna, and Lodestar Quarterly. Her poetry has also been featured at numerous open mics and cabarets. She is a member of the national Asian Pacific Islander American women’s performance collective, Mango Tribe.

THIEN-BAO THUC PHI was born in Viet Nam and raised in the Phillips neighborhood of South Minneapolis. A spoken-word artist and activist for the past 15 years, he has performed and taught at venues and schools across the nation, including the Nuyorican Poets Café and the Asian American Writers Workshop in New York City, several National Poetry Slams, the University of Pennsylvania, Amherst College, the Kennedy Center, and Stanford University. He is a 2003 recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board fellowship and was recently featured on HBO’s Def Poetry. He has issued two CD’s of his work, Refugeography and Flares, as well as a book Surviving the Translation: Collected Poems from 1993-2002.

This year's Good Thunder Reading Series is funded by the Minnesota State University Department of English, the MSU College of Arts and Humanities, the MSU Office of Institutional Diversity, MSU Library Services, the Eddice B. Barber Visiting Writer Endowment, the Robert C. Wright Endowment, and individual donors. This activity is made possible in part by a grant provided by the Prairie Lakes Regional Arts Council from funds appropriated by the Minnesota State Legislature. This activity is also made possible in part by a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.