A FOREST CANOPY: A Rail Reading curated by Jay Besemer

Kenning JP García is an Afro-Absurdist diarist, humorist, performer, and tragedian . Xe is the author of OF: What Place Meant (West Vine Press), With (Really Serious Literature), Ghost Notes (Spiral Editions), and Suffused (If and Only If Press). Xe is also an editor at Rigorous and Dream Pop Press.

JANICE LEE (she/they) is a Korean American writer, teacher, spiritual scholar, shamanic healer, and author of several books, most recently Imagine a Death, Separation Anxiety (2023 Oregon Book Award finalist), and A roundtable, unanimous dreamers chime in, with Brenda Iijima. Currently writing about the Korean concept of han, death rituals, and Korean script (hangul), Lee teaches workshops on inherited trauma, bringing together elements from the Q’ero medicine tradition, Zen Buddhism (in the tradition of Plum Village and Thich Nhat Hanh), Korean shamanic ritual, plant medicine & flower essence work, divination, and interspecies communication. She lives in Portland, OR and is the Operational Creative Director at Corporeal Writing and Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at PSU.

Poet and artist Jay Besemer is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Men & Sleep (Meekling Press 2023) the double chapbook Wounded Buildings/Simple Machines (Another New Calligraphy 2022) and Theories of Performance (The Lettered Streets Press, 2020). His hybrid long-form autotheory/essay On Being Half-Imaginary is currently seeking a new home after the folding of the press from which it was forthcoming. He was a 2021 Lambda Literary Award Finalist for Transgender Poetry, and a finalist for the 2017 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature. Jay was included in the groundbreaking anthology Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics.