Dobby Gibson, Ed Bok Lee

press release: A Room of One's Own presents a joint poetry reading with Dobby Gibson, author of Little Glass Planet, and Ed Bok Lee, author of Mitochondrial Night!

Little Glass Planet exults in the strangeness of the known and unknowable world. In poems set as far afield as Mumbai and Marfa, Texas, Gibson maps disparate landscapes, both terrestrial and

subliminal, to reveal the drama in both the extraordinary and the mundane. Aphoristic, allusive, and collaged, these poems mine our various human languages to help us understand what we might mean when we speak to each other—as lovers, as family, as strangers.

Dobby Gibson is the author of Polar, which won the Alice James Award, Skirmish, and It Becomes You. His poetry has appeared in Fence, New England Review, and Ploughshares, among others. He lives in St. Paul.

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In Mitochondrial Night, taking mitochondrial DNA as his guide, Ed Bok Lee explores familial and national legacies, and their persistence across shifting boundaries and the erosions of time. In these Tthe trait of an ancestor appears in the face of a newborn, and in her cry generations of women’s voices echo. Stories, both benign and traumatic, travel as lore and DNA. Using lush, exact imagery, whether about the corner bar or a hilltop in Korea, Lee is a careful observer, tracking and documenting the way that seemingly small moments can lead to larger insights.

Ed Bok Lee is a recipient of a 2012 American Book Award and the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry. Lee is the son of North and South Korean emigrants. Lee grew up in South Korea, North Dakota, and Minnesota, and was educated there and on both U.S. coasts, Russia, South Korea, and Kazakhstan. He teaches at Metropolitan State University in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Other honors include the Asian American Literary Award (Members’ Choice Award) and a PEN Open Book Award.