Afterlives: An AGNI Portfolio of Asian Adoptee Diaspora Writing

The Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith hosts a virtual event to discuss and celebrate Afterlives: An AGNI Portfolio of Asian Adoptee Diaspora Writing. Co-editors Jennifer Kwon Dobbs and Lee Herrick will be in conversation with contributors Eva Lin Fahey, Susan Ito, Greg Santos, and Jenny Heijun Wills.
This digital portfolio gathers together fiction, art, memoir, and poetry by eighteen writers from eight Asian adoptee diasporas.
Jennifer Kwon Dobbs is senior poetry editor of AGNI and the author of two books and two chapbooks. Most recently, she received the American-Scandinavian Foundation’s Lief and Inger Sjöberg Prize for her co-translation of Niillas Holmberg’s Juolgevuođđu, published as Underfoot.
Lee Herrick is the California Poet Laureate. He is the author of three books of poems: Scar and Flower, finalist for the 2020 Northern California Book Award; Gardening Secrets of the Dead; and This Many Miles from Desire.
Eva Lin Fahey was born in Jingmen, China, during the One Child Policy. A transracial adoptee, she became a U.S. citizen at age three. A primarily water-based media artist, Fahey creates work that investigates her origins and the circumstances of other girls adopted from China, centering on themes of motherhood, intergenerational ties, and the East Asian diaspora.
Susan Ito is the author of the forthcoming memoir I Would Meet You Anywhere and the coeditor of the anthology A Ghost at Heart’s Edge: Stories & Poems of Adoption. Her work has appeared in The Writer, Growing Up Asian American, Catapult, and elsewhere. Her theatrical adaption of Untold, stories of reproductive stigma, was produced at Brava Theater. She is a co-organizer of Rooted and Written, a writing workshop for writers of color. She teaches at the Mills College campus of Northeastern University and at Bay Path University.
Greg Santos is the author of Ghost Face and several other poetry collections. He is editor-in-chief of the Quebec Writers' Federation's carte blanche magazine. A transracial Cambodian adoptee of Portuguese and Spanish heritage, he lives in Montreal, Quebec, with his family.
Jenny Heijun Wills is the author of Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related, which received the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, Manitoba Book Awards’ Best First Book prize, and a CBC best in nonfiction, and was named one of the most influential books of 2019 by The Globe & Mail. Wills is coeditor of Adoption and Multiculturalism and Teaching Asian North American Texts. Her book of personal essays, Asian Adopted Queer Hungry, is forthcoming in 2024. She is professor of English at the University of Winnipeg.
Hosted by the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith, this virtual event was originally recorded on October 12, 2023.
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