Events Calendar

The Mission Creek Festival Presents Cindy Juyoung Ok and Thea Brown, who will read from Ward Toward and Loner Forensics. This is a free event, all are welcome!

Cindy Juyoung Ok is the author of Yale Younger Poets Prize-winning Ward Toward, selected by Rae Armentrout. A MacDowell Fellow, Kenyon Review Fellow, and poetry editor at Guernica magazine, she is a former high school science teacher and now teaches creative writing at Kenyon College. Her poems are out now or soon in New England Review, Sewanee Review, and The Yale Review.  "Reading Cindy Juyoung Ok's poems is like witnessing the Big Bang in close-up slow motion--infinite collisions of syntax, thought and emotion--pyrotechnic and glorious. This debut volume spectacularly showcases an utterly singular poetic sensibility."—Monica Youn, author of From From

Thea Brown is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow. She is the author of the chapbook We Are Fantastic (Petri Press 2013) and the full-length poetry collections Think of the Danger (H_NGM_N 2016), Famous Times (Slope Editions 2019), and Loner Forensics (Northwestern University Press 2023). Poems can be found in Oversound, Denver Quarterly, Pinwheel, the Iowa Review, LitHub, and Vinyl. She lives in Baltimore, where she’s been the Tickner Fellow at the Gilman School and a Rubys Artist Project Grant awardee, as well as the recipient of a UCross Foundation fellowship and the 2020 Art Alliance Poetry Prize. She teaches creative writing at the George Washington University. "You’ll likely find Thea Brown’s collection Loner Forensics shelved under poetry, but this book is something all its own: lyric noir, speculative elegy, private procedural. A story told through story’s negation ('The city is not a story'), here we feel we might glimpse Schrödinger’s cat gone stray, living out one of its lives off alley scraps in the intimate estrangement of the metropolis. While the chorus of voices builds a litany of delightfully dubious testimony out of postmodern materials—fragments of the attention economy, consumer culture, and so on—place (as in any good Gothic) is a crucial character as well: dangerous, endangered, and indelible. Alongside Brown and her Detective, we search for truth in the trappings, asking the big questions, like, well, 'What was the question?'” —Dora Malech, author of Flourish

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