Featured keynotes, poets, writers, artists and posters from past years at DRWF.
2019 Keynote 2019 Spotlight 2019 Comic Artist
Ryka Aoki is the author of Seasonal Velocities, He Mele a Hilo and Why Dust Shall Never Settle Upon This Soul. She has appeared inVogue, Elle, Publisher’s Weekly, and the Huffington Post, and was honored by the California State Senate for “extraordinary commitment to the visibility and well-being of Transgender people.” She worked with the American Association of Hiroshima Nagasaki A-Bomb Survivors, and two of her compositions were adopted as the organization’s official “songs of peace.”
Ryka is the Director of The After School Workspace at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, Head Instructor of Supernova Queer Martial Arts, and Founder of Studio Passoire. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell University and is professor of English at Santa Monica College.
DDOOGG is an artist collective and independent press focused on publishing alternative, experimental, and abstract comics. Originally co-founded in 2015 by a small group of undergraduate students at Emily Carr University, DDOOGG is now run by Cristian Hernandez and Juli Majer, and affiliated with a growing number of Vancouver-based alt-comic artists.
DDOOGG has published the work of numerous local and international artists, both online and in print, and exhibited at book fairs in cities across Canada, United States, Europe and Asia, including: Vancouver Art/Book Fair (2016-18) Vancouver Comics Art Festival (2018-19), Toronto Comic Arts Festival (2016-18), Zine Daze (2018), Los Angeles Art Book Fair (2016), Comics Art Brooklyn (2017), Short Run Festival (2017-18) Print Ready VII - Minibar Stockholm (2016), The Future of Comics - Fumetto Festival (2019) and Picnic Art Festival, Shanghai (2018).
Carta Monir is an award-winning cartoonist and micropress publisher living in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She's six foot one.
2018 Keynote 2018 Spotlight 2018 Comic Artist
Crystal Boson writes short, dense poems that lay bare the complicated geographies of the United States and the lives of the Black, queer, and marginalized bodies that dwell within its boundaries. They are dark matter, heavy and frightening things that will tear you open. She currently writes about and resides in the midwest.
She is a Cave Canem and Callaloo fellow, and was awarded the Langston Hughes Creative Writing Award. She has work published in Blueshift Journal, Pank, Parcel, among other locations. Most recently her work: The Bitter Map was selected as the winner of the 2017 Honeysuckle Press Chapbook Contest by Saeed Jones
Feng Sun Chen is the author of The 8th House, Butcher's Tree, and chapbooks Blud and Ugly Fish. She lives in Minneapolis and is a student of jyotish (vedic astrology). She is also working on a masters in occupational therapy.
Thu Tran is an artist who makes comics, videos, and videogames. She is the author of Dust Pam, published by Peow Studios. Her comics have also been published by Kuš Komiks. She created and hosted stoner cooking shows for IFC and MTV, ('Food Party', 'Late Night Munchies') and has made short-form videos for Adult Swim, SuperDeluxe, and other outlets. Her videogames / video installations have been shown at the Museum of Moving Image, Fantastic Arcade, Babycastles, and at various art spaces, educational institutions, and events.
Click here to explore Thu’s work!
2017 Keynote 2017 Spotlights
Serena Chopra is the author of This Human (Coconut Books, 2013) and Ic (Horse Less Press, 2017), as well as the chapbooks, Penumbra (Flying Guillotine Press, 2011) and Livid Season (Free Poetry, 2012). She is a 2016-2017 Fulbright Scholar for which she is composing a novel informed by her research with queer women in Bangalore, India. She is a multidisciplinary artist, working as a professional modern dancer and five-year company member with Evolving Doors Dance. She is currently working on a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Denver.
Indrani Sengupta is a poet from Kolkata, India, living in the Bay Area. Her work is interested in fairy tales, body horror, monsters and mental illness, obsession, and the loss of the “I.” Indrani has an MFA in poetry from Boise State University, and has had poems appear in The Feminist Wire and Fogged Clarity.
A 2016 Jack Straw Fellow, Artist Trust Fellow, and nominee for a Stranger Genius Award, Robert Lashley has had poems published in Poetry Northwest, Seattle Review Of Books, NAILED, GRAMMA, and The Cascadia Review.
His first full-length book: The Homeboy Songs, was published by Small Doggies press in April 2014. His new book, Up South, was published in March of 2017.
Rachael Jensen’s first chapbook, Free Junk, was published on Snoot Books. She lives in Portland, OR by way of Idaho.
Touring Hip-hop artists CAUZNDFX. and FRESH PRODUCE.
closed out Saturday night of the festival at their all ages music showcase.
2016 Keynote 2016 Spotlights
Quenton Baker is a poet, educator, and Cave Canem fellow. His current focus is anti-blackness and the afterlife of slavery. His work has appeared in Jubilat, Vinyl, Apogee, Poetry Northwest, Pinwheel, and Cura and in the anthologies Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters and It Was Written: Poetry Inspired by Hip-Hop. He has an MFA in Poetry from the University of Southern Maine and is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee. He is a 2017 Jack Straw Fellow and a former Made at Hugo House fellow, as well as the recipient of the 2016 James W. Ray Venture Project Award and the 2018 Arts Innovator Award from Artist Trust. He is the author of This Glittering Republic (Willow Books, 2016).
Nora Cooper is a 2015 semifinalist at the Collegiate Undergrad Poetry Slam Invitational (CUPSI), has been featured on Button Poetry, and reviewed by "The Verge". She has been nominated for the Peter Rotter Undergraduate Essay Prize, and shares the same name as a yellow lab.
Jamondria Marnice Harris is a poet & artist living in Portland, Or. They use words, sounds, wires, instruments, textiles & what falls into their hands to engage with blackness, desire, decolonization, fairy tales, femme supremacy, & body horror. They are a VONA Workshop Fellow, among other things.
Olivia Olivia is a Salvadoran writer living in Portland, Oregon. She came to the United States as a child and has spent considerable amounts of times trying to be American and trying to Not Be American. Having spent several years in Berlin after having graduated with a degree in Creative Writing from Reed College in 2009, she specializes in writing about exile, immigration, and the afterlife.
Her writing can be found on Salon, the Portland Observer, Queen Mob’s Tea House, and The Rumpus, among other places.
