PB&J 22

PB&J 22: Spoken Word and Performance Showcase for APIA Summit in New Orleans
Saturday May 5, 2007
@ Stereo Underground in Hongdae (see map below)
8:00pm – 10:00pm
Sliding scale 5,000-10,000 won! All proceeds donated to the August 2007 New Orleans spoken word and poetry summit

Spoken Word & Performance Showcase on Saturday May 5

On Saturday May 5th, a passel of poets and performers will take the stage at Stereo Underground in Hongdae in support of spoken word and youth arts in New Orleans. From experimental music to unadulterated poetry, Sam Lee, Julayne Lee, Sue Kwon, Annie Koh, Su-Yoon Ko, Sora Kim-Russell, Mirim Kim and Jason Ahn will bring their creativity to the microphone. Sliding fee scale of W5,000-W10,000. Pay what you want/can. No one will be turned away due to lack of funds.

August 3-5, 2007 will mark the 4th biennial APIA (Asian Pacific Islander American) Spoken Word and Poetry Summit at the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts in Louisiana. As a grassroots movement among Asian American artist/activists that began in Seattle in 2001 and continued in Chicago (2003) and Boston (2005), the Summit supports several Asian American youth artist programs around the US, and this year Asian American immigrant youth community in New Orleans will also participate and benefit from the Summit. Proceeds from the fundraiser will go directly to the operating costs involved in hosting the Summit.

Artists Bios
Jason Ahn is a California native and he graduated from the University of California , Berkeley in 2005 with Honors in both Molecular Cell Biology and History. As a Fulbright Scholar he is doing a medical anthropological study on the structural violence in North Korea and its affects the people’s health. He will start medical school in the fall of 2007. He was introduced to writing poetry in a course at UC Berkeley called June Jordan’s Poetry for the People in 2004. He hopes to become a doctor in North Korea, publish a collection of poetry, and direct a documentary film.

Mirim Kim is a transplanted Korean who tried to grow up in North Dakota amongst lutefisk, Scandinavian Heritage Days, and fourth-generation Norwegian-American attempts to pigeonhole her according to her race. She has lived in Korea for four years, and her main passion is working with Korean orphans. After a wrenching experience of watching a child go for domestic adoption and shortly followed by a quite differently heartwrenching experience of watching a newborn infant who bears her name grow into toddlerhood, she has focused her writing on “Aejin,” the phantom Korean orphan child who represents both love and neglect, hope and despair. Mirim hopes, through her writing, to bring her audience closer to a rarely examined underside of Korean society.

Sora Kim-Russell is a poet and aspiring fiction writer. Her alleged novel is presumed to be a queer, hyphenated Asian chick lit novel that may or may not be a memoir in disguise. The existence of this novel has yet to be confirmed.

Su-Yoon Ko is an adoptee. In Minnesota she was involved in theater, drumming, and was 1/3 of Mongrel, a spoken word group, until she relocated to Seoul over four years ago. She’s a member of ASK (Adoptee Solidarity Korea), a politically active group.

Annie Koh is a graduate student in Korean Studies, a cheese-devourer, a Midwesterner by birth and a San Franciscan by sheer stubbornness. She has been a political campaign manager, an arts organizer, a dot com casualty, a freelance writer and a drummer. Her fiction/nonfiction work has been featured in the San Francisco Examiner, Ten magazine, San Jose Metro, Galeria de la Raza, Pacific Time Radio, and in the League of Pissed Off Voters inaugural anthology. On sunny afternoons, she dreams of tshirt empires and starting her own museums.

Sue Kwon teaches AP Economics at a high school outside of Seoul, and commutes to Seoul on the weekends for special occasions such as this one.

Julayne Lee is a 1.X generation Korean American who grew up in Minnesota. The bi-annual APIA Spoken Word and Poetry Summit has been a source of inspiration for her writing. Since she moved here, Korea has successfully divided over 6,000 families through international adoption.

Sam Lee grew up longing to fit in with other Denver-area Korean Americans, but couldn’t afford his own black honda civic. He has been in Seoul for a year and a half, and is currently working as a teacher trainer. In his free time, Sam likes to sit at the piano and improvise about topics that people would write poems, books or term papers about, like North Korean nationalism, Weslyian Hymns or Jongno 3-ga at 7am.