OUR SQUAD

Lidia Yuknavitch

Founder/Creator of Corporeal Writing

Lidia Yuknavitch is the National Bestselling author of the novels The Book of Joan and The Small Backs of Children, winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Award's Ken Kesey Award for Fiction as well as the Reader's Choice Award, the novel Dora: A Headcase, and a critical book on war and narrative, Allegories Of Violence (Routledge). Her widely acclaimed memoir The Chronology of Water was a finalist for a PEN Center USA award for creative nonfiction and winner of a PNBA Award and the Oregon Book Award Reader's Choice. The Misfit's Manifesto, a book based on her recent TED Talk, was published by TED Books, and her new collection of fiction, Verge, was released in 2020. Lidia’s newest novel, Thrust, was released by Riverhead Books on June 28th, 2022.

She has also had writing appear in publications including Guernica Magazine, Ms., The Iowa Review, Zyzzyva, Another Chicago Magazine, The Sun, Exquisite Corpse, TANK, and in the anthologies Life As We Show It (City Lights), Wreckage of Reason (Spuytin Duyvil), Forms at War (FC2), Feminaissance (Les Figues Press), and Representing Bisexualities (SUNY), as well as online at The Rumpus.

Writing by and through the body, one workshop at a time.

She founded the workshop series Corporeal Writing in Portland Oregon, where she teaches both in person and online.  She received her doctorate in Literature from the University of Oregon. She lives in Oregon with her husband Andy Mingo and their renaissance man son, Miles. She is a very good swimmer.

Janice Lee

Operational Creative Director

janice@corporealwriting.com

Janice Lee (she/they) is a Korean American writer, teacher, spiritual scholar, and shamanic healer. She is the author of 8 books of fiction, creative nonfiction, & poetry, most recently Imagine a Death (Texas Review Press, 2021), Separation Anxiety (CLASH Books, 2022), a finalist for the 2023 Oregon Book Award, and A roundtable, unanimous dreamers chime in, a collaborative novel co-authored with Brenda Iijima (Meekling Press, 2023). An essay (co-authored with Jared Woodland) is featured in the recently released 4K restoration of Sátántangó (dir. Béla Tarr) from Arbelos Films. 

She writes about interspecies communication, plants & personhood, the filmic long take, slowness, the apocalypse, architectural spaces, inherited trauma, and the Korean concept of han, and asks the question, how do we hold space open while maintaining intimacy? Her next book seeks to explore ties between the Korean cultural concept of han, narratives of inherited trauma in the West, the Korean folk traditions and shamanic practices of her ancestors (especially rituals around death), the history and creation of Korean script (Hangul), and revisions of the Korean myth of Princess Bari. Lee teaches workshops on inherited trauma, healing and writing, and facilitates guided meditations, especially as a practitioner of Engaged Buddhism (in the tradition of Plum Village and Thich Nhat Hanh) and an aspirant for the Order of Interbeing. She also incorporates elements of ancestor work, Korean shamanic ritual (Muism), traditional Korean folk practices, plant medicine & flower essence work, card readings & divination, and interspecies communication.

She currently lives in Portland, OR where she is the Operational Creative Director at Corporeal Writing and an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Portland State University. She can be found online at http://janicel.com and Instagram: @diddioz.

Daniel Isaiah Elder

Navigator

registration@corporealwriting.com

Daniel Isaiah Elder (he/they) is a queer Jewish New Yorker who lives and writes in Oregon together with his cat, Terence. He wears many hats at Corporeal, and he’s your man for all questions pertaining to enrollment/registration. Like the interstellar Navigators of Frank Herbert’s Dune series, he folds space and time to get people where they need to be.

Daniel wandered into a Corporeal Writing Fall Workshop in 2015 and never left. He is a 2018 Lambda Literary Emerging LGBTQ Writer. His writing appears in The Rumpus, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Gertrude Press, Maudlin House, and more. He authored the 2015 essay collection The Museum Dose: 12 Experiments in Pharmacologically Mediated Aesthetics. His debut memoir, Umbilicus, is making its way into the world.

Katie Collins-Guinn

Creatinator :: Swag Hag

katie@corporealwriting.com

Katie Collins-Guinn (She/They) is an artist, mother, spouse, designer, writer, and dirt digger.

Her adult coloring book The Stoner Babes was published in 2018 with Microcosm Publishing, which celebrates diversity alongside the transcendental and medicinal qualities of cannabis, and recently went into its 4th printing. She’s been published in Pacific Stone Zine, Call Me [Brackets], Entropy, Nailed Magazine and others. She also spent time as a contributing freelance writer for the Portland Mercury.

She creates all the original artwork for Corporeal Writing, co-designs for social media, is the in-person events coordinator, and manages all of the swag, thus utilizing her apparel design degree.

Leigh Hopkins

Editor & Curator of Khôra

leighhopkins@gmail.com

Leigh Hopkins is the Editor and Curator of Khôra, a dynamic online arts space conceived and produced in collaboration with Corporeal Writing. Her writing has appeared in BOMB Magazine, Longreads, McSweeney’s, and The Rumpus, among others. After the publication of Leigh’s essay The Brazilian Healer and the Patron Saint of Impossible Causes (Longreads), she was featured in a Brazilian documentary by the film crew who first exposed the crimes of John of God, the world’s most famous “spiritual surgeon.” Read more at leighopkins.com. 

In 2010, Leigh left a career in social policy to move to Brazil, where she founded an online institute by rigging a satellite dish to a boulder in a banana field. Before moving to Brazil, Leigh was a leader in the design, development, and implementation of the after school literacy program model Youth Education for Tomorrow, which was referenced by President Obama in the New York Times as an example of what’s possible in community-based institutions. As the Vice President for Education of a leading social policy think tank, Leigh provided support to 500 literacy programs in historically underserved communities throughout the United States. Today, Leigh lives in Philadelphia. You can find her online on Instagram and Twitter.

Andy Mingo

Collaboration Leader

Writer/Director Andy Mingo: Andy is a seasoned screenwriter who has adapted fiction to screen from authors like Monica Drake, Lidia Yuknavitch, and Chuck Palahniuk.  He and Palahniuk recently co-wrote the script adaptation of Palahniuk's award-winning novel, Lullaby, which is currently in preproduction with Andy slated to direct. Andy brings extensive teaching experience in film production, screenwriting, and writing to his commercial and film work as a co-founder of MindPollen Studios. Learn more at andymingo.net.

Questions for Andy? Daniel, at registration@corporealwriting.com, will make sure he gets them.