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? Lee teaches workshops on inherited trauma, healing and writing, and facilitates guided meditations bringing together elements from several different lineages as a mesa-carrying practitioner of the Q’ero tradition of medicine work and as a practitioner of Engaged Buddhism (in the tradition of Plum Village and Thich Nhat Hanh). 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.
Domi Shoemaker
Collaboration Leader & Seasonal Series Co-Facilitator
domi@corporealwriting.com
Domi J. Shoemaker is a gender-free writer who lives in Portland, Or. Domi spent several years with Tom Spanbauer's Dangerous Writers, and started the quarterly reading series, Burnt Tongue in 2012, just before snatching a gig with Lidia Yuknavitch for the launch of Dora: A Headcase. While finishing an MFA in Writing from Pacific University in 2015, Lidia asked Domi to help create the Corporeal Writing Seasonal Creative Lab Series. Domi is now the Seasonal Workshop Lead-Facilitator, Corporeal Center Manager, as well as prime holder of space.
Learn more at domishoemaker.com
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.
Photo by Mason Rose
Katie Collins-Guinn
Creatinator :: Swag Hag
katie@corporealwriting.com
Katie Collins-Guinn (She/They) is an artist, mother of blood and non-blood daughters, designer, illustrator and writer, spouse, flower gardener, North Portlander and lover of the beautiful.
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. She’s spent time as a contributing freelance writer for the Portland Mercury and has been published in Pacific Stone Zine, Call Me [Brackets], Entropy, Nailed Magazine and others.
In 2015 Katie attended the very first Corporeal Writing collaborative workshop with Lidia, not knowing a soul in the room when she walked in, and knowing she'd finally met her artist family when she walked out.
Katie now oversees design elements, merchandise and other creative and logistical happenings at Corporeal Writing, and leads the young mammals collaborations. She cares for 21 roses and counting.
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.
Anya Pearson
Collaboration Developer and Leader
anya@corporealwriting.com
Anya is an award-winning actress, playwright, poet, producer, and activist. She is one of five 2021-2022 Hodder fellows of the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. She was the inaugural winner of the $10,000 Voice is a Muscle Grant from the Corporeal Voices Foundation, for her choreopoem, Made to Dance in Burning Buildings. Made to Dance in Burning Buildings was showcased at Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater and received its World Premiere at Shaking The Tree Theatre where Anya was the Playwright-in-Residence for the 2018-2019 season.
Anya received the $10,000 Problem Play Commission to adapt Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure focused on mass incarceration and the numerous other failings of our criminal justice system and their complex and nuanced effects on the black family unit. Her adaptation, The Measure of Innocence, was selected for the 2020 Kilroys List and won the 2020 Drammy Award for Best Original Script. She was a finalist for the 2020 George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship in Playwriting and the National Black Theatre’s 2019 I Am Soul Playwriting Residency.
Her reimagining of Agamemnon, The Killing Fields, was recently developed at Seven Devils New Play Foundry and will head to the Great Plains Theatre Conference in 2021. Anya was commissioned by Portland Center Stage (as part of the National Play at Home Initiative) to write Three Love Songs, which can be downloaded and performed for free.
Anya runs a multimedia production company called Urban Haiku whose mission is to produce groundbreaking work that transcends the traditional boundaries of performance while also serving as the catalyst for art and community action to combine for real social change. She is currently launching a BIPOC collective through Corporeal Writing, finishing her debut collection of poetry, writing three pilots, launching a black - and femme-owned, PDX-based clothing label, and constantly plotting, planning, devising, creating, imagining, and revising visions of a better world.
She is a member of Linestorm Playwrights, Couch Film Collective, Actors’ Equity Association, and the Dramatists Guild. Anya is a graduate of the acting program at William Esper Studio in New York City and continues to train at AMAW in Los Angeles. Her best production is her 8-year-old daughter, Aidee, who can be seen, most nights, trying to circumvent bedtime by asking deep philosophical questions like: “When are we going to see the world? When is my life going to truly begin?”
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.
Ly Villmann
Engagement Coordinator
Ly Villmann is a queer, disabled writer, artist, and death doula from Portland, Oregon. They’ve had short stories and essays published in Expat Press (2023) and 99E (2021). They love to explore themes relating to death in all its forms, darkness and light, the transience of finding Home, and the natural world in both their writing and visual art. They are the now the Engagement Coordinator at Corporeal Writing where they are constantly in the process of shaking up the visual spaces of Corporeal Writing.