October 16, 2025
Jennifer Reimer (image: Patrick Hart) and Aimee Suzara (image: Bethanie Hines)
Poetry & the Mythic Imagination:
Join writers Jennifer Reimer & Aimee Suzara for Poetry & the Mythic Imagination on October 16th at UC Berkeley’s Arts Research Center. Jennifer Reimer, Assistant Professor of American Studies at Oregon State University—Cascades, and Aimee Suzara, Filipino-American poet, playwright, & interdisciplinary performer, will read from their latest poetry collections and be in conversation with Erika Higbee, Ph.D. student in English and Mellon-Chancellor Fellow at UC Berkeley.
Jennifer A. Reimer, Assistant Professor of American Studies at Oregon State University—Cascades, received her PhD in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and her MFA in Writing from the University of San Francisco. She is the 2011 winner of the American Studies Association’s Gloria E. Anzaldúa Award. Jennifer’s scholarly work has appeared in Western American Literature, ARIEL, The Journal of Popular Music Studies, Latino Studies, The Journal of Transnational American Studies, Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano/a Studies, AmLit, Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, Boletín Hispánico Helvético, as well as in the Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies. Her current research interests include comparative im/migrant aesthetics, collaboration as transnational feminist praxis, and the poetics of difference. She is co-editor of the Forms of Migration book series, and the author of two books of poetry: The Rainy Season Diaries (2013, Quale Press) and Keşke (Airlie Press, 2022). The Turkish translation of The Rainy Season Diaries was released in 2017 by Şiirden Press (Istanbul). She is the Forward Editor for the Journal of Transnational American Studies. She lives in Salem, OR with Gonzalo, Belmonte, and Daisy, and dreams of the Mediterranean.
Aimee Suzara is a Filipino-American poet, playwright, and interdisciplinary performer based in Oakland, CA. Her book SOUVENIR (2014) was a Willa Award Finalist; poems and prose appear in publications such as Kartika Review, Lantern Review, Orion Magazine, Raising Mothers, and Popsugar. She has been invited to universities, conferences and festivals such as O! Miami, Utah Arts Festival, and the A/PA Institute at NYU. Her play THE REAL SAPPHO was awarded the Kenneth Rainin Foundation New Works and she has been awarded by YBCAway, A Room of Her Own Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has collaborated with Deep Waters Dance Theater, Alayo Dance Theater, and a spoken word opera with Grammy-Award-winning Kronos Quartet. An ARC Fellow with Poetry and the Senses at UC Berkeley in 2023-24, Suzara teaches at San Francisco State University and is a writing coach through her business, Wild Tongues. She received her M.F.A. at Mills College. www.aimeesuzara.net
Erika Higbee (she/they) is a Ph.D. student in English and Mellon-Chancellor Fellow at UC Berkeley. She is a first-generation college student, child of immigrants, Vietnamese American and Chicanx woman from Garden Grove, California. Her dissertation examines contemporary documentary poetry written by diasporic Asian American poets--poets such as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Mai Der Vang--in order to show how poetry can operate as both a historiographic practice and healing ritual for those found in the aftermath of imperial war and occupation. She is interested in documentary poetry and poetics, womxn of color documentarians, the archive, historiography, feminist methods of critique, minority aesthetics, diasporic cultural production, and poetry as spell and ritual. Her creative work can be found on Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN). She teaches courses on feminism and history, anticolonial feminist poetry, and mothers and daughters in Asian American literature. She loves kumquats, orchids, and the moon.
“Jennifer Reimer’s gorgeous Keşke reworlds the neglected desire and historical will of Calypso. Collapsing time through citation, she remolds myth’s methods as they become embodied as seaworn landscapes. As her epic’s aperture opens on the political violence of contemporary Turkey, even as the stony ruins of the physical and the mythical accumulate, Reimer’s verse maps the oft unanswerable, historical cry of ‘What if?’”
—J. Michael Martinez, author of Museum of the Americas
keske, by Jennifer Reimer - read more at Airlie Press
"Her songs gather together clashing voices that reveal colonization to be an exchange that is never uni-directional or uniform...The danger of narratives is that they can be perpetrated and inflicted again and again, for centuries. Their true damage is immeasurable, echoing over time. Poets like Aimee Suzara not only have the courage to handle these weapons of history, but they have the skill to disarm them. They have the ability to take apart the museum itself and reassemble it in unexpected ways.”
—Carribean Fragoza, Los Angeles Review of Books
Souvenir, by Aimee Suzara. More at WordTech Editions.