Exiled Home: An Evening with Two Expatriate Poets
"I flew home— / then I flew from home— / having found my home is flight."
Expatriate voices have always enriched our collective experience of literature. As Tolstoy asserted: "If literature is NOT translated . . . it's like blood that stays locked in one part of the body." Translation, while often a primary transfusion, is not the only medium of this profound and essential circulation. Another significant form is travelers who've gone on private Odysseys . . . and then returned to tell the tales those journeys have sculpted in them. Bolstered by the edges they've crossed, those travelers return with new ways of seeing that lead to new ways of saying.
Diving deep into themes of traveling and transformation, celebrated Prague-based American poet Lucien Zell (heralded by Alan Levy as a "21st Century Troubadour") joins internationally acclaimed British haiku poet Michael Dylan Welch for an evening of poetry and music. Emceed by Heidi Seaborn, the executive editor of The Adroit Journal, expect to encounter new ways of saying that lead to new ways of seeing.
Michael Dylan Welch
Michael Dylan Welch has had his haiku read for the Empress of Japan and at the Baseball Hall of Fame, chiseled in stone in New Zealand, and printed on balloons in Los Angeles. One of his translations from the Japanese appeared on the back of 150 million U.S. postage stamps in 2012. Michael also directs the annual Seabeck Haiku Getaway, cofounded the biennial Haiku North America conference, founded the American Haiku Archives at the California State Library, founded the Tanka Society of America, and founded National Haiku Writing Month. Michael has published his haiku, senryu, tanka and related poetry in hundreds of journals in more than 20 languages. He has published 75 books, mostly haiku-related, including several translations from the Japanese. Aside from Japanese forms, Michael served two terms as poet laureate of Redmond, Washington, where for many years he has been president of the Redmond Association of Spokenword and curator of the monthly SoulFood Poetry Night. Michael is originally from England, lived there and in Ghana and Australia, became a Canadian as a teenager, and in 2022 he and his Japanese wife became U.S. citizens. He also has a day job and lives with his family in Sammamish, Washington. You can visit his main website at www.graceguts.com.
Lucien Zell
Born in LA, raised in Seattle, Lucien Zell lives in Prague. His writing has appeared in The New Orleans Review, Tikkun, Poetry Salzburg Review, and will appear in three upcoming anthologies. His first American book of poetry, Tiny Kites, was published in 2019. Carnival of Shades, a classical piece for which he composed the libretto, premiered last November at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam.
Heidi Seaborn
Heidi Seaborn thought she’d grow up to be a writer. And eventually, she did. But first, she had a long global business career, raised three children, divorced, remarried, and then finally, in her late 50’s took a class at the Hugo House that helped launch her second act as a poet, essayist, and editor. Since 2016, Heidi’s authored two full-length collections of poetry, including PANK Books 2020 Poetry Award winner An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe (2021), Give a Girl Chaos (C&R Press, 2019), and three chapbooks of poetry including the 2020 Comstock Review Prize Chapbook, Bite Marks (2021), as well as Finding My Way Home (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and Once a Diva (dancing girl press, 2021), as well as a poetic political pamphlet Body Politic (Mount Analogue Press, 2017). She’s won or been shortlisted for over two dozen awards. Her poetry and essays have recently appeared in American Poetry Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, Best American Poetry, Brevity, Copper Nickel, The Cortland Review, The Financial Times, The Greensboro Review, The Missouri Review, The Slowdown, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. She is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal and holds an MFA in Poetry from NYU and a BA from Stanford University. After living all over the world, she now resides in her hometown of Seattle.
