This event is virtual-only (via Zoom) and is open to Helen Zell Writers' Program MFA students and Zell Fellows, as well as U-M graduate and undergraduate students. It is not open to the general public. Please email Julie Cadman-Kim (kimjulie@umich.edu) for login instructions.

Kai's talk, "Finding Connections: How to Navigate the Experimental Literary Journal Landscape," is a quick introduction to the landscape of experimental literary journals, focusing primarily on the US. She'll talk about the basics of how best to format and submit work, and how to find journals that are likely the right fit for your poems.

Kai Ihns works as the Poetry Editor of Chicago Review (June 2020-January 2024), one of the Poetry Editors at Fence, and as a Staff Reader and Daily Poem Archives Assistant at The Paris Review. She primarily focuses on experimental work in both senses: i.e. work that continues and develops various “experimental” 20th century traditions, and work that produces new forms from the materials of now.

She believes that form is a way artworks of all media metabolize, reflect, and challenge the perceptual orders of their moment, and offer these orders to their readers/viewers on new and more (or at least differently) phenomenologically available terms. In other words, she believes in art as an organ of social self-knowledge, but thinks that this knowledge is aesthetic, not discursive, and often offers itself in oblique and non-conceptual ways.

Her job as an editor is to find (and if necessary, help edit) the poems genuinely doing this work, and to help them make their way into the world. She also works extensively with the Nonfiction and Reviews section(s) at Chicago Review to select and developmentally edit essays and reviews concerned with poetry. Authors she has worked with include: Wendy Xu, Joyelle McSweeney, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Alice Notley, Roberto Harrison, Aditi Machado, Will Alexander, Mark Francis Johnson, Lauren Russell, Hannah Brooks-Motl, Langdon Hammer, Mia You, and many others.