PorchLight: International Lights Salon Series

Enjoy conversation, connection, and community over light snacks and wine. A collaboration with the International Writing Program, the International Lights Salon provides a space for visiting International writers, local artists, university students, and community members to engage in dialogue.

September 5th’s topic will revolve around queer aesthetics in writing and creating queer writing communities. The conversationalists will be:

Nina Dragičević is a poet, writer, sound artist, and sociologist, the author of nine volumes of poetry, essays, and theory, as well as numerous sound-poetry compositions and installations. Known for a distinct formal and stylistic hybridity, linguistic precision, and an articulated queer and feminist stance, her work has been characterised by critics as “striking,” “pioneering,” and “majestic,” as “strong, powerful poetry that deserves a lot of attention.”

Dragičević is the recipient of the 2025 Lastovka Award, the 2023 Werner Düttmann Fellowship (Akademie der Künste, Berlin), the 2023 Dr Ana Mayer Kansky Award (University of Ljubljana), the 2021 Jenko Award, the 2020 Župančič Award, two 2018 Knight of Poetry Awards, and was a 2018 Palma Ars Acustica finalist.

Amber Esau is the author of Hungus, her debut poetry collection published earlier this year, and co-editor of a queer poetry anthology, Spoiled Fruit (2023). She has performed her poetry extensively, and her work has been published in various journals and anthologies in Aotearoa-New Zealand. She is working on a mixed media speculative fantasy novel set in the South Pacific.

Jun Li is a Hong Kong writer director. His film works include Tracey (2018), Drifting (2021), and Queerpanorama (2025). He won Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Director at the 58th and 62nd Golden Horse Film Awards for the latter two. His theatre works include Song of Grief (2018-2019) and In a Perfect World (2025), which is nominated for Best Production and Best Play at the Hong Kong Drama Awards.

Sangyoung Park is a prominent South Korean novelist and screenwriter, internationally recognized for his sharp emotional insight, wit, and nuanced exploration of urban life, intimacy, and identity. His bestselling novel, Love in the Big City, has been translated into more than twenty languages and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize, the Dublin Literary Award, and the Prix Médicis étranger. Beyond the page, Park has established himself as a versatile creator, serving as the writer and creator for the global television adaptation of his own work.

Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder is a scholar of twentieth and twenty-first century transnational American literature and culture. Her teaching and research interests include multiethnic literature and culture, (specifically African American and Latinx Studies), performance studies, women of color feminism, southern studies, and social movement activism. She received her PhD from University of Mississippi in English; an MA in American Studies from Columbia University; and a BA in English/Creative Writing from SUNY Binghamton. Her book project “Cultural Activism and the Civil Rights Movement” is a multidisciplinary study of creative activism and performance by minority artists and revolutionaries in the 1960s and 70s. This book engages in the role of creativity in social movements and argues that the aesthetics of cultural production shaped civil rights politics. Rodriguez Fielder presents a vision of social movement activism where the collaborative production of performances and of experimental media overlapped with quotidian activities, such as farming okra and sewing quilts.