J. YURU ZHŌU

💌 fieldednotes (at) gmail.com
🕸🪢 are.na/jess-ica, twitter (poetry, research), instagram

J.Yuru Zhou / 周玉茹 (they, she) is a poet, writer, researcher, and artist rooting in San Francisco. She enjoys theorizing at the club, ambling in-and-out of the panopticon, and reveling in summery autumns in California.

Her poems and essays have been exhibited in shows at Gray Area and Southern Exposure; looped at Asian Art Museum; performed at Litquake (Yerba Buena Gardens, Noisebridge), Berkeley Poetry Festival (Berkeley Ballet Theatre), the Pride Poets Hotline (ONE Gallery, Los Angeles Public Library); published by Inverse Magazine and the Los Angeles Times.

Their practice has been supported by fellowships, residencies, and scholarships from Community of Writers, the School for Poetic Computation, Kearny Street Workshop, the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference, Kundiman, the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction, the Audubon Society, the Writers’ Grotto, ToftH.org, and Friends With Benefits. She’s trying really hard to piece together a DIY MFA.

They curated visual art and creative writing for volumes 2-4 of Kernel Magazine, exploring non-didactic climate fictions, and the machinery of poetry’s illegibilities.

A girlblogger by necessity since 2010, they have been writing within a hydra of Twitter and Tumblr accounts in an on-going, unfurling, online autobiography. 

In a past life, her work reporting and editing for The Daily Evergreen, as a part of its 2016-2018 newsrooms, was nationally recognized by the Society of Professional Journalists. In another past life, she enjoyed her internet shenanigans with Subtle Asian Dating and eye mouth eye, which others seemed to enjoy as well.

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Hi! I co-steward Flowers & Fields, a literary collective dedicated to the incubation of a more radical Asian American politics and poetics in the Bay Area. 🌻 I am also at work on a smattering of poetry, nonfiction, multimedia projects (like everyone else and their mother, I Am Reading & Writing Poems About The Moon).

With blessed company, I am forging cultural and community practices turned toward the horizon beyond the consolidation of a career, because “isn’t the ‘how we’re living’ among our most important works of art?” (Mandy Harris Williams).

Alongside my belief in the work of poets on-and-off of the page, I believe in the work of inventors on-and-off the screen; within-and-without software; before-and-beyond industry, and the lessons to be learned from within industries and institutions.

My attention is turned toward the work of assembling the past-present practices and blueprints that prefigure and lay the ground for the worlds yet-to-be. I’m interested in emergent social infrastructures, after Audre Lorde’s skeleton architectures 🔖, and am pondering the dis/similarities between technologists and artists, alongside the possibilities of cultural work within either kind of practice.

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