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Welcome to the 6th Annual Ashland Literary Arts Festival! This year’s event focuses on independent story and thought throughout the entire Cascadia region, celebrating not only books, but all forms of expression: literature, poetry, journalism, art, lyrics, comics, film, and documentary. We invite you to come on in, explore the festival schedule, and find the stories that speak to you!
avatar for Sam Roxas-Chua

Sam Roxas-Chua

The Requatorist
Artist
EUGENE, Oregon
Sam Roxas-Chua is the author of Saying Your Name Three Times Underwater, Echolalia in Script, and Fawn Language. His poems, artworks, and asemic writings have appeared in journals including Narrative, December Magazine, Cream City Review and an essay/review of his two recent books appears in the Georgia Review and Rhino Poetry. His poetry sequence Diary of Collected Summers was awarded the Missouri Review’s Miller Audio Prize and most recently he was interviewed by Gulf Coast Journal. In his writing process, Sam is interested in discovering the invisible poem. These are images and thoughts conjured up by asemic writing—a writing practice using non-sensical script. Here’s how he described it in an interview: “In between stanzas of a poem, or when I can’t quite get to an image or a phrase, I pull out a piece of paper and start writing this nonsensical script. When I do this script and feel the texture of my wrist on the page, images open like a deck of cards.” Eventually, this work became an art form on its own for Sam, one that exists in conversation with his poetry. His books talk to each other across mediums as well, with the poems in Saying Your Name Three Times Underwater resurfacing in the poem that concludes Echolalia in Script, which is made up of phrases drawn from the poems in that book, making a new thing. And each visual art piece in Echolalia is, in turn, in conversation with a line from that work. Sam is a quadrilingual speaker with a multinational background, an adoptee, and a maker open to what happens in the ineffable interstices, the between. Sam has exhibited his visual works and read for PEN International Philippines and most recently at the Performatura literature and arts festival at the Cultural Center of the Philippines.