My artistic practice centers poetry—performance, publication, and education for a future generation of poets. Poetry piqued my interest when I entered my education at the University of California, Berkeley, where I studied English literature and creative writing, taking the most competitive classes in the major—the verse seminars and the honors thesis. Through this education, I learned more about how to approach my craft with a sense of duality, and I focused on using external, tangible sensations to describe internal feelings. Not only did this realization better my work, it also allowed me to find restoration and healing through the poetry I wrote. My first collection, published in 2019 with Scrambler Books, is titled no body in particular, and the poems largely center around my relationship to my body through the long and arduous process of recovering from a debilitating eating disorder. After the release of the book, I found myself drawn to performance, reading poems from the book at slams and open mic nights. I kept writing, homing some of my poems in various literary magazines, and I was eventually offered performance gigs over zoom, reading my poetry to Bay Area communities. These readings continued as in-person events resumed, and I found myself on the stage more and more often. However, the writing was the root of it all, and I decided to hone my craft at New York University's Low Residency Master of Fine Arts Program upon my graduation from Berkeley. In 2021, I also released my second collection of poetry jupiter fell out the sky last night through Bound to Brew. The title quickly went out of print, but after having so much of my work in performance, I decided to record the audiobook and publish an ebook of the work online. Following this experimentation with form, I then approached the art book publisher RITE Editions and have been working closely with the organization to locally source and produce an interactive poetic erasure edition (described in my publications). The edition is set to be released in December of 2021. In addition to my personal creative pursuits, I have also worked to solidify my own identity in relation to the larger communities in the East Bay. As a Southeast Asian American, disabled woman, I largely focus my poems on metaphor to relay my experience to peers experiencing the same injustices or to advocate for my identities and allow others to understand the ongoing process of healing. I performed my poetry at a solidarity rally for Stop Asian Hate and Black Lives Matter, where I was able to visibly see the reactions of a community that understood the themes and subject matters of intergenerational trauma that come with the violence against Asian Americans. I also collaborated with local artist and friend Jane McKay to create a chapbook called moonlit heartline, the proceeds of which we are donating to the Black Table Arts fund in Minneapolis, the city where George Floyd was murdered. My art is not simply for myself—my art is using my experiences to amplify emotion, to connect others to their own identities as well. My work has been featured on KALW (San Francisco Public Radio), the Worth-Ryder Art Gallery, NewsBreak, Indonesian Writers, Box (a Journal), and the Elevation Review. The 2021 San Francisco Poet Laureate Tongo Eisen-Martin has also written in praise of my work, stating: " Giovanna Lomanto has a vanguard imagination with poems like a pianist racing to the climax of an era. A loving care for language and political economy make for Lomanto’s exciting, singular writing that is like coming to the carnival and watching a performer juggle gravity fields. Lomanto is truly a confidant of the cosmos bringing so much insight to bear in a moment like a master painter able to reveal through their subjects the play and contradictions of competing winds." The generous reception to my work has been a source of external recognition, but I am of the strong opinion that this has occurred as a result of my internal focus on selfhood and empowerment. Ultimately, I stand by the idea that acceptance and activism are rooted in compassion, which places value on the individual and their experiences. As such, my work's focus on embodiment and presence is an internal exploration of how our mentality and physicality are paramount to affecting external change.
