Reading

June 20: Transatlantic Poetry with Janine Joseph & Shruti Iyer; Hosted by R.A. Villanueva

Tune in to the Transatlantic Poetry channel to watch Janine Joseph and Shruti Iyer read poetry and answer your questions live on air across two continents! Supported by Kundiman. Hosted by R.A. Villanueva. 

Saturday, 20th, 2015
8pm BST | 3pm EDT | 12pm PDT
Online Channel


TRANSATLANTIC Poetry is a unique community of poets writing in (or translating to) English from the US, UK, Europe, and beyond. We host an innovative series of readings “on air” that brings poets together from across the globe using Google+ Hangouts on Air technology.

Click here for the countdown.

BIOS:

Shruti Iyer is a writer, activist, and student of Politics, Philosophy, and Law at King's College London. She was also a Barbican Young Poet in 2014-15. Her work has previously appeared in Stone Telling. When she is not hunting for guavas in South London, chasing pigeons, or singing to plants, she tweets @arreyaar and (occasionally) writes at http://salem-steel.tumblr.com/. 

Janine Joseph is the author of Driving Without a License (Alice James Books, 2016), winner of the 2014 Kundiman Poetry Prize. Her commissioned work for the Houston Grand Opera/HGOco stage includes a libretto, From My Mother's Mother, and a song cycle, "On This Muddy Water": Voices from the Houston Ship Channel. She holds an MFA from New York University and a Ph.D. from the University of Houston. Janine lives in Ogden, UT, where she is an Assistant Professor of English at Weber State University. 

R.A.Villanueva is the author of Reliquaria, winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize (U. Nebraska Press, 2014). His many honours include fellowships from Kundiman and The Asian American Literary Review, and scholarships from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. He holds graduate degrees from Rutgers University and New York University, where he is a Senior Lecturer.


 

June 26: 2015 Kundiman Retreat Public Reading

KUNDIMAN PUBLIC READING W/ SANDRA LIM, BAO PHI, ARTHUR SZE, GINA APOSTOL, PETER HO DAVIES, & SIGRID NUNEZ 

Come celebrate Kundiman's 12th Annual Writing Retreat as retreat faculty Sandra Lim, Bao Phi, Arthur Sze, Gina Apostol, Peter Ho Davies, & Sigrid Nunez share work with 2015 Kundiman Retreat Fellows. Also sharing their work will be this year's graduating fellows Janine Joseph and W. Todd Kaneko!

Friday, June 26th, 7:00 pm
Fordham University, Lincoln Center
113 W. 60th Street (at Columbus Avenue)
12th Floor Lounge

Directions
Take A, B, C, D & 1 trains to Columbus Circle.
Exit at 60th Street & Broadway. Go west of Columbus Avenue. Upon entering the glass doors inform the security desk that you are attending the Asian American Poetry event. Take escalators up 1 floor to Plaza level. Take elevator up to the 11th floor. Take stairs 1 flight up to the 12th Floor. Enter 12th Floor Lounge.

Free and open to the public. Reception to follow!

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Sandra Lim is the author of The Wilderness (W.W. Norton, 2014), selected by Louise Glück for the most recent Barnard Women Poets Prize, and a previous collection of poetry, Loveliest Grotesque (Kore Press, 2006). A 2015 Pushcart Prize winner, she has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Getty Research Institute. Lim was born in Seoul, Korea and educated at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell and lives in Cambridge, MA.


Bao Phi has been a performance poet since 1991. A two-time Minnesota Grand Slam champion and a National Poetry Slam finalist, Bao Phi has appeared on HBO Presents Russell Simmons Def Poetry, and a poem of his appeared in the 2006 Best American Poetry anthology. His first collection of poems, Sông I Sing, was published by Coffee House Press in 2011 to critical acclaim. He has been a City Pages and Star Tribune Artist of the Year. He was recently awarded a Minnesota State Arts Board grant to work on his newest manuscript in 2015. He is the Program Director of the Loft Literary Center.


Arthur Sze published three books in 2014: his ninth book of poetry, Compass Rose (Copper Canyon), a collaboration with artist Susan York, The Unfolding Center (Radius Books), and a bilingual selected poems, Chinese/English, Pig’s Heaven Inn (Beijing: Intellectual Property Publishing House). His other books of poetry include The Ginkgo Light, Quipu, The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998, and Archipelago. A professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts, as well as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Sze lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.


Gina Apostol's last novel, Gun Dealers' Daughter, won the 2013 Pen/Open Book Award and was shortlisted for the 2014 William Saroyan International Prize. Her first two novels, Bibliolepsy and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, both won the Juan Laya Prize for the Novel (Philippine National Book Award). She is working on William McKinley's World, a novel set in Balangiga and Tacloban in 1901, during the Philippine-American War. She lives in New York City and western Massachusetts and grew up in Tacloban, Philippines.


Peter Ho Davies is the author of the novel The Welsh Girl and collections The Ugliest House in the World and Equal Love. A new novel, Your Name in Chinese, is due out in 2016. Born in Britain to Welsh and Chinese parents, Davies now makes his home in the US. He has taught at the University of Oregon, Emory and Northwestern and is now on the faculty of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.


Sigrid Nunez has published six novels: A Feather on the Breath of God, Naked Sleeper, Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury, For Rouenna, The Last of Her Kind, and Salvation City. Her most recent book is Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. Nunez received a Whiting Writer’s Award in 1993. She was the 2000-2001 Rome Prize Fellow in Literature at the American Academy in Rome. In 2003, she was elected as a Literature Fellow to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In spring 2005, she was the Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. Nunez has taught at Amherst College, Smith College, Columbia University, Princeton University and the New School. She lives in New York City.

 

March 8: Kundiman & Verlaine ft. Bethany Carlson, W. Todd Kaneko, & Monica Ong

March 8: Kundiman & Verlaine ft. Bethany Carlson, W. Todd Kaneko, & Monica Ong

Join us for a night of words & libation with readings by: BETHANY CARLSON, W. TODD KANEKO, & MONICA ONG

Happy hour: 4-5pm
Open mic: 4:30-5pm
Feature Reading: 5pm
$5 suggested donation

RSVP on Facebook!


Bethany Carlson is an MDiv candidate at Yale University and holds an MFA from Indiana University. She is interested in how lyricism enhances sacred liturgy, invites eschatological imagination, and transcends a Christological understanding of narrative time. Bethany is a Kundiman Fellow and a member of The Lilly Graduate Fellows Program in Humanities & the Arts.

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W. Todd Kaneko is the author of The Dead Wrestler Elegies (Curbside Splendor, 2014). His poems, essays and stories can be seen in Bellingham Review, Los Angeles Review, The Normal School, The Collagist, Blackbird, Third Coast, Song of the Owashtanong: Grand Rapids Poetry in the 21st Century, Bring the Noise: The Best Pop Culture Essays from Barrelhouse Magazine and many other journals and anthologies. A recipient of fellowships from Kundiman and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, he lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan where he is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Writing at Grand Valley State University.

Monica Ong is a visual artist and poet whose hybrid image-poems juxtapose diagram and diary. She completed her MFA in Digital Media at the Rhode Island School of Design and is also a Kundiman poetry fellow. Her work has been published in several journals including the Lantern Review, Drunken Boat, Glassworks Magazine, Loaded Bicycle, Tidal Basin Review, and the Seneca Review. She has also been exhibiting artwork for over a decade nationally and internationally. Ms. Ong’s debut collection, Silent Anatomies, was selected by poet Joy Harjo as winner of the Kore Press First Book Award. Silent Anatomies will be released in March 2015.

November 16: Kundiman & Verlaine ft. Jay Deshpande, Sandra Lim, & Jee Leong Koh w/ translator Keisuke Tsubono

Kundiman & Verlaine ft. Jay Deshpande, Sandra Lim, & Jee Leong Koh w/ translator Keisuke Tsubono

Join us for a night of words & libation with readings by:

JAY DESHPANDE, SANDRA LIM, & JEE LEONG KOH w/ translator KEISUKE TSUBONO 

Open bar: 4-5pm
Open mic: 4:30-5pm
Feature Reading: 5pm
$5 suggested donation

RSVP on Facebook!

** This event was funded in part by Poets & Writers, Inc. through public funds from the New York State Council of the Arts in partnership with the City Council with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. *


Jay Deshpande’s poems have appeared in Narrative, Sixth Finch, Atlas Review, Handsome, Forklift, Ohio and elsewhere. He is the author of Love the Stranger, forthcoming from YesYes Books in 2015. He has studied poetry at Columbia University and served as poetry editor of AGNI. He lives in Brooklyn. You can find him @jdeshpan and at jaydeshpande.com.

 

Sandra Lim is the author of The Wilderness (W.W. Norton, 2014), selected by Louise Glück for the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and a previous collection of poetry, Loveliest Grotesque (Kore Press, 2006). A 2015 Pushcart Prize winner, she has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Getty Research Institute. Lim was born in Seoul, Korea and educated at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell and lives in Cambridge, MA.

 
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Jee Leong Koh is the author of four books of poems, including Seven Studies for a Self Portrait (Bench Press). His latest collection The Pillow Book (Math Paper Press) has been translated into Japanese by Keisuke Tsubono, and published in an illustrated bilingual edition by Awai Books. It is shortlisted for the 2014 Singapore Literature Prize. Jee is the co-chair of the inaugural Singapore Literature Festival in NYC, and the curator of the arts website Singapore Poetry (http://singaporepoetry.com/). He has a new book of poems forthcoming from Carcanet Press (UK) in July 2015. 

 
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Keisuke Tsubono is a translator, writer, editor, and scholar of American literature. He is also a co-founder of Awai Books, Ph.D student in contemporary literary studies at the University of Tokyo, and Fulbright visiting student researcher at New York University (2014-2015).


September 7: Kundiman & Verlaine Reading Series featuring Franny Choi, Sahra Vang Nguyen, Chris Tran, & Paul Tran

September 7: Kundiman & Verlaine Reading Series featuring Franny Choi, Sahra Vang Nguyen, Chris Tran, & Paul Tran

Join us for a night of words & libation with readings by:

FRANNY CHOI, SAHRA VANG NGUYEN, CHRIS TRAN, & PAUL TRAN

Open bar: 4-5pm
Open mic: 4:30-5pm
Feature Reading: 5pm
$5 suggested donation

** This event was funded in part by Poets & Writers, Inc. through public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council. **

Franny Choi is a poet, teaching artist, and author of Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014). Her poems and stories have appeared in Poetry, PANK, Folio, Solstice, Fringe, Apogee, and others. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she has been a finalist at the three largest adult poetry slams in the country. She is a VONA Fellow and a member of the Dark Noise Collective. Through Project V.O.I.C.E. and the Providence Poetry Slam, Franny teaches creative writing in her local community and in classrooms across the country.

Sahra Vang Nguyen is a multidisciplinary artist currently based in Brooklyn, New York. She has served as the Director of the Writing Success Program at the University of California, Los Angeles where she helped undergraduate students develop their critical thinking, self-confidence and agency through the writing process. Her writing primarily explores themes of identity, race in America, the Vietnamese American experience and the power of human potential. Sahra has self-published an e-book titled, "One Ounce Gold," and she has been published in the print anthology, "Pho For Life." She has toured Universities across the country speaking, performing poetry and facilitating workshops aimed to empower and inspire audiences. In Fall 2013, Sahra was invited to perform at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC in a celebration of Asian American artists. More recently, Sahra created a web series about NYC entrepreneurs called, "Maker's Lane," which is co-presented by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center.

Chris Tran is an emerging Vietnamese American writer, photographer & media maker from Oklahoma City, OK. He's performed with Sarah Kaye & Hieu Minh Nguyen and was a semifinalist at the 2014 College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational (CUPSI). His work interrogates new constructions of race, sexuality & nostalgia. A sophomore at Brown University, Chris constantly yearns for southern fried cooking.

Paul Tran is an Asian American activist, historian & spoken word poet from Providence, RI. He's won "Best Poet" and "Pushing the Art Forward" at the national college poetry slam and fellowships from Kundiman, Coca Cola, the VONA/Voices Writing Workshop, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. His work combines oral history and performance to reimagine the violences inherited from the Vietnam War. Paul is also the cofounder of Gravediggers, a workshop for emerging writers of color, and coaches the 2014 Providence youth slam team heading to Brave New Voices.

July 22: Kundiman at Word for Word Poetry

 

Word for Word Poetry welcomes Kundiman for a summer night of contemporary Asian American poetry in the park!

FEATURING Michelle Chan Brown, Cathy Linh Che, Eugenia Leigh, Sally Wen Mao, & Patrick Rosal 

7:00pm – 8:30pm | Bryant Park Reading Room

* This event was funded in part by Poets & Writers, Inc. with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. *

Bios:

MICHELLE CHAN BROWN’s Double Agent was the winner of the 2011 Kore First Book Award, judged by Bhanu Kapil. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blackbird, Cimarron Review, Linebreak, The Missouri Review, Quarterly West, Sycamore Review, Witness, and others.

CATHY LINH CHE is the author of Split (Alice James, 2014), winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize. A Vietnamese American poet from Los Angeles and Long Beach, CA, she received her BA from Reed College and her MFA from New York University. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies from Poets & Writers, The Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, Kundiman, Hedgebrook, Poets House, The Asian American Literary Review, The Center for Book Arts, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Residency, and a Jerome Foundation Travel Grant.

EUGENIA LEIGH is the author of a full-length collection of poetry, Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows (Four Way Books, 2014), which was a finalist for both the National Poetry Series and the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications including PANK Magazine, North American Review, The Collagist, and the Best New Poets 2010 anthology.

SALLY WEN MAO is a Chinese American poet. She earned a BA from Carnegie Mellon University and an MFA from Cornell University. Mao is the recipient of fellowships from Kundiman and the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets as well as the 2010 RHINO Poetry Editors’ Prize. Her first book, Mad Honey Symposium, appears from Alice James Books in 2014.

PATRICK ROSAL is the author of three full-length poetry collections. His most recent, Boneshepherds (2011), was named a small press highlight by the National Book Critics Circle and a notable book by the Academy of American Poets. His other two books are My American Kundiman (2006), and Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive (2003). His collections have been honored with the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award, Global Filipino Literary Award and the Asian American Writers Workshop Members' Choice Award. In 2009, he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to the Philippines. He is co-founding editor of Some Call It Ballin', a literary sports quarterly. 

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Facebook Event

RAIN INFORMATION:
In case of rain, events are held under a tent at the Reading Room. In case of severe weather, please check bryantpark.org for the indoor location.

Feb 23. Kundiman Reading in DC with Michelle Chan Brown, Tung-Hui Hu, and Subhashini Kaligotla

February 23, 2014
5:30pm-7:30pm
Bloombars
3222 11th St NW 
Washington, DC, 20010

$10 donation 

Three Kundiman poets (fellows and former faculty) -- Tung-Hui Hu, Michelle Chan Brown, and Subhashini Kaligotla -- come together for a night of poetry, sharing new work. Kundiman is an Asian American poetry organization that cultivates and promotes new generations of Asian American poets. This is Kundiman’s first reading in DC.

Facebook event page here: https://www.facebook.com/events/132722683565152/

About the Poets: 

MICHELLE CHAN BROWN's Double Agent received the 2012 Kore Press First Book Award. A chapbook,The Clever Decoys, is available from LATR editions. Poems and reviews have appeared in Blackbird, Cimarron Review, The Journal, Linebreak, Missouri Review, Quarterly West, Sycamore Review, Witness and others, as well as forthcoming anthologies; two poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She has received scholarships from the Vermont Studio Center, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Wesleyan Writers’ Conference. A Kundiman fellow, Michelle lives in DC, where she teaches, writes and edits Drunken Boat.

SUBHASHINI KALIGOTLA's poems have appeared in such journals as Boxcar Poetry Review, Drunken Boat, LUMINA, New England Review, and The Literary Review, and in anthologies published in India, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Her writing has benefited from the support of Hedgebrook, Sanskriti Kendra (New Delhi), the Fulbright Program, and Columbia University. Subhashini is currently a fellow at the National Gallery of Art, where she is writing her doctoral dissertation on Indian temple architecture.

TUNG-HUI HU is the author of three collections of poetry, The Book of Motion (Georgia, 2003), Mine (Ausable/Copper Canyon, 2007), and Greenhouses, Lighthouses (Copper Canyon, 2013). His poems have appeared in places such as Boston Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Gastronomica, and, most recently, the SoundWalk festival of sound art in Long Beach, CA. Hu teaches at the University of Michigan, where Hu teaches at the University of Michigan, where he is an assistant professor of English.

For more Kundiman events, please visit our events page at www.kundiman.org/events