Come see where Kundiman will be during AWP 2017!
January 15: Kundiman Retreat Deadline
Applications for our 2017 Poetry and Fiction Retreats at Fordham University, Rose Hill in New York City will be accepted from December 1st through January 15th.
September 18 & 20: #LITINCOLOR at The Brooklyn Book Festival
Friday, September 18, 2015
7:00 PM
Unnameable Books, 600 Vanderbilt Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11238
Poets Yesenia Montilla and Angel Nafis join nonfiction writer Amarnath Ravva and fiction writer Gina Apostol to celebrate writers of color. The authors will read from New York-based writers of color that have influenced them, and from their own work. This reading is presented by Asian American literary organizations Kaya Press and Kundiman, who will be sharing a booth at the Brooklyn Book Festival on Sunday Sept. 20th. #LitinColor is a campaign to draw attention to the influence of writers of color on the national imagination.
Bios:
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 was writer-in-residence at Phillips Exeter Academy and a fellow at Civitella Ranieri in Umbria, Italy, among other fellowships. Her essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Foreign Policy, Gettysburg Review, Massachusetts Review, and others. She lives in New York City and western Massachusetts and grew up in Tacloban, the Philippines. She teaches at the Fieldston School in New York City.
YESENIA MONTILLA is a New York City poet with Afro-Caribbean roots. Her poetry has appeared in the chapbook For the Crowns of Your Head, as well as the literary journals 5AM,Adanna, The Wide Shore and others. She received her MFA from Drew University in Poetry and Poetry in Translation and is a CantoMundo Fellow. Her first collection The Pink Box will be published by Willow Books in October of 2015.
ANGEL NAFIS (Brooklyn, NY) is a Cave Canem Fellow. Her work has appeared in The Rattling Wall, Union Station Magazine, MUZZLE Magazine, Mosaic Magazine and Poetry Magazine. She is an Urban Word NYC Mentor and the founder, curator, and host of the quarterly Greenlight Bookstore Poetry Salon reading series. She is the author of BlackGirl Mansion (Red Beard Press/ New School Poetics, 2012). Facilitating generative writing workshops and reading poems across the United States and Canada, she lives in Brooklyn.
California-based writer AMARNATH RAVVA (Los Angeles, CA) is the author of American Canyon (Kaya Press, 2014). He has performed at LACMA, Machine Project, the MAK Center at the Schindler House, New Langton Arts, the Hammer Museum, USC, Pomona, CalArts, and the Sorbonne. In addition to his writing practice, he is a member of the site specific ambient music supergroup Ambient Force 3000, and for the past nine years he has helped run and curate events at Betalevel, a venue for social experimentation and hands-on culture located in Los Angeles’ Chinatown. He is currently working on a book about Victorian era botanical expeditions called The Glass House.
Facebook Event Page here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1719097484980473/
Kundiman & Kaya Booth at the Brooklyn Book FestivaL
Sunday, September 20th, 10am – 6pm
Table #247
Join Kaya Press and Kundiman for a scavenger hunt and readings by writers of color at Table #247 at The Brooklyn Book Festival.
July 28: Kundiman with Lunchtime Poems in Military Park
Kundiman is reading with the Lunchtime Poems reading series on Tuesday, July 28, 12:30 - 1:30pm. Reading will be held on the Plaza in Military Park, Newark, NJ.
Tuesday, July 28 from 12:30 - 1:30pm
Military Park in Newark, NJ
Admission is free
Featured readers are Wo Chan, Chen Chen, Amy Meng, and Alison Roh Park.
BIOS:
Wo Chan is a queer Fujianese poet and drag performer. A recipient of fellowships from Poets House, Kundiman, and Lambda Literary, Wo’s work has been published in cream city review, BARZAHK, and VYM Magazine. As a member of Brooklyn-based drag alliance, Switch n' Play, Wo has performed at venues including Brooklyn Pride, The Trevor Project, and the Architectural Digest Expo. Wo is a 2015 AAWW Margins Fellow.
Chen Chen is the author of the chapbook Set the Garden on Fire (Porkbelly Press, 2015). His poems have appeared/are forthcoming in Poetry, The Massachusetts Review, Narrative, [PANK], The Best American Poetry 2015, among others. He is the winner of the Matt Clark Award from New Delta Review and the Joyce Carol Oates Award, selected by Ishion Hutchinson. He holds an MFA from Syracuse University and this fall he will be joining the PhD program in English & Creative Writing at Texas Tech University. Visit him at chenchenwrites.com
Amy Meng’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Cream City Review, Indiana Review, The Literary Review, The Normal School, North Dakota Quarterly, Pleiades, and Slice Magazine. She is a Kundiman Fellow and was a finalist for the Margins fellowship. Currently, she teaches creative writing at Rutgers University and serves as a poetry editor at Bodega Magazine.
Alison Roh Park is a Kundiman fellow, Pushcart nominated poet, and past winner of of the PSA New York Chapbook Fellowship, Poets & Writers Magazine Amy Award, and Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant. She teaches ethnic studies at Hunter College and is a founding member of The Good Times Collective of emerging poets writing in the tradition of Lucille Clifton.
In case of rain, readings will be held in the New Jersey Historical Society as 52 Park Place. Co-sponsored by the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival and the Military Park Partnership. Admission is free.
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
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!
***
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.
May 17: A Celebration of Kundiman at Verlaine
May 17: A Celebration of Kundiman at Verlaine with Aziza Barnes, Cornelius Eady, Shonni Enelow, Rigoberto González, Monica Sok, Christopher Soto, & Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai
Join us for a blowout CELEBRATION OF VERLAINE: a cross-cultural, cross-generational poetry carousal featuring:
AZIZA BARNES, CORNELIUS EADY, RIGOBERTO GONZÁLEZ, MONICA SOK, CHRISTOPHER SOTO, & KELLY ZEN-YIE TSAI
Sunday, May 17
Verlaine Bar & Lounge
110 Rivington St, New York, NY
Happy hour: 4-5pm
Feature Reading: 5pm
$5 suggested donation
BIOS:
AZIZA BARNES is blk & alive. Born in Los Angeles, she currently lives in Bedstuy, New York. Her first chapbook, me Aunt Jemima and the nailgun, was the first winner of the Exploding Pinecone Prize and published from Button Poetry. You can find her work in PANK, pluck!, Muzzle, Callaloo, Union Station, and other journals. She is a poetry & non-fiction editor at Kinfolks Quarterly, a Callaloo fellow and graduate from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She is a member of The Dance Cartel & the divine fabrics collective. She loves a good suit & anything to do with Motown.
CORNELIUS EADY is the author of eight books of poetry, including Hardheaded Weather: New and Selected Poems (Putnam, April 2008). His second book, Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, won the Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets in 1985; in 2001 Brutal Imagination was a finalist for the National Book Award. His work in theater includes the libretto for an opera, “Running Man,” which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 1999. His play, “Brutal Imagination,” won Newsday’s Oppenheimer award in 2002. In 1996 Eady co-founded, with writer Toi Derricotte, the Cave Canem summer workshop/retreat for African American poets. More than a decade later, Cave Canem is a thriving national network of black poets, as well as an institution offering regional workshops, readings, a first book prize, and the summer retreat.
SHONNI ENELOW writes for and about theater and performance. She is an assistant professor of English at Fordham University. Her latest work of theater, The Power of Emotion, premiered this January in the Public Theatre's Under the Radar Festival Incoming Series. Her performance lecture, "My Dinner with Bernard Frechtman," was recently published in Aufgabe. Her critical monograph, Method Acting and Its Discontents: On American Psycho-drama, is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press.
RIGOBERTO GONZÁLEZ is the author 15 books, most recently the poetry collection Unpeopled Eden, which won the Lambda Literary Award and the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets. A professor of English at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey, he is the recipient of Guggenheim, NEA and USA Rolón fellowships; a NYFA grant in poetry; the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America; The Poetry Center Book Award; the Barnes & Noble Writer for Writers Award; and the 2015 Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Publishing Triangle.
MONICA SOK is a Cambodian poet from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Currently, she is completing an MFA in poetry at New York University. A Kundiman fellow, her poems are forthcoming in Narrative, Crab Orchard Review, and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn.
CHRISTOPHER SOTO (aka LOMA) is a queer latin@ punk poet and prison abolitionist. They are currently curating Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color in collaboration with The Lambda Literary Foundation. They have work published in Columbia: A Journal , MiPOesias, Apogee Journal and more. They are an MFA candidate in Poetry at NYU and the 2014-2015 Intern at Poetry Society of America.
KELLY ZEN-YIE TSAI is an award-winning spoken word poet, playwright, and filmmaker whose work has been featured at over 600 venues worldwide including the White House, Apollo Theater in Harlem, Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, BAM, Tyra Banks’ Flawsome Ball, & three seasons of “HBO Def Poetry.” Award recipient of the Illinois Arts Council, Asian American Arts Alliance, New York Foundation for the Arts, Asian Women Giving Circle, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Kelly has been profiled on Idealist in NYC’s Top 40 NYC’ers Who Make Positive Social Change, AngryAsianMan.com’s “30 Most Influential Asian Americans Under 30,” and HBO’s “East of Main Street: Asians Aloud.”
Get there early for drinks, seats, and chat!
Kundiman at AWP 2015
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.
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.
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.
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).