Please join Kundiman Northern California for "We Come Swimming," a virtual event celebrating two new collections: CONTINENTAL DRIFT by Mai-Linh Hong and BIRTH LANGUAGE by Aimee Suzara. Exploring shared themes of water, migration, and mothering, Hong and Suzara will read from their books and converse with Tina Bartolome. This free event will take place on Saturday, December 5th at 11:00 AM PT via Zoom. Register here.
About the books:
“To survive is to refuse / death, but how / to tell refusal from retreat?” In the 2025 Trio Award winning poetry collection Continental Drift, Mai-Linh Hong honors and explores the geography that made and continues to shape her ancestors’ story, her own story, and the future story of her descendants. From Vietnam to Virginia, California to Thailand, Hong plumbs the fault lines, crosses the oceans, crystallizing moments into meaning. Whether luxuriating in the small joys of nature and of existence, or marveling at the process of geological shift, these artfully crafted poems bring the reader into the complex promises and griefs of migration, navigation, and claiming space in a postcolonial world.
Aimee Suzara’s second full-length book Birth Language centers on a Filipina-American time traveling through her history, twisted and haunted like the roots of a balete tree. The book fuses English, Spanish, and Tagalog. It employs archival texts from as early as the 1500s when European conquistadors and explorers encountered the pre-colonial Philippine islands. Guided by the babaylan (shaman) and populated by mythical creatures like the mananngangal, kapre, and sireno, the collection celebrates a history of resistance, reclaiming and redefining the self despite colonization, assimilation, and cultural loss.
About the speakers:
Mai-Linh Hong is a Vietnamese American poet and literary scholar writing from the afterlife of refugee migration. Her debut poetry collection, Continental Drift (Trio House Press, 2026), won the 2025 Trio Award and was a 2026 Golden Poppy Award finalist. Poems appear or are forthcoming in Waxwing, Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, Wildness, and elsewhere. Her creative work has received support from Tin House, Voices of Our Nation, and the Vermont Studio Center. She also publishes scholarly essays on Asian American and refugee literature. A lifelong crafter, she is coauthor and coeditor of The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice (University of California Press, 2021). Raised in Virginia, she is an associate professor of literature at the University of California, Merced. Follow her work @continentaldrift_poems on Instagram or at mai-linhhong.com.
Aimee Suzara is a Filipino-American poet, playwright, and interdisciplinary performer based in Oakland, CA. She is the author of poetry book BIRTH LANGUAGE (Tia Chucha Press 2026) a Golden Poppy Award finalist, SOUVENIR (Wordtech Editions 2014), which was Willa Award Finalist, and poems and prose appear in many publications and journals. Her commissioned play THE REAL SAPPHO was supported by the Kenneth Rainin Foundation New Works Fund and National Endowment for the Arts and she was a 2025 San Francisco Foundation / Nomadic Press Literary Award winner. As a multidisciplinary performer, she has collaborated with dance theater and music ensembles such as Deep Waters Dance Theater and the Grammy-Award-winning Kronos Quartet. She holds degrees from UC Berkeley and Mills College. Based in Oakland, California, she teaches writing at Bay Area colleges and through her coaching business Wild Tongues.
Tina Bartolome is a writer and educator, the daughter of working-class immigrants from the Philippines and Switzerland. She was born and raised in San Francisco, where she attended public schools, survived divorce, the ‘89 earthquake and eviction. Between unlearning the 500-year lie of Columbus, coming out, writing on walls, and fighting racist propositions, she joined the movement and never looked back. Her writing appears in Black Power Afterlives: The Enduring Significance of the Black Panther Party and Still Here: An Anthology of Queer and Trans People Raised in San Francisco. For over 25 years, Tina has trained thousands of community organizers across the country and created vibrant spaces where young women, queer, and trans people of color can share their stories.
Image by Matt Hardy via Unsplash.