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Testimonials

“The retreat was a blossoming of voice and connectedness. I felt privileged teaching the classes which I taught, because the writers were uniformly passionate and open-minded. They were there to learn, which made me passionate to teach them all I knew.”

– Rick Barot

Testimonials

“Each of the faculty helped me learn something that was, and will continue to be, an integral lesson for my poetry. When I spoke to other fellows, it seemed as though each one of us felt similarly “seen”, “spoken to”, inspired, and motivated. We all wanted to go back through every poem we've ever written, thanks to the power of the newfound “tools”, handed to us by the faculty, and make our work better. I couldn't hope for a better outcome after attending a poetry retreat, and couldn't offer any better praise.”  

– Amisha Patel

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2004 - 2011 Kundiman Faculty

Kundiman Poets - View my most interesting photos on Flickriver

Kazim Ali is the author of The Far Mosque (Alice James Books). His poems and essays have appeared in such journals as The Iowa Review, Colorado Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review and Catamaran, and in the anthologies Writing the Lines of Our Hands and Risen From the East. A graduate of the Creative Writing Program at New York University, he is the author of a novel, Quinn’s Passage. He is the publisher of Nightboat Books and assistant professor of English at Shippensburg University.

Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of Ardor (Tupelo Press, 2008), In Medias Res (Sarabande Books, 2004), and a chapbook, God’s One Hundred Promises (Swan Scythe Press, 2002).  Her books have been honored by the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, she chairs the English department at a faith-based college in southern California, where she is also a novice harpist.

Rick Barot was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He attended Wesleyan University, the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, and Stanford, where he was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow in Poetry. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous publications, including The Yale Review, The Threepenny Review, New England Review, Grand Street, and Ploughshares. In 2001, he received a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He now teaches at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, and for the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Regie Cabico is a spoken word pioneer having won top prizes in the 1993, 1994 and 1997 National Poetry Slams. His work appears in over 30 anthologies including Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café, Spoken Word Revolution and Slam. He has appeared on two seasons of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, PBS’ “In The Life” and MTV’s “Free Your Mind” Spoken Word Tour. Regie is the recipient of the 10th annual Writers for Writers Award sponsored by Poets & Writers and has received three New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships for Poetry and Multi-Disciplinary Performance.

Marilyn Chin is the author of Dwarf Bamboo (Greenfield Review Press, 1987) and The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty (Milkweed Editions, 1994). Her latest book, Rhapsody in Plain Yellow, was published by Norton in 2002. She has won numerous awards for her poetry, including two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Stegner Fellowship, the PEN/Josephine Miles Award, four Pushcart Prizes, a Fulbright Fellowship to Taiwan, and residencies at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Lannan Residency, the Djerassi Foundation, and others. Chin’s work is featured in a variety of anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, The Norton Introduction to Poetry, The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry, Unsettling America, The Open Boat, and The Best American Poetry of 1996. Her poetry was also featured in Bill Moyers’s PBS series The Language of Life. She codirects the MFA program at San Diego State University.

Staceyann Chin was the winner of the 1999 Chicago People of Color Slam; first runner-up in the 1999 Outright Poetry Slam, winner of the 1998 Lambda Poetry Slam; a finalist in the 1999 Nuyorican Grand Slam; winner of the 1998 and 2000 Slam This!; and winner of WORD: The First Slam for Television. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post and featured on "60 Minutes." "Hands Afire," Staceyann's first one-woman show ran for ten weeks at the Bleecker Theater in the Summer of 2000. In 2002, Staceyann was nominated for the Rolex Mentor and Protege Art Initiative. She was also featured on the second and third seasons of the Peabody Award winning HBO series, Def Poetry Jam. She has since gone on to co-writing and performing as one of the original cast members of the ground-breaking and critically acclaimed, Tony Award winning Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam on Broadway.

Bei Dao is the author of poems that were a major source of inspiration during the April Fifth Democracy Movement of 1976, a peaceful demonstration in Tiananmen Square. His books of poetry include Unlock (2000); At the Sky’s Edge: Poems 1991-1996 (1996), for which David Hinton won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from The Academy of American Poets; Landscape Over Zero (1995); Forms of Distance (1994); Old Snow (1991); and The August Sleepwalker (1990). His awards and honors include the Aragana Poetry Prize from the International Festival of Poetry in Casablanca, Morocco, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has been a candidate several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and was elected an honorary member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Kimiko Hahn is the author of eight books of poems, including: Earshot (Hanging Loose Press, 1992), which was awarded the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and an Association of Asian American Studies Literature Award; The Unbearable Heart (Kaya, 1996), which received an American Book Award; The Narrow Road to the Interior (W.W. Norton, 2006); and Toxic Flora, (W.W. Norton, 2010).  As part of her service to the CUNY community, she helped initiate a Chapbook Festival that has become an annual event; since then she has published the chapbooks, Ragged Evidence and A Field Guide to the Intractable.  Hahn has also written text for film, such as the 1995 MTV special, Ain't Nuthin' But a She-Thing; also, the text for Everywhere at Once, a film based on Peter Lindbergh’s still photos and narrated by Jeanne Moreau.  Honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, PEN/Voelcker Award, Shelley Memorial Prize, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.  Aside from teaching for literary organizations such as the Fine Arts Work Center and Cave Canem, she has taught in graduate programs at the University of Houston and New York University, and of course, in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College, The City University of New York where she is a distinguished professor.

Lawson Inada is third-generation Japanese American, born and raised in Fresno, California. He has taught at Southern Oregon State College since 1966. For both historical and aesthetic reasons, Lawson Inada is a significant figure in Asian American poetry and literature. He was one of the co-editors of the landmark anthology, Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers, and has participated in efforts to recover writing by earlier Japanese American authors such as Toshio Mori and John Okada. Inada’s collection Before the War: Poems as They Happened (1971) was one of the first Asian American single-author volumes of poetry from a major New York publishing house. Inada won the American Book Award in 1994 for Legends from Camp and was named Oregon State Poet of the Year in 1991. He has received a number of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Myung Mi Kim’s books of poems include Commons (University of California Press), DURA (Sun & Moon), The Bounty (Chax Press), and Under Flag, winner of the Multicultural Publisher’s Exchange Award (Kelsey St. Press). Anthology appearances in Asian-American Literature: An Anthology, Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women, Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry, Primary Trouble: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry and other collections. Honors include a residency at Djerassi Resident Artists Program and awards from The Fund for Poetry. She is Professor of English at SUNY-Buffalo.

Tan Lin is the author of Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe, BlipSoak01, Ambience is a Novel with a Logo, Heath (Plagiarism/Outsource) and 7 Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking (2010) . His work has appeared in numerous journals including Conjunctions,  Artforum, Cabinet, New York Times Book Review,  Art in America, and Purple. His video, theatrical and LCD work have been shown at the Marianne Boesky Gallery, Yale Art Museum, Sophienholm Museum (Copenhagen), Ontological Hysterical Theatre, and as part of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Soundcheck Series.  Lin is the recipient of a Getty Distinguished Scholar Grant for 2004-2005 and a Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writing Grant to complete a book-length study of the writings of Andy Warhol. He has taught at the University of Virginia and Cal Arts, and currently teaches creative writing at New Jersey City University. He has just completed a sampled novel, entitled Our Feelings Were Made by Hand.

David Mura is a poet, creative nonfiction writer, critic, playwright and performance artist. A Sansei or third generation Japanese American, Mura has written two memoirs: Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei (Anchor-Random), which won a 1991 Josephine Miles Book Award from the Oakland PEN and was listed in the New York Times Notable Books of Year, and Where the Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality and Identity (1996, Anchor). Among his awards, Mura has received a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, a US/Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, two NEA Literature Fellowships, two Bush Foundation Fellowships, four Loft-McKnight Awards, several Minnesota State Arts Board grants, and a Discovery/The Nation Award.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of At the Drive-In Volcano and Miracle Fruit (Tupelo Press), winner of the Tupelo Press Judge's Prize, the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award in poetry, and the Global Filipino Award. Her poetry and essays have been widely anthologized and have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Black Warrior Review, FIELD, Mid-American Review and Tin House. She is associate professor of English at the State University of New York-Fredonia, where she is a recipient of the campus-wide Hagan Young Scholar Award and the SUNY Chancellor's Medal of Scholarly and Creative Activities.

Ishle Yi Park is a Korean American woman who has been published in The Best American Poetry of 2003. She has been twice featured on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, and performed her poetry on the NAACP Image Awards. She has a CD entitled “Work is Love,” and an upcoming book called “The Temperature of this Water,” which will be released this year. Ishle currently lives in New York.

Jon Pineda's latest book, Sleep in Me, was a Barnes & Noble "Discover Great New Writers" 2010 Holiday Selection and a Library Journal "Best Books of 2010" Selection.  He is the author of the poetry collections The Translator's Diary, winner of the 2007 Green Rose Prize, and Birthmark, winner of the 2003 Crab Orchard Award Series Open Competition.  His new work is appearing or forthcoming in Brevity, Copper Nickel, Handsome, and storySouth.  He teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte.

Paisley Rekdal is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee and three books of poetry, A Crash of Rhinos, Six Girls Without Pants and The Invention of the Kaleidoscope. A hybrid photo-text memoir that combines poems, nonfiction and fiction entitled Intimate is forthcoming from Tupelo. Her work has received a Village Voice Writers on the Verge Award, an NEA Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, the University of Georgia Press’ Contemporary Poetry Series Award, a Fulbright Fellowship, and the Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review. Her poems and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House, and on National Public Radio among others. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Utah.

Patrick Rosal is the author of Uprock Headspin Scramble And Dive (Persea Books). His work has been published in many journals and anthologies including North American Review, Columbia, The Literary Review, and The Beacon Best 2001. He has been a featured reader at many venues in and out of NYC, from Boston to Daytona Beach, as well as in London and on the BBC radio’s “World Today.” He is currently Assistant Professor of English at Bloomfield College.

Prageeta Sharma is the author of Bliss to Fill (subpress books, 2000) and The Opening Question (Fence Books, 2004). Her work has also appeared in Agni, Art Asia Pacific, Boston Review, Combo, Fence, Indiana Review, Women’s Review of Books and other periodicals. She received her MFA in poetry from Brown University and an MA in Media Studies from The New School.

Arthur Sze is a second-generation Chinese American. Educated at the University of California, Berkeley, Sze is the author of five volumes of poetry, including most recently The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998 (Copper Canyon Press, 1998), a finalist for the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. His poems have also appeared in numerous magazines, including American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, Mother Jones, Conjunctions, and The Bloomsbury Review. Translations of Sze’s work have been published in Italy and China. The recipient of a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, three Witter Bynner Foundation Poetry Fellowships, and two Creative Writing Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Sze currently directs the Creative Writing Program at the Institute for American Indian Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he has taught for more than a decade.