For the next installment in our series of Creative Nonfiction Intensives, Kundiman is excited to present the Personal Essay Intensive with Larissa Pham! This two-day workshop will focus on writing from one’s life, as well conducting research to strengthen themes within a piece. The Personal Essay Intensive will be limited to 15 participants and will be held at The Ace Hotel New York’s Boardroom. You can register here. Thank you to The Ace Hotel New York for their support of this event!

At AWP Portland, four Kundiman Fellows will be signing at our booth. Visit Booth 3055 to meet Neil Aitken, Shamala Gallagher, Vanessa Huang, and Lillian Li!

3/29, 1 – 2: Vanessa Huang

3/29, 2 – 3: Shamala Gallagher

3/30, 2 – 3: Neil Aitken

3/30, 3 – 4: Lillian Li

See all of our AWP19 programs here.

Neil Aitken is the author of two books of poetry, Babbage’s Dream (Sundress 2017) and The Lost Country of Sight (Anhinga 2008), winner of the the Philip Levine Prize, as well as a poetry chapbook, Leviathan (Hyacinth Girl Press 2016), an Elgin Prize winner. He is the founding editor of Boxcar Poetry Review, curator of Have Book Will Travel, and host of the podcast series, The Lit Fantastic. He also co-directs De-Canon: A Visibility Project & Library, which showcases the work of writers of color in a physical archive while also providing an online exploration of the intersection of race and literary production and canon-making. His poetry has appeared in The Adroit Journal, American Literary Review, The Collagist, Crab Orchard Review, Ninth Letter, Southern Poetry Review, and many other journals and anthologies.

A Canadian of Chinese, Scottish,and English ancestry, Neil was born in British Columbia, and grew up in Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, and various parts of the western United States and Canada. He holds a PhD in Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Southern California, an MFA in Creative Writing from UC Riverside, as well as a BS in Computer Science with a Mathematics minor from Brigham Young University. With Ming Di, he co-translated The Book of Cranes: Selected Poems of Zang Di, 1984-2015 (Vagabond AU 2015), and his collaborative translations of other mainland Chinese poets are also prominently featured in New Cathay: Contemporary Chinese Poetry, 1990-2012 (Tupelo 2013). He was awarded the DJS Translation Prize in 2011. Neil presently serves as a board member of Poetry East West, and on advisory committees for the Portland Book Festival and the East Portland Arts & Literary Festival. He lives outside of Portland, Oregon where he works as a freelance creative writing coach and workshop facilitator. (www.neil-aitken.com)

Shamala Gallagher is a poet and essayist who is working on a novel. Her recent work appears in Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Gulf Coast, Black Warrior Review, The Missouri Review, Verse Daily, Poetry Daily, Copper Nickel, West Branch, The Offing, and The Rumpus, among other journals, as well as in the anthologies Completely Mixed Up: Mixed Heritage Asian North American Writing and Art (2015) and Bettering American Poetry vol. 2 (2018). Her chapbook I Learned the Language of Barbs and Sparks No One Spoke was published by dancing girl press in 2015. She holds a BA from Stanford University and an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas-Austin, and she has received fellowships from Kundiman, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and the New York State Summer Writers Institute. She has worked as a case manager for homeless families in San Francisco and for HIV+ individuals in Austin, TX. She has volunteered and worked in several domestic violence shelters, and she has taught writing workshops in public schools and community centers. She currently teaches creative and critical writing at the University of Georgia in Athens, where she's pursuing a PhD in English.

Born in Berkeley and home in diaspora from California and Taipei to Atlanta, New York, and Tianjin, Vanessa Huang is a multimedia poet, artist, and cultural worker whose practice inherits teachings from the prison industrial complex abolition, gender liberation, and intersecting social justice movements. For over 15 years, Vanessa has worked to shift cultural narratives and strategies based in fear, violence, and exploitation towards realities centering love, vision, and transformation. Vanessa’s deejaying extends this practice, continuing to conjure public/digital space for sonic healing and freedom dreams.

quiet of chorus (UpSet Press 2018) is Vanessa’s debut poetry collection. Vanessa has received literary fellowships from Kundiman and Macondo, holds a BA in Ethnic Studies from Brown University, and has worked with racial, economic, and trans/gender justice organizations with a focus on decarceration, homecoming, and transformative justice. Vanessa’s interdisciplinary work and writings have conversed through community organizing, printmaking, and rallies; film, choreography, and sonic performance; letters to/from prison and with bread delivery through a community supported bakery subscription newsletter; and a range of publications including critical race and gender studies journals, magazines, and the anthologies Abolition Now: Ten Years of Strategy Against the Prison Industrial Complex (AK Press, 2008), Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (AK Press, 2011), Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (South End Press, 2011), and Writing the Walls Down: A Convergence of LGBTQ Voices (Trans-Genre Press, 2015).

Lillian Li is the author of the novel Number One Chinese Restaurant (Henry Holt). Her work has been published in the New York Times, Granta, Guernica, Glimmer Train, Bon Appetit, and Jezebel. Originally from the D.C. metro area, she lives in Ann Arbor.

"White supremacy, slavery, genocide, and colonization have shaped our here and now in a myriad of ways––we inherit history and the material conditions of power and privilege produced by it. Grace Lee Boggs said 'Movements are born of critical connections rather than critical mass.' This call to make critical connections with one another is the heart of solidarity – it is the fire of knowing that our liberation is intertwined with one another’s." –– Jai Dulani

This month, Kundiman has created a Poetry & Democracy Action Calendar for the Poetry Coalition's March programming. We've enlisted 4 curators to create folios of material for each week. This week, Dulani delves into the rich history of Asian American solidarity. See the whole week here! Read more about our Poetry Coalition project on our website.

"For years I have carried with me the following lines from Li-Young Lee’s poem, 'For a New Citizen of These United States': 'After all, it was just our life,/ merely years in a book of years.' I have carried them as I have carried, from state to state and house to house, boxes of papers and photographs documenting my time in the United States since arriving from the Philippines at the age of eight. After living undocumented for fifteen years, I used these records as part of my application to become a legal permanent resident and, years later, a naturalized citizen. In many ways, of course, there was documentation of my presence in this country before I became 'documented'—for one, I paid taxes. The tone and sentiment of Lee’s lines reached me differently through the years and I was grateful for their flex." –– Janine Joseph

This month, Kundiman has created a Poetry & Democracy Action Calendar for the Poetry Coalition's March programming. We've enlisted 4 curators to create folios of material for each week. Janine Joseph is our curator for the week of Documentation. See the whole week here! Read more about our Poetry Coalition project on our website.

"Let’s consider the term 'Asian American' as a poetic act: a new term reshaping the world by naming. It’s only a fifty-year-old idea—before then we were 'Orientals.' The anti-war, Black Power, feminist, and Marxist movements of the day inspired students in the Bay Area to take up the new term 'Asian American' both to mark their political awakening and to form a coalition across race and nationality. Those students sparked a nationwide Asian American movement, a long decade of art-making, organizing, teaching, and radical politics." –– Ryan Lee Wong

This month, Kundiman has created a Poetry & Democracy Action Calendar for the Poetry Coalition's March programming. We've enlisted 4 curators to create folios of material for each week. This week, Ryan Lee Wong delves into the rich history of Asian American activism. See the whole week here! Read more about our Poetry Coalition project on our website.

"I grew up in Queens, New York, where immigrants speak 800+ languages, including Garifuna, an Arawakan language nearly extinguished by the British in the late 1700s. Some of my neighbors are from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador––places from which thousands have fled for safety and been met instead with brutality. Beyond triumphant diversity narratives, language and migration reveal the connection between past and present, here and there, us and them. Poetry, like all diasporic languages, is a singular record of human hybridity, migration and war of Gramscian accuracy, capturing not only a language, but all its interstices and flyways. It is in this language that Asian American poetry speaks." –– Alison Roh Park

This month, Kundiman has created a Poetry & Democracy Action Calendar for the Poetry Coalition's March programming. We've enlisted 4 curators to create folios of material for each week. This week, Alison Roh Park takes us through Immigration, giving us an intimate introduction, curating a folio of poems, and providing writing prompts and direct action items. See the whole week here! Read more about our Poetry Coalition project on our website.