Leah Silvieus' Poems in Current Issue of Diode

Read her poems here: http://www.diodepoetry.com/v5n3/content/silvieus_l.html

Born in Seoul, South Korea, and raised in the Mountain West, Leah Silvieus is a recipient of an Alfred Boas Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets as well as residencies from Kundiman and the Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation. Her work has been featured at the O, Miami Poetry Festival, and Asian American Women Artist Association and has appeared or is forthcoming in Asian American Poetry & Writing, Diode, Melusine, The Monarch Review, Rock & Sling, and CaKe.

Congrats, dear Leah!

On Friday, Oct. 19th, in celebration of Bengali Poet Subodh Sarkar, Kundiman alums Sonia Mukherji and R.A. Villanueva will read with Yusef Komunyakaa at Poets House

Rattapallax and Kundiman present

I HAD THOUGHT MYSELF A KANGAROO:

A Reading by Bengali Poet Subodh Sarkar

In a rare New York appearance, noted Bengali poet Subodh Sarkar reads from his work in Bengali and English translation and discusses the contemporary Bengali literary scene.  With poets Sonia Mukherji and R.A. Villanueva and special guest Yusef Komunyakaa.

Subodh Sarkar is a major Bengali poet with 22 books of poems and one travelogue on America . Critics find his poetry as ‘incisive, provocative, satiric, and most of all, entertainingly contemporary’.  His poems have been translated into English, French and several Indian languages and published in several journals and anthologies. Sarkar edits Bhashanagar, a Bengali culture magazine with occasional English issues. In 2010 he was appointed as the guest editor of Indian Literature, the flagship journal of Sahitya Akademi.  Sarkar also has participated in a number of international poetry festivals including events in Taiwan, Germany,  and France and was a fellow at the International Writers Program at the University of Iowa.  He recently visited Russia and Turkey as a member of the Indian Writers’ delegation organized by Sahitya Akademi.  He teaches English at City College, Kolkata.

Date and Time: October 19, 2012 - 7:00PM

Event Location: Poets House
10 River Terrace  
New York, NY 10282

Admission free.  Reception to follow.

Joseph O. Legaspi will read at Poets House for Page Meets Stage on Oct. 17th

This pairing will take place at the beautiful Poets House in Battery Park City (10 River Terrace) in downtown New York City.

 

The series continues on the third Wednesday of October with . . .

Joseph O. Legaspi is the author of Imago (CavanKerry Press), winner of a Global Filipino Literary Award. He lives in Queens, NY and works at Columbia University. A graduate of New York University’s Creative Writing Program, his poems appeared and/or are forthcoming in American Life in Poetry, From the Fishouse, jubilat, World Literature Today, PEN International, Smartish Pace, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Gay & Lesbian Review, The Normal School, and the anthologies Language for a New Century (W.W. Norton), Collective Brightness (Sibling Rivalry Press) and Tilting the Continent (New Rivers Press). A recipient of a poetry fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, he co-founded Kundiman (www.kundiman.org), a non-profit organization serving Asian American poetry.

Born in Trinidad and raised in New York City, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor is the author of  three collections of poetry, Raw Air, Night When Moon Follows, and Convincing the Body. Her work has been published in various anthologies including: Callaloo, Carry the Word, The Mom Egg, To Be Left With The Body, So Much Things To Say:100 Calabash Poets and Making the Trees Shiver. A poet, and teaching artist, she holds an MFA in Poetry from Stonecoast: The University of Southern Maine, and an MSW in Social Work from Fordham University. Boyce-Taylor’s text WATER has been commissioned by Jacob’s Pillow, and The Joyce Theater for Ronald K. Brown /Evidence Dance Company. She currently hosts two monthly reading series in New York City, The Calypso Muse Reading Series and The Glitter Pomegrate Performance Series, she is working on a memoir and a new manuscript of poetry titled, The Red Bible: Poems of Loss and Remembrances after her mother Eugenia Boyce.

Page Meets Stage was born in 2005 when Billy Collins and Taylor Mali read together on the same stage in an event called “Page vs. Stage: The Final Smackdown!” Now it is a monthly series curated by Taylor which brings together two poets—one ostensibly repping the “page,” the other ostensibly repping a more performative style—to read/perform back and forth, poem for poem, continuing the conversation of where poetry exists. Some of the most prominent poets in the United States both in the “academy” and in spoken word circles (Gerald Stern, Mark Doty, Carol Muske-Dukes, Valzhyna Mort, Paul Muldoon, Thomas Lux, Roger Bonair-Agard, Patricia Smith, Rives, Lynne Procope, to name just a few) have been involved.

All Page Meets Stage events are co-productions of Words Worth Ink and Blue Flower Arts. Check out YouTube to see some of the more memorable moments in the series (search for “Page Meets Stage”), or go to www.PageMeetsStage.com for the complete schedule.

Tickets are $12 ($6 students) and are available ONLY at the door on the night of the show. Call 917-743-6911 for more information.

Neil Aitken Wins First Place in Beyond Baroque's Third Annual Poetry Contest

Congratulations, dear Neil!

Beyond Baroque Announces the Winners of its Third Annual Poetry Contest!
Now in it’s third year, the 2012 Beyond Baroque Poetry Contest was judged by Los Angeles poet, teacher and arts organizer, Ms. Suzanne Lummis. Over 800 entries were submitted, and this year the contest was open to poets nationwide, expanded from California poets only for the first two years. Winners receive cash prizes. The first place winner receives $1000, the second place winner receives $500, and the third place winner receives $250.

Mr. Neil Aitken, a resident of Los Angeles and founding editor of Boxcar Poetry Review, has won first place in Beyond Baroque's third annual poetry contest, and will receive $1,000 in prize money. 

Noted Los Angeles poet, and this year’s judge, Ms. Suzanne Lummis, said of Mr. Aitken’s winning poem, “Of all the entries, my first choice, "Vigil," was the one that struck that fine balance between clarity and mystery, simplicity, and shimmering depth. After I'd read it, it continued to echo in my imagination.”

http://www.beyondbaroque.org/

Jason Bayani's book Amulet is forthcoming in April 2013

Major congrats, Jason!

Amulet By Jason Bayani

Jason Bayani, pulls at the threads of his culture and upbringing to deliver his most powerful collection of poems born out of an irreconcilable sense of home that exists on opposite ends of the Pacific. It is spun out of opposing forces; of the Filipino and the American; of the artist and the paycheck collector; of the clenched fist and the open hand; of one who embraces and embodies an inherited language, and knows only less of the one written on his skin. Bayani’s work pulls the reader in with writing that is empathic and brimming with a wide-eyed attachment to beauty that is painted from the guts, and then beckons you to take him up on the offer presented at the end of Broken Crown of Sonnets for the End of the World, “that you might remember me a place in this world.” Coming April 18, 2013

Come join us Oct. 10 for our first ever Kundiman & CantoMundo Fellows Reading at Fordham

Please join us for a reading featuring fellows from CantoMundo and Kundiman. The reading will take place in the the South Lounge at Fordham Lincoln Center on 60th and Amsterdam Avenue, New York City. 7pm to 9pm Tarfia Faizullah Deborah Paredez Ocean Vuong Javier Zamora Eugenia Leigh Anthony Cody Hosted by R.A. Villanueva and Eduardo C. Corral

Tarfia Faizullah is the author of Seam (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014), winner of the 2012 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Her poems and prose appear in Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. A Kundiman fellow, she received her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, and is the recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Project Award, a Fulbright Fellowship, scholarships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop, and other honors.

Deborah Paredez is the author of the poetry collection, This Side of Skin (Wings Press) and the critical study, Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory.  Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Mandorla, Poet Lore and elsewhere. Her honors include an Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation Award and residencies from the Vermont Studio Center and Hedgebrook. She is the co-founder of CantoMundo, a national organization for Latina/o poets, and an Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas in Austin where she teaches in the New Writers School MFA Program.

Born in 1988 in Saigon, Vietnam, Ocean Vuong was raised by women (a single mother, aunts, and a grandmother) in housing projects throughout Hartford, Connecticut. He received his B.A. in English Literature at Brooklyn College, CUNY. His first chapbook Burnings was released by Sibling Rivalry Press, 2010. A Kundiman fellow, other honors include a 2012 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize for Younger Poets, an Academy of American Poets prize, the Connecticut Poetry Society’s Al Savard Award, as well as four Pushcart Prize nominations. Poems appear in the American Poetry Review, Guernica, and Drunken Boat, amongst others.

Javier Zamora was born in La Herradura, La Paz, El Salvador. At the age of nine he immigrated to the Yunaited Estais. His chapbook, Nine Immigrant Years, is the winner of the 2011 Organic Weapon Arts Chapbook Contest. Zamora is a CantoMundo fellow and a Breadloaf work-study scholarship recipient. He has received scholarships from Frost Place, Napa Valley, Squaw Valley, and VONA. His poems appear or are forthcoming in DirtyLaundry, NewBorder, Phat’titude, The Homestead Review, The Poetry Show, Spillway Magazine, among other journals. He attends NYU’s MFA program.

Eugenia Leigh is the author of a forthcoming 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. A Korean American poet and Kundiman fellow, she holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, and has taught writing workshops for high school students and incarcerated youth. Her poems have appeared in several publications including North American Review, The Collagist, Rattle and the Best New Poets anthology.

Anthony Cody was born in Fresno, California to children of borne from immigrants of the Dust Bowl and Bracero Program. A graduate of CSU-Fresno, Anthony has been writing poetry since he read his first poem in Spanish. Anthony writes to capture the complexities of each moment and hopes that through writing, he, as well as others, can further understand humanity and have an opportunity to reflect upon the personal struggles within life. His work has been previously published in 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross The Border: Undocuments 1971-2007.

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.

Sally Wen Mao is a Distinguished Finalist for Tupelo's First/Second Book Award

Congratulations, Sally!

Tarfia Faizullah wins 2012 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Contest

Chad Davidson has selected SEAM by Tarfia Faizullah as the 2012 winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book contest. SEAM will be published by Southern Illinois University Press in February 2014.  Big congratulations Tarfia!

Join us Sept. 9 for our Reading Series at Verlaine!

Kundiman & Verlaine present
a night of poetry & libation with  

Sara Goudarzi, Sahar Muradi,
& Richard Jeffrey Newman

Sunday, Sept. 9
Reading begins at 5 pm
Open Bar, 4 - 5 pm
$5 suggested donation

http://www.kundiman.org/reading-series/

Verlaine
110 Rivington Street
b/w Ludlow & Essex Sts.
[ directions: F to Delancey or V to 2nd Ave. ]
http://verlainenyc.com/

This program is made possible, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in Partnership with the City Council and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Readers' Bios

Sara Goudarzi is a New York City writer and performer of poetry. She was born in Tehran and grew up in Iran, Kenya, and the U.S. Her work has appeared in The Adirondack Review, National Geographic News, The Christian Science Monitor, and Drunken Boat, among others. She is the founder and co-editor of /One/ The Journal of Literature, Art and Ideas. Sara teaches writing at NYU and is working on a first novel. www.saragoudarzi.com.

Sahar Muradi is a NY-based writer and performer originally from Kabul, Afghanistan. She is co-editor of One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature (University of Arkansas Press, 2010) and co-founder of the Afghan American Artists & Writers Association.  She was a 2010-2011 Open City Organizing Fellow with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Sahar’s writing has been featured on public radio and published in dOCUMENTA, phati’tude, Green Mountains Review, and HOW2 Journal. Her recent theater credits include performing in a devised production of “Masque of the Red Death” (HiveMind Theatre) and in a tour of “Undocumented” (Unboxed Voices), as well as helping to establish an all-women’s theater group in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. Sahar has an MPA in international development from New York University and a BA in literature and creative writing from Hampshire College.

Richard Jeffrey Newman is the author of The Silence Of Men (CavanKerry Press, 2006), a book of poetry, and three books of translations from classical Persian literature: Selections from Saadi’s Gulistan, Selections from Saadi’s Bustan (Global Scholarly Press 2004 and 2006) and, most recently, The Teller of Tales: Stories from Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh. He is Professor of English at Nassau Community College in Garden City, New York. His website is www.richardjnewman.com.

MISSION STATEMENT
Kundiman is dedicated to the creation, cultivation and promotion of Asian American poetry.

Tarfia Faizullah wins 2012 Copper Nickel Poetry Contest

Paisley Rekdal has chosen Tarfia Faizullah's poem "Reading Célan at the Liberation War Museum" as the winner of the 2012 Copper Nickel Poetry Contest. Congratulations Tarfia! More info is here.