Announcements
Congrats, dear Todd, for his podcast up at The Collagist.
W. Todd Kaneko lives and writes in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His work has appeared in Bellingham Review, Los Angeles Review, Southeast Review, Lantern Review, NANO Fiction, the Collagist, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from Kundiman and the Kenyon Review Writer’s Workshop. He teaches at Grand Valley State University. Visit him at www.toddkaneko.com.
Congrats, Angela! You can read her poems, which are inspired by The Star card of the tarot deck here.
Also, read a review of her book up at The Rumpus!
Angela Veronica Wong is the author of how to survive a hotel fire (Coconut Books 2012). She is on the internet at angelaveronicawong.com.
Experience Tamiko's poetry/visual art collaboration "Subterranean Haibuns" here.
Tamiko Beyer is the author of We Come Elemental, winner of the 2011 Kinereth Gensler Award from Alice James Books, and bough breaks from Meritage Press. She is the Advocacy Writer at Corporate Accountability International and lives in Cambridge, MA. Find her online at wonderinghome.com.
Ching-In Chen is author of The Heart’s Traffic (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press) and co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (South End Press). They are a Kundiman, Lambda and Norman Mailer Poetry Fellow and a member of the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation and Macondo writing communities. A community organizer, they have worked in the Asian American communities of San Francisco, Oakland, Riverside and Boston. www.chinginchen.com
Congrats to our dear Kundiman alums!
Please visit our Retreat page to learn more about this summer's Kundiman poetry retreat.
Li-Young Lee is the author of four critically acclaimed books of poetry, his most recent being Behind My Eyes (W.W. Norton, 2008). His earlier collections are Book of My Nights (BOA Editions, 2001); Rose (BOA, 1986), winner of the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University; The City in Which I Love You (BOA, 1991), the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; and a memoir entitled The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (Simon and Schuster, 1995), which received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and will be reissued by BOA Editions in 2012. Lee's honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Lannan Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, as well as grants from the Illinois Arts Council, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. In 1988 he received the Writer's Award from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation. He is also featured in Katja Esson's documentary, Poetry of Resilience.
Srikanth Reddy is the author of two books of poetry -- Facts for Visitors, which received the 2005 Asian American Literary Award for Poetry, and Voyager -- both published by the University of California Press. His scholarly study of 20th Century American poetry, titled Changing Subjects, was published by Oxford University Press in 2011. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the doctoral program in English at Harvard University, Reddy has received fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the NEA, and the Creative Capital Foundation. He is currently an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago.
Lee Ann Roripaugh’s most recent volume of poetry, Dandarians, is forthcoming from Milkweed Press in 2014. Her third volume of poetry, On the Cusp of a Dangerous Year, was released by Southern Illinois University Press in 2009. A second volume, Year of the Snake, also published by Southern Illinois University Press, was named winner of the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award in Poetry/Prose for 2004. Her first book, Beyond Heart Mountain (Penguin Books, 1999), was a 1998 winner of the National Poetry Series, and was selected as a finalist for the 2000 Asian American Literary Awards. The recipient of a 2003 Archibald Bush Foundation Individual Artist Fellowship, she was also named the 2004 winner of the Prairie Schooner Strousse Award, the 2001 winner of the Frederick Manfred Award for Best Creative Writing awarded by the Western Literature Association, and the 1995 winner of the Randall Jarrell International Poetry Prize. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Roripaugh is currently a Professor of English at the University of South Dakota, where she serves as Director of Creative Writing and Editor-in-Chief of South Dakota Review.
Dhaka Nocturne
I admit that when the falling hour
begins to husk the sky free of its
saffroning light, I reach for anyone
willing to wrap his good arm tight
around me for as long as the ribboned
darkness allows.
Hear and read the rest of the poem here.
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, The Southern Review, LA Review of Books, Massachusetts Review, Mid-American Review, Ninth Letter, 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, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, scholarships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Kenyon ReviewWriters’ Workshop, and other honors.
"At this year’s Split This Rock Poetry Festival, Patricia Smith talked about ‘the pressure of stories.’ Stories help to change the conversation. My parents’ stories and my stories aren’t part of the dominant American narrative, and why I write, I suppose—to write us in.
Read the rest of the interview here.
Cathy Linh Che is the author of Split (Alice James, 2014), the winner of the 2012 Kundiman Poetry Prize. She received her MFA from New York University and is the recipient of fellowships from The Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, Hedgebrook, and Poets House. She currently teaches at NYU Poly and is Program Assistant for Readings/Workshops (East) at Poets & Writers."
Hear some of Purvi's poetry, its inspirations, Rajiv's questions, and foot-tapping Bollywood music too! At 4 p.m. EST today and tomorrow on the JUS Radio website at http://tunein.com/radio/JUS-Radio-s177833/ (or download the JUS Radio app on your Iphone or Android if you are on the go!).
Congrats, dear April!
"This reading by students, alumni, and staff of the Jimenez-Porter Writers’ House is the culmination of an evening of good eats, speeches, games, and door prizes to celebrate the House’s ten-year anniversary.
As a former assistant director and instructor (2004-‘07), I arrived too late for the crab rangoon and sushi, but I enjoyed a slab of red velvet cake, catching up with old students, meeting new ones, sharing my poetry, and most of all, cheering on the program’s remarkable ten-year run. The House has flourished through the toughest of economic times—a testament to the University’s commitment to educating young writers."
Read the rest of her blog post here.
April Naoko Heck was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1971, and moved to the United States seven years later. Her poems have most recently appeared in Artful Dodge, Borderland: Texas Quarterly Review, Epiphany, and Shenandoah. She has received an AWP Intro Journals Award and held a writers residency at VCCA. Her first book of poems, A Nuclear Family, is forthcoming from UpSet Press in Fall 2013.
From louderARTS' Facebook Page:
We are thrilled to be closing out our 2012 season with this brilliant and generous poets. Please join us for our final double feature of 2012: Patrick Rosal and Angel Nafis!
Showtime is 7:30pm. But come early for our free weekly rooftop workshop at 6pm. As always there will be two-for-one drinks all night. Cover is $6/$5 with student ID.
And this is your last chance to get in free with a donation to hurricane relief efforts. If you donate $10 or more online and print out your receipt, we will waive your cover charge. Or come make a donation at one of our computers and we will refund what you paid at the door.
Patrick Rosal is the author of three full-length poetry collections, Boneshepherds (2011), My American Kundiman (2006), and Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive (2003). His collections have been honored with the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award, Global Filipino Literary Award and the Asian American Writers Workshop Members' Choice Award. In 2009, he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to the Philippines. He is currently on the faculty of Rutgers University-Camden's MFA program.
Angel Nafis is an Ann Arbor, Michigan native and Cave Canem Fellow. Her work can be stumbled upon in FOUND Magazine’s Requiem for a Paper Bag, Decibels, GirlSpeak Webzine, The Bear Rivers Writing Conference Online Magazine, MUZZLE Magazine, and The Rattling Wall. In 2011 she represented the LouderArts poetry project at both the Women of the World Poetry Slam and the National Poetry Slam. Author of the chapbook BlackGirl Mansion (Red Beard Press, 2012), she is an Urban Word NYC Mentor and currently curates and hosts a poetry reading series in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.
Congrats to Monica Ong for her nomination in Tidal Basin Review for her poem "Bo Suerte."
Monica Ong, artist and poet in new media, creates narrative installations that investigate social hierarchies and cultural silences in the context of public health. Monica completed her MFA in Digital Media at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2006. Her research has included fellowships at the Oral History Summer Institute at Columbia University, and the Writing the Medical Experience Workshop at Sarah Lawrence College. She is also a Kundiman Fellow in poetry whose work has been published most recently in the Lantern Review, as well as forthcoming issues of Drunken Boat, and The New Sound: A Journal Interdisciplinary Art & Literature.
Congrats to Matthew Olzmann for his nomination from B O D Y for his poem "A RIVER, BRIEFLY PARALLEL TO AN EIGHT-LANE SUPER HIGHWAY" and for his nomination from the New England Review for his poem "The Tiny Men in the Horse's Mouth."
Matthew Olzmann's first book of poems, Mezzanines, was selected for the Kundiman Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Alice James Books.
Congrats to Ocean Vuong for his Pushcart nomination from the South Dakota Review for his poem "Time Maker."
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.
Congrats to Tarfia Faizullah for her Pushcart nominations from Blackbird and from Passages North for her poem "Register of Eliminated Villages."
Tarfia Faizullah is the author of Seam (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014), winner of the 2012 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry's First Book Award. Her poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in The Missouri Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Massachusetts Review, Ninth Letter, LA Review of Books, Mid-American Review, Blackbird, and elsewhere. A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, an AWP Intro Journals Award, a Ploughshares Cohen Award, and other honors, as well as scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Sewanee Writers' Conference, and the Kenyon Review Writers' Workshop.
