Kundiman has been selected for inclusion in NYCGives municipal campaign administered by United Way

Good news! Kundiman has been selected for inclusion in the 2012-2013 NYCGives combined municipal campaign administered by United Way. This means all New York City employees can give at work to Kundiman. Please spread the word to anyone you know who works for the city and encourage them to give generously.


Also, if you haven’t yet given, please consider making as generous a contribution as possible before the year ends, so we can continue and expand our work in shaping our Asian American legacy through poetry at http://www.kundiman.org/support/. Thank you.  

And to all current donors, thank you again.

Happy Holidays!

Rachelle Cruz and Melissa Roxas with poems up at Poetas y Diwatas, guest edited by Barbara Jane Reyes. Read their work at The Bakery!

Rachelle Cruz is from Hayward, California. She is the author of the chapbook, Self-Portrait as Rumor and Blood (Dancing Girl Press,2012). Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in Bone Bouquet, PANK Magazine, Muzzle Magazine, Splinter Generation, KCET’s Departures Series, Inlandia: A Literary Journey, among others. She hosts The Blood-Jet Writing Hour on Blog Talk Radio. An Emerging Voices Fellow, a Kundiman Fellow and a VONA writer, she lives and writes in Southern California.

 

My Imelda Marcos
after Margaret Rhee

O, Imelda Marcos, I wear your hair like a woven flag of sharp stars and bees. Something I can’t touch.

 

Click here to read more of Rachelle's poetry.

 

Melissa Roxas is a poet, health worker, and human rights activist. For over fifteen years she has done community and social justice work in the United States and in the Philippines. She is a co-founder of Habi Arts, a Los Angeles-based cultural organization dedicated to promoting community empowerment and social justice through the arts.

Melissa is a survivor of enforced disappearance and torture by the Philippine military. While conducting health care work in the Philippines on May 19, 2009, she was abducted at gunpoint and held in secret detention in a Philippine military camp and tortured for six days. Melissa continues to write and speak out against human rights violations and to demand justice for victims all over the world.

 

Light the Bonefire

for Raymond Manalo

Wood lights a fire within the body.

And yes,

there is ash before the burning.

 

Click here to read more of Melissa's poetry.

2013 Kundiman Retreat Application Now Available!

Fordham University, Rose Hill · New York City · June 19 - 23, 2013

In order to help mentor the next generation of Asian American poets, Kundiman sponsors an annual Poetry Retreat in partnership with Fordham University. During the Retreat, nationally renowned Asian American poets conduct workshops with fellows. Readings, writing circles and informal social gatherings are also scheduled. Through this Retreat, Kundiman hopes to provide a safe and instructive environment that identifies and addresses the unique challenges faced by emerging Asian American poets. This 5-day Retreat takes place from Wednesday to Sunday. Workshops will not exceed eight students.

Application Period: December 15 - February 1

Retreat Faculty: Li-Young Lee, Srikanth Reddy, and Lee Ann Roripaugh

For more information on the Asian American Poetry Retreat, visit out Retreat page.

Click here to apply!

Podcast up on The Collagist! W. Todd Kaneko pays homage to Macho Man Randy Savage as he reads from "The Dead Wrestler Elegies"

 

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.

Tamiko Beyer and Ching-In Chen in the Trans/Queer edition of Evening Will Come

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.

 

Read Ching-In's "Dialektik Skool, a Sampling of Correspondance, Interrogation, and Other Materials" here.

 

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!

Introducing our 2013 Kundiman Poetry Retreat Faculty: Li-Young Lee, Srikanth Reddy, and Lee Ann Roripaugh

Please visit our Retreat page to learn more about this summer's Kundiman poetry retreat.

2013 Faculty

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.

Tarfia Faizullah with a beautiful poem and audio recording up at the New Ohio 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.

Cathy Linh Che has an interview up on the Ploughshares blog

"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."