Interview with Nina Sharma

Nina Sharma is a writer from Edison, New Jersey. Her work has been featured in Certain Circuits Magazine, The Feminist Wire, Reverie: Midwest African American Literature, and Ginosko Literary Journal. She recently was awarded a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center and nominated for a Pushcart Prize for her nonfiction. With Quincy Scott Jones, she co-created the Noreaster Exchange: a multicultural, multi-city reading series. She is currently attending Columbia University's MFA in writing program and working on her first book. 

Cathy Linh Che: I know that you are now attending Columbia for your MFA program. How has your work changed during the course of the MFA? How has it remained the same?

Nina Sharma: I’m actually starting next week!  This world isn’t entirely new to me though.  I have a master’s in American Studies.  I think I began to find my footing as a writer during the course of that program.  It was a little bit of a discovery period for me—honing in on the issues and themes I care most about and how I’d like to attend to them.  I took chances.  I slipped in creative writing when I could, brought pop culture into conversations otherwise reserved for canonical works, and vice versa.  I felt a newfound charge in my writing as I did.  While I was working along these lines prior to my program, shifting into that new space, with a new audience, made me realize that the best writing comes out of a sense of risk.  I kind of take that with me whether I am working in a program or outside of it. 

CLC: Could you tell me a little about your life pre-MFA? What made you decide to apply and attend one?

NS: For the most part, up until like a year or so ago actually, I was more of what I call a secret writer.  I always wanted a professional writing life but I wasn’t sure it would happen.  Most of my family members are in healthcare in some way.  Only three out of the fourteen of us cousins pursued something else.  Even though I didn’t take a science track and wrote throughout my life, I always struggled to see this as something very real and possible. I owe a huge debt to Asian American Writers’ Workshop, where I worked for a few years.  Meeting other writers of similar backgrounds and who engaged with similar themes, who pushed their work across bounds I could not even fathom yet, connecting with like-minded organizations such as Cave Canem and Kundiman along the way, I felt excited and hopeful in a way I hadn’t before.  Being part of a writing community full time for two years is a real gift, to not have to fight for that time or qualify it in any way.

CLC: Kundiman has an ongoing Kavad project this year called Writing Race and Belonging: Would you mind spending some time discussing your relationship to writing, race, and belonging? Broad topic, I know, but we're interested in any gut reactions, memories, thoughts, or impressions you have when you think about those three ideas.

NS: At the risk of sounding Mad Libby, I would say that writing, in particular reflecting on race and identity, gives me a sense of belonging more than anything else.  I am a shy person and I think I have written my way out of the silences in my life.  I am thinking of the times when my loved ones do not consider the traumas they have suffered to be worth acknowledging and also times when I fail to acknowledge my own.  I am, like many first generation South Asian Americans, an inheritor of silences, we absorb them and later, learn to read between them, just as we learn to negotiate the two worlds we exist in— the world of our home and family and the one outside of it, in which the former is often rendered invisible.  It is that threshold between the two worlds that is most like home to me, the closest I’ve felt to belonging.  That is where I write from.

CLC: What are you currently working on?

NS: I am working on a series of essays reflecting on my relationship with my husband, Quincy Scott Jones, meditating on our experiences as an interracial couple— he being African American and I, South Asian.  I reflect upon moments in our life and also engage with broader histories that speak our experiences; in particular surprising, idiosyncratic connections I found as I looked into things further.  It’s been exciting, discovering so much even as I write our own story.

CLC: Do you have any poetry (or art or music) recommendations?

NS: The writings of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Maxine Hong Kingston, and James Baldwin are particularly inspiring to me. They are and always will be, to take a line from Kingston's Woman Warrior, my swordsmen and swordswomen. Speaking more contemporarily, the work of Minter Krotzer, Kamilah Aisha Moon, Bushra Rehman, whose wonderful debut novel Corona came out earlier this year, Thaddeus Rutkowski, Hal Sirowitz, and Mecca Jamilah Sullivan are always close by me and Quincy’s The T-Bone Series is right at the heart.

Nina will be reading at Kundiman & Verlaine this Sunday, September 8th with Jenny Xie and Sho Sugita. Facebook event here and more event info here.

Interview with Sho Sugita

Sho  Sugita lives in Brooklyn, NY. He works as a medical manuscript translator and studies poetry at Brooklyn College. He was an invited musician/reader in 2012 for Les Souffleurs de Vers: deuxième edition in Grenoble, France to raise funds for the 3-11 Tohoku disaster. His creative work can be found in Washington Square and Endless Possibilities (Classical and New Music on WRSU). He is currently working on a translation manuscript of Hirato Renkichi and Kanbara Tai, two poets active during the Japanese Futurist Movement of the early 1920s.

Cathy Linh Che: I've heard that you are now attending Brooklyn College for your MFA program. How has your work changed during the course of the MFA? How has it remained the same?

Sho Sugita: I used to attempt at verse. I now think about how to rupture them.

CLC: Could you tell me a little about your life pre-MFA? What made you decide to apply and attend one?

SS: I graduated from the University of Chicago in 2008, which was obviously a bad time for finding jobs. This was especially true for the Midwest. I had an offer to pursue an MFA in music at Mills, but it didn’t make too much sense to go into debt at the time. I moved to Japan due to the dire prospects for seeking employment in the US and ended up becoming an orthopedic sales representative. I decided that I wanted to reapply for school when I entered my late-20s. There was a lot of downtime with the nature of my work, so I was writing a lot during my waiting hours at outpatient lounges. The pursuit of writing made more sense than music with my work-related constraints in Japan.

CLC: Kundiman has an ongoing Kavad project this year called Writing Race and Belonging: Would you mind spending some time discussing your relationship to writing, race, and belonging? Broad topic, I know, but we're interested in any gut reactions, memories, thoughts, or impressions you have when you think about those three ideas.

SS: To answer your question directly, I have a tendency to question the authority of how we canonize literature—especially in regards to race and belonging—that probably stems out of my interest in Frank Chin’s “Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake” as a teenager. I never liked the term “Classics” in literature and its implications of the Western cannon, but I’ve learned over the years that there is just as much to talk about “what we don’t talk about.” 

I’m currently interested in the study of Modernism. With that said, the term scholars tend to use a lot in the field is “transatlantic” to describe the transmission of fin de siècle as a spirit of the time. I want to provide examples that “transcontinental” might be a more accurate modifier to describe the era. Fortunately, the academic climate is moving in a similar direction. For example, I think this year’s interest around Chicago Review’s criticism of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics by Kent Johnson is a necessary discussion to have—that inclusion has improved over the years, but to question if it is enough.

The same could be said about attitudes in poetry circles and small presses. When I was an undergraduate, I remember Ed Roberson was kindly suggesting to me that I should try to find Asian-American writing communities, but little was visible to me back in 2007. Kundiman’s programming is a testament to the changes I’m seeing.

CLC: What are you currently working on?

I recently finished a translation manuscript of Hirato Renkichi Shishū, a posthumous selection of poems by a Japanese Futurist poet. I spent some time over the summer in Tokyo at the Museum of Modern Literature, and I realized that I could collect Modernist and Proletariat coterie journals from the 1910s-1920s to compile a “Collected Works of Hirato Renkichi.” I should be finished with that project in a month or so. Hopefully, some of the poems will be available for readers in the near future. One can find an excellent translation of Hirato Renkichi’s Manifesto of the Japanese Futurist Movement by Miryam Sas in Cabinet Magazine (Issue 13).

SS: Do you have any poetry (or art or music) recommendations?

Poetry: O-Bon by Brandon Shimoda, Facts for Visitors by Srikanth Reddy, the recent Northwestern World Classics edition of Mayakovsky’s Selected Poems. I would also recommend John Solt’s translations of Kitasono Katue in Oceans Beyond Monotonous Space. I’ve read that there’s going to be a translation of Gozo Yoshimasu by Sayuri Okamoto with creative interventions by Forrest Gander, which is exciting to hear. Here’s an amazing reading of Yoshimasu’s “Ancient Observatory” from 1985: http://vimeo.com/31991414

Art: Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde, Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha, and Modernism in the Russian Far East and Japan 1918-1928

Music: Odori by radicalfashion (Hirohito Ihara), Perfect Lives by Robert Ashley, Obscure Tape Music of Japan 1: Aoi no Ue by Joji Yuasa, Tomomi Adachi’s sound poetry performances on PennSound. I’ve also heard from a professor in the MFA program that Jay-Z is great.

Tarfia Faizullah, Kenny Tanemura & Hannah Sanghee Park & Kundiman/Alice James Books Prize winner Lo Kwa Mei-en included in the Best New Poets 2013

Congrats, dear Tarfia, Kenny, Hanna & Lo Kwa!

BEST NEW POETS 2013

Melissa Barrett, “The Invention of the Metal Detector”

Oliver Bendorf, “Wagon Jack” (previously published under a different title in 

Evening Will Come)

Debbie Benson, “Memory”

Michael Boccardo, “What No One Told Me About Autumn”

Michelle Bonczek, “Entering the Body”

Claudia Burbank, “TGIF” (previously published in The Antioch Review)

Micah Chatterton, “Now, Someday”

Darin Ciccotelli, “Superpower”

Meg Day, “Taker of the Temperature, Keeper of the Hope Chest” (previously published in Adrienne)

Aran Donovan, “two left feet” (previously published  in Rattle)

Tarfia Faizullah, “Self-Portrait as Slinky” (previously published in Ninth Letter)

Jennifer Givhan, “Karaoke Night at the Asylum” (forthcoming in Indiana Review)

Andrew C. Gottlieb, “Portrait: Parsing My Wife As Lookout Creek”

Mikko Harvey, “Cannonball” (poet nominated by The Ohio State University, poem previously published in Juked)

Anna Claire Hodge, “Where We Have No Business” (previously published in Copper Nickel)

Anna Maria Hong, “Four Barrels, Jaw & Locket” (nominated by Unsplendid, where it originally appeared. Also previously published in Verse Daily.)

Erin Hoover, “On the Origin of Species” (forthcoming in Gargoyle)

Rochelle Hurt, “Poem in Which I Play the Runaway” (previously published  in The Collagist)

John James, “Chthonic”

Josh Kalscheur, “Katari” (previously published in The Iowa Review)

Courtney Kampa, “Ars Biologica” (previously published  in TriQuarterly)

Elizabeth Langemak, “An Apology” (previously published  in C4)

Sarah Levine, “Birds are loosely folded napkins thrown into the sky”

Jason Macey, “Love Song for Cesar Vallejo”

Lo Kwa Mei-en, “Romance in Which Open Season Changes Everything” (previously published in APARTMENT Poetry)

Scott Miles, “Ode to the Gods of French Cinema”

Peter Mishler, “Fludde”

Gloria Muñoz, “Your Biome Has Found You” (nominated by the University of South Florida)

Lisa Allen Ortiz, “Confection”

Elsbeth Pancrazi, “What's penciled in”

Hannah Sanghee Park, “Bang” (previously published  in 32 Poems)

Laura Passin, “The Egon Schiele Art Center, Cesky Krumlov”

Jade Ramsey, “She Lives in a Pat of Butter” (previously published in Gargoyle)

Kyeren Regehr, “Eversion” (previously published  in Prairie Fire)

Stephanie Rogers, “How It Kept On”

Justin Runge, “History” (previously published  in  Rattle) 

Michael Simon, “Interstate”

Meighan L. Sharp, “Beyond Measure” (previously published in DIALOGIST)

Max Somers, “The Narrative Poem”

Benjamin Sutton, “from Footnotes on the City”

L.J. Sysko, “Just Try”

Kenny Tanemura, “Expulsion”

Chad Temples, “Waking, Waking, Singing”

Emily Van Kley, “Physical Education”

Angela Voras-Hills, “Preserving”

Corrie Lynn White, “Gravy”

Derek JG Williams, “Ode to the Tongue” (previously published in Knockout Literary Magazine)

Cori A. Winrock, “Débridement” (previously published in Versal)

Amy Woolard, “A Girl Gets Sick of a Rose” (nominated by Smartish Pace, where it originally appeared)

Javier Zamora, “This Was The Field” (nominated by New York University)

George Yamazawa, Paul Tran, and Cathy Linh Che to present at LAPPFest DC

Congrats, dear fellows!

Check the schedule here: http://lappfest.org/schedule/

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.  

Paul Tran  is a rising senior at Brown University and a graduate of The Preuss School at the University of California, San Diego. He is a first-generation college student and aspires to pursue a Ph.D. in American Studies. Currently concentrating in History, Africana & Ethnic Studies, Paul’s work as a twentieth-century U.S. social & cultural historian-in-training, activist and spoken word poet attempts to illuminate the complex relationships between race, empire and the production of knowledge. With the past as his battleground, Paul is determined to excavate new understandings of human existence. His scholarship, poetry and leadership seeks to create communities compelled towards love and social justice. Inspired by the notion of America as “a land without ghosts,” Paul specifically aims to exhume this nation’s dead, to find what moves in the margins, and respectfully articulate their stories in the hopes of making meanings for our lives.

At 22 years old,  George “G” Yamazawa is widely considered one of the top young spoken word artists in the country. A Kundiman fellow, National Poetry Slam Finalist, two-time Individual World Poetry Slam Finalist, and three-time Southern Fried Champion, G has performed at numerous venues and universities across the nation including the Sundance Film Festival, Bonnaroo Music Festival, as well as overseas in England, Germany, and the Netherlands.

Bushra Rehman is Poets & Writers' August Writer in Residence

Congrats, dear Bushra! 

To check out her blog posts, click here and here.

Bushra Rehman’s mother says Bushra was born in an ambulance flying through the streets of Brooklyn. Her father is not so sure. Since there are no definitive records of the time of her birth, there is no real way of knowing, but it would explain a few things. Bushra is a vagabond poet who traveled for years with nothing more than a greyhound ticket and a book bag full of poems. Now, she performs her poetry regularly in theaters and colleges around the world. Lately, she’s been spending her time flying through the streets of Brooklyn and writing an on the road adventure novel for Muslim girls.

Jai Arun Ravine's investigative review / encounter with Bhanu Kapil's Humanimal, in collaboration with Lucas de Lima, is live at Tarpaulin Sky Literary Journal

Congrats, dear Jai!

Half [ ]-half [ ]-half [ ]: Trauma and Transformation in the Humanimal
Letters to Bhanu Kapil

by Jai Arun Ravine and Lucas de Lima

Note to reader: In 2010, Ching-In Chen asked Jai Arun Ravine to interview Bhanu Kapil for a speculative literature issue for Asian American Poetry and Writing. At the time, Bhanu was in India and unavailable for an interview, so she asked Lucas de Lima to answer Jai’s questions as an interpolate. The result of Lucas and Jai’s collaboration constitutes part one of this piece. Lucas’s replies to Jai — substituted for potential statements or responses by Bhanu — appear in italics: below. The dirty starlings are his, just as the triplicate, mutating calf is Jai’s. In 2013, Bhanu, Lucas and Jai re-convened with Bhanu asking Jai and Lucas questions. The feral appendix they created appears in part two of this piece. Even though the original interview was never published in AAPW, Jai thanks Ching-In for instigating this collaborative exploration.

Read the rest of the piece here.

August 27: Tamiko Beyer, Matthew Olzmann, & Jamaal May read at Word for Word in Bryant Park

Word for Word Poetry welcomes Alice James Books
Bryant Park Reading Room
(mid-block on the 42nd Street side of Bryant Park)

Tuesday, August 27, 2013
7:00pm – 8:30pm

More here: http://tamikobeyer.com/readings-and-events/ 

Tamiko Beyer spent the first ten years of her life in Tokyo, Japan, and has since lived in cities near the water on the West and East coast. She is the author of We Come Elemental (Alice James Books) and bough breaks (Meritage Press). She received her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis where she was awarded a Chancellor's Fellowship. Beyer has received grants and fellowships from Kundiman, the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund, and VONA/Voices. She is the Senior Writer at Corporate Accountability International in Boston.

Jamaal May is a poet, editor, and educator from Detroit, MI where he taught poetry in public schools and worked as a freelance audio engineer and touring performer. He is the author of Hum (Alice James Books, Nov 2013), winner of the Beatrice Hawley Award, and two poetry chapbooks (The God Engine and The Whetting of Teeth). His poems have been published widely in journals such as POETRY,Ploughshares, The Believer, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, and New England Review.   

 Matthew Olzmann is a graduate of the MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson College. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review, New England Review, Inch, Gulf Coast, Rattle, and elsewhere. He’s received fellowships from Kundiman and the Kresge Arts Foundation. 

Yes to Eugenia Leigh & Ocean Vuong for making the list of 23 More People Who Made Me Care about Poetry in 2013--now up at HTMLGiant.

Congrats, dear Eugenia and Ocean! 

Check here to view the list, now up at htmlgiant. 

Eugenia Leigh is the author of a full-length 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. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications including PANK Magazine, North American Review, The Collagist, and the Best New Poets 2010 anthology.

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 and received his B.A. in English Literature from Brooklyn College.

He is the author of two chapbooks: No (YesYes Books, 2013) and Burnings (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2010), which was an American Library Association’s “Over The Rainbow” selection and has been taught widely in universities, both in America and abroad. A recipient of a 2014 Pushcart Prize, other honors include fellowships from Kundiman, Poets House, and the Saltonstall Foundation For the Arts, as well as an Academy of American Poets Prize and the Connecticut Poetry Society’s Al Savard Award. Poems appear in Denver Quarterly, Quarterly West, Passages North, Guernica, The Normal School, Beloit Poetry Journal, Crab Orchard Review, and the American Poetry Review, which awarded him the 2012 Stanley Kunitz Prize. Work has also been translated into Hindi, Korean, Vietnamese, and Russian.

Sejal Shah is this week's Kenyon Review Online feature for her essay "Street Scene"!

Congrats, dear Sejal!

Street Scene

by Sejal Shah

Parisians call this neighborhood mixed. Mixed is code; it means immigrants. Think Brooklyn, Caitlin says. We are in the 20th Arrondissement, near Père Lachaise. I am here to see the Louvre and the Turkish Baths; I am here to visit my friend, Caitlin. I have a map and some time for wandering. To travel by yourself and enjoy it is a skill; I don't practice enough.

The 20th Arrondissement. Storefronts with fuchsia and blue signs; Senegalese behind tables of patterned scarves, watch caps, and leather bags; music, a low flare around which we warm ourselves at the park, at pool tables, at long wooden bars. LeeAnne isn't here to tell me where she stayed in Paris. When I think of her, I see us talking in my backyard, splashing in the pool, upstate New York summers. It surprises me. She was never there, but I can see it: the blue pool, our hideaway; beach towels; instant iced tea. I imagine we lay ourselves out on the uneven flagstones, waiting to be hot enough to peel ourselves off and fling ourselves into the water. If I close my eyes hard enough, if I squint, I can almost see it, this scene-that we grew up together. She was that kind of friend. As I walk through Paris, I keep expecting to catch a glimpse of her, vanishing into some narrow street.

. . . 

Click here to continue reading this essay.

 Sejal Shah is a writer and teacher of writing. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in journals and books including the Asian American Literary Review, Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, the Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, and Under Her Skin: How Girls Experience Race in America (Seal Press). 

Jennifer S. Cheng's from "Letters to Mao" published at Web Conjunctions

Congrats, dear Jennifer! 

"Letters to Mao"  are the this week's Web Conjunctions Exclusive! To read the poems, click here: http://www.conjunctions.com/webconj.htm 

Jennifer S. Cheng is the author of a chapbook, Invocation: An Essay (New Michigan Press). Her writing appears in the Seneca Review, The Collagist, Quarterly West, and Fifty-Fifty, an anthology of Hong Kong writing. She lives in San Francisco.