Announcements
Congrats, dear Shelley!
Read her three poems, "In the Hot-Air Balloon," "Wool," and "Vermeer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art" at the Nashville Review's current issue.
Shelley Wong is a Kundiman fellow, MFA candidate at The Ohio State University, and a poetry editor at The Journal. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Lantern Review, Kartika Review, Linebreak, Eleven Eleven, and Flyway.
Books for sale donated by Junot Diaz, Chris Abani, and Filipino American writers. Letterpressed holiday cards/ornaments for sale donated by Newhard Design.
Facebook event page here: https://www.facebook.com/events/752892964725092/
For those who cannot attend the fundraiser, donations can be made here: Additional donations can be made here: http://www.crowdrise.com/KayaNatin2013
Sponsored by the Asian American Writers' Workshop, Kundiman, Sunday Salon. Merienda (afternoon snacks and drinks) from Papa's Kitchen (Woodside, Queens) & Brooklyn Brewery.
Your $10 donation at the door and sales from donated books will go to KUSOG TACLOBAN and GOTA DE LECHE.
Asian American Writers' Workshop
112 W 27th St
New York, NY
7pm
Facebook event here: https://www.facebook.com/events/552519674824154/
It's Decorative Gourd Season around here, as McSweeney’s famously declared — a time to look back at all the hard work that’s gone into producing the fruits we now collect and devour in gluttonous revelry.
To mark the season, we’re inviting poets, writers, and readers alike to join us in celebrating the fruits of three poets’ labors. April Naoko Heck, Natalie Diaz, and Ocean Vuong will share their work and talk with R.A. Villanueva about their obsessions and preoccupations as the days get shorter.
In A Nuclear Family, her first collection of poems, April Naoko Heck contemplates a lineage passing through the atomic bombing of Hiroshima to the world of nuclear power outside of Cleveland. Born in Tokyo, she relocated with her family to the U.S. when she was seven. A Kundiman Fellow, she has been awarded residencies from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Vermont Studio Center. She works for the NYU Creative Writing Program and lives in Brooklyn.
Natalie Diaz delves into life on a reservation in the American Southwest in When My Brother Was an Aztec, where family collides with conquest and empire. She is a member of the Mojave and Pima Indian tribes and attended Old Dominion University on a full athletic scholarship. After playing professional basketball in Austria, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey she returned to ODU for an MFA in writing. Her work was selected by Natasha Trethewey for Best New Poets, and she has received the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. She lives in Surprise, Arizona.
Ocean Vuong’s work examines love, longing, and family memory against the backdrop of the Vietnam War. Born in 1988 in Saigon, he was raised by women (a single mother, aunts, and a grandmother) in Hartford, Connecticut, and received his BA in English literature from Brooklyn College. He is the author of two chapbooks: No and Burnings, which was an American Library Association’s Over The Rainbow selection. A recipient of a 2013 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. He lives in New York, where he reads chapbook submissions as the associate editor of Thrush Press.
R.A. Villanueva is the author of Reliquaria, winner of the 2013 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. He is also the winner of the 2013 Ninth Letter Literary Award for poetry. A semi-finalist for the 2013 "Discovery"/Boston Review Prize and a finalist for the 2011 Beatrice Hawley and Kinereth Gensler Awards, additional honors include fellowships from Kundiman and The Asian American Literary Review, and scholarships from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.
Seats are limited! Reserve yours here: http://www.eventbrite.com/e/decorative-gourd-season-a-poetry-reading-tickets-9290410869?aff=eorg
Ansley Moon was born in New Delhi, India, and has since lived on three continents. Her work has been published in PANK, J Journal, Southern Women's and elsewhere. Her first book of poetry, How to Bury the Dead, was published by Black Coffee Press. She is the recipient of a Kundiman fellowship and works as an editor for Black Lawrence Press. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.
You attended your first Kundiman retreat with your fellow readers Wo Chan and Tung-Hui Hu, in 2012. What's one memory or takeaway that you have from that retreat?
The Kundiman retreat is a sacred place. For me, it altered my relationship to poetry and it made me believe that my voice was necessary. I also remember Wo and Hui-Hui’s transformative reading. I feel privileged to read alongside them at the Kundiman & Verlaine Reading.
You attended the New School for your MFA. How has your writing life changed since then? How has it remained the same?
My MFA program made me a stronger writer by pushing me to take my work seriously. Before my writing program, my writing life was a solitary one. Now, I have a group of friends that inspire and challenge me to be a better writer and person.
Can you talk a little about how you balance your teaching life and your writing life?
I think that the key to balancing any job and writing is setting strict parameters and differentiating your “work” time from your writing time. I do this by striving to complete all my teaching related tasks at my job so that my evenings and weekends are free to write. Some weeks are better than others, and this is the first year that I feel I am balancing writing and teaching. I write everyday and revise and submit writing on the weekend. While teaching can be a grueling vocation, I am passionate about education. My students inspire me by sharing their poetry.
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 first memories, thoughts, or impressions you have when you think about those three ideas.
I was born in India and adopted into a white, Southern family. From an early age, I learned that “belonging” meant complicating traditional narratives. For me, being raised in the South was a constant trauma that forever marked me. I am always navigating race and identity.
In Monique Truong’s book, Bitter in the Mouth, she states: “We all need a story of where we came from and how we got here. Otherwise, how could we ever put down our tender roots and stay.” Writing has always been my way of navigating my place in the world.
What are you working on now?
I am working on a poetry manuscript about adoption, race, and infanticide in India and a long poem about my father.
What are some favorite books (movies or art) that you would recommend?
There are too many books to name! Recently I read Crazy Brave by Joy Harjo and The Father by Sharon Olds. I would recommend both! I am also interested in the way that art, music and dance intersect poetry. Wim Wenders’ film Pina especially comes to mind.
Ansley Moon will be reading with Wo Chan and Tung-Hui Hu at Kundiman & Verlaine on Sunday, November 17th at 4pm. Check out the Facebook event page here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1375415046033941/?source=1
Please note that we decided to hold a fundraiser at this event. Proceeds from this reading will benefit Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda Relief in the Philippines. So, please come and open up your hearts as well as your pockets. The Philippines is in dire need. Every bit counts.
Open Bar from 4-5 pm
Open Mic from 4:30-5pm
Reading beings at 5 pm
$5 donation
Verlaine
110 Rivington St.
(Ludlow & Essex Sts.)
212-614-2494
F train to Delancey
Wo Chan, Tung-Hui Hu, & Ansley Moon read.
Facebook event page here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1375415046033941/?source=1
Please note that we decided to hold a fundraiser at this event. Proceeds from this reading will benefit Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda Relief in the Philippines. So, please come and open up your hearts as well as your pockets. The Philippines is in dire need. Every bit counts. Thank you.
xox,
Kundiman
Click here to donate directly for Hurricane Relief: www.nafconusa.org
Wo Chan is a recent graduate of the University of Virginia's Area Program for Poetry Writing where he received the Rachel St. Paul Poetry Award for his work. Wo was a finalist for cream city review's 2013 Poetry Contest and his poems appeared in the journals Spring 2013 issue. Wo is a Kundiman fellow and plans to pursue an MFA in the following year.
Poet and media scholar Tung-Hui Hu was born in San Francisco and educated at Princeton University, the University of Michigan, and the University of California-Berkeley. His collections of poetry includeThe Book of Motion (2003); Mine (2007), which won the Eisner Prize; and Greenhouses, Lighthouses (2013). He is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan.
Ansley Moon was born in New Delhi, India, and has since lived on three continents. Her work has been published in PANK, J Journal, Southern Women's and elsewhere. Her first book of poetry, How to Bury the Dead , was published by Black Coffee Press. She is the recipient of a Kundiman fellowship and works as an editor for Black Lawrence Press. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.
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.
Congrats, dear Ocean!
Please click here to learn more about the Chad Walsh Poetry Prize: http://www.bpj.org/bpj_about_walsh.html
Ocean Vuong is the 2013 winner of the Beloit Poetry Journal’s 21st annual Chad Walsh Poetry Prize. The editors of the BPJ select on the basis of its excellence a poem or group of poems they have published in the calendar year to receive the award. This year’s choice is Vuong ’s poem “Telemachus,” which appeared in the Fall 2013 issue.
Although he completed his undergraduate studies at Brooklyn College just a year ago, Vuong is already widely recognized as an important new voice in American poetry. Among other honors, he has been the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, The American Poetry Review's Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize, the Academy of American Poets Prize, the Poets House Emerging Writers Fellowship, a Kundiman Fellowship, the Asian American Literary Review's A Lettre Poetry Fellowship, and a Saltonstall Poetry Fellowship. He has published two chapbooks, No (YesYes Books, 2013) and Burnings (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2010), an American Library Association's Over the Rainbow selection. He is Associate Editor of Thrush Press.
Vuong's contemporary rendering of the story of Odysseus's arrival home after the Trojan war and ten years of misadventures is a wise and moving parable about fathers and sons, particularly those caught up in the destruction and displacement of war. Odysseus washes up on shore of a bombed-out Ithaca that "is no longer / where he left it." Wanting both to know and to confront his father--"Do you know who I am, ba?"--Telemachus discovers "the bullet hole in his back, brimming / with sea water." In the poem's final gesture, a kiss transmits both the father's curse and his blessing. Telemachus turns Odysseus's body over to face
The cathedral in his sea-black eyes.
The face not mine but one I will wear
to kiss all my lovers goodnight:
the way I seal my father’s lips
with my own and begin
the faithful work of drowning.
The Walsh Prize, which this year carries a cash award of $4000, was established in 1993 by Alison Walsh Sackett and her husband Paul in honor of Ms. Sackett’s father, the poet Chad Walsh (1914-1991), a co-founder in 1950 of the Beloit Poetry Journal. An author and scholar, Walsh published six volumes of poetry, including The End of Nature and Hang Me Up My Begging Bowl; several books on literary history, notably on C.S. Lewis; and edited textbooks and anthologies as well. He was professor and writer-in-residence at Beloit College, in Wisconsin, for thirty-two years, serving for many of those as chair of the English Department. He also taught as a Fulbright lecturer in Finland and Italy. This year's award is also supported by donations from thirteen previous Walsh Prize winners.
Poet and media scholar Tung-Hui Hu was born in San Francisco and educated at Princeton University, the University of Michigan, and the University of California-Berkeley. His collections of poetry include The Book of Motion (2003); Mine (2007), which won the Eisner Prize; and Greenhouses, Lighthouses (2013). He is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan.
You taught at the Kundiman retreat where the other Verlaine readers Ansley Moon and Wo Chan attended as Fellows, in 2012. What's one memory or takeaway that you have from that retreat?
I remember a lot of things (the stained glass windows of the room where we held Hour Number 5 of workshop, dinner being just a short intermission; the final party, branded “Kundiman 2012: I am the Warrior”). But mostly I remember how exhausted I’d been with poetry before I arrived, not unlike so many others I met at the retreat who were suffering from post-MFA burnout. It was, as Truong Tran described it, as if we had been filled with other people’s words and thinkings about poetry to the point that we barely recognized our own language as ours. Kundiman let me shed this baggage and start again.
I’ve heard (I hope I’m not totally mistaken!) that you teach in Michigan, but also shuttle back and forth between Ann Arbor and the Bay Area. How is it living in more than one place? How does it/how has it impact(ed) your work?
I’m on research leave in San Francisco this year, and next year I’ll be back full-time at Michigan. Even though I don’t really live in two places at once, I don’t mind shuttling back and forth between them when I need to. I schedule urgent work—a graduate student thesis, a must-finish essay, or a conference call—around planes and airports; the no-place of travel, the banality of the food, is somehow productive for me. A friend says that she loves flying because all the decisions that might cause anxiety are taken out of the equation. I don’t own a TV, but I often teach television in my undergraduate classes, so all the second-rate shows that I’ve consumed in-flight make me feel strangely virtuous.
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 first memories, thoughts, or impressions you have when you think about those three ideas.
Just thinking about the white supremacist who found out he is 14% black, I find it interesting that we’ve begun to link race to genetic testing and bloodwork. In that process, race gets understood as a code to be decrypted from the data, a secret of the body that is made to speak. I’m not sure what this means, but I do find that one of the joys of writing is to take up race with much more subtlety. It’s concerned less with uncovering at a truth than, as you point out, questions of belonging, which continue to exist long after the secret of race is ‘uncovered.’
What are you working on now?
I’m working on a publishing project called the Office for Net Assessment. ONA is a lab for figuring out the role of print books in the digital age, and to this end, we’ve started to solicit material from artists, game designers, scholars, and writers (such as multilingual poetry written for border crossings by Amy Sara Carroll) who can help us experiment with potential answers. I’m also finishing an academic book on the pre-history of the digital cloud, and starting a new book of poetry on forests. The original word ‘forest’ had nothing to do with trees, but comes from the word ‘foreign,’ meaning outside the rule of law; the prison camp at Guantanamo would be, in this sense, a forest.
What are some favorite books (movies or art) that you would recommend?
I initially misread this question as asking about my favorite movie books (in response I could only come up with Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion). Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey is one of the few books I brought with me to California: essays for people who don’t necessarily like essays. As for poetry, I have Maged Zaher’s Thank You for the Window Office and Evie Shockley’s The New Black next up on my shelf.
The last artworks that stayed with me came out of a visit to Cai Guo-Qiang's Cultural Melting Bath, essentially a hot tub/sculpture with rocks and floating herbs. Sitting in our bathing suits, we struck up a conversation with a family from Jakarta, who graciously invited us to visit. A half-year later, we found ourselves introduced to several of West Java’s up-and-coming artists (in one corner of Cecilia Patricia Utario’s studio: hand-blown glass condom chandeliers) and walking through an old art gallery originally built by Dutch East Indies colonialists to display European masters. But now it was filled with a spectacular collection of Indonesian new media art, including a wickedly funny Andy Warhol remake, Yusuf Ismail’s “Eat Like Andy”. The family’s hospitality continues to amaze. Moral of the story: always accept propositions made in hot tubs, particularly if they involve art.
Tung-Hui Hu will be reading with Wo Chan and Ansley Moon at Kundiman & Verlaine on Sunday, November 17th at 4pm. Check out the Facebook event page here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1375415046033941/?source=1
Please note that we decided to hold a fundraiser at this event. Proceeds from this reading will benefit Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda Relief in the Philippines. So, please come and open up your hearts as well as your pockets. The Philippines is in dire need. Every bit counts.
We are thrilled to announce that W. Todd Kaneko's poetry manuscript THE DEAD WRESTLER ELEGIES is soon to be his first full-length book. To be published by Curbside Splendor in the Fall of 2014.
For more about Curbside Splendor, visit: http://www.curbsidesplendor.com/
W. Todd Kaneko is from Seattle, Washington. His poetry, fiction and non-fiction can be seen in Bellingham Review, Los Angeles Review, Southeast Review, Lantern Review, NANO Fiction, The Collagist, Blackbird, The Huffington Post, Song of the Owashtanong: Grand Rapids Poetry in the 21st Century, Bring the Noise: The Best Pop Culture Essays from Barrelhouse Magazine and elsewhere. He took his MFA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University and has received fellowships from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and Kundiman. He is an associate editor for DMQ Review. Currently, he teaches in the Department of Writing at Grand Valley State University. He lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan with the writer Caitlin Horrocks.
Kajun's Pub
2256 St. Claude Ave.
New Orleans, LA 70117
7pm
TENDE RLOIN's choicest reading series, featuring TIANA NOBILE, MURIEL LEUNG AND LAURA THEOBALD!
About the series:As always, stay for karaoke...
Facebook event page here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1432671103619244/
Congrats, dear Tarfia!
"This issue opens with an introduction by U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey (whose early work appeared in Poet Lore - Vol. 91, No. 2) to Tarfia Faizullah’s poems on identity, desire, and personal agency."
Read more here: https://www.writer.org/sslpage.aspx?pid=1165, and pick up a copy today!
