Jan. 28 After the Fire: New Poems for Hiroshima--April Naoko Heck, Cynthia Lowen, and special guest Lee Ann Roripaugh

Please join us for readings from two new poetry collections about Hiroshima and the atomic age by April Naoko Heck & Cynthia Lowen, with special guest & Kundiman faculty member Lee Ann Roripaugh traveling from South Dakota to read, reflect, and moderate a conversation with the audience.

Tuesday, January 28, 2014
7pm
KGB Bar & Lit Mag
85 East 4th Street
New York, New York 10003

This reading has been made possible in part by funds from Poets & Writers 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.

Tarfia Faizullah has poems published in the current issue of the American Poetry Review

Congrats, dear Tarfia!

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.

from "West Texas Nocturne"

Because the sky burned, I had to unhinge
from the window the mesh screen
to step out onto the roof where the world was
an orange freshly peeled.

Read more here: https://www.aprweb.org/poem/west-texas-nocturne

Douglas Brown's Zero to Three wins the 2013 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, selected by Tracy K. Smith

Congrats, dear Douglas!

2013 Cave Canem Poetry Prize Winner

Cave Canem is pleased to announce the winner of the 2013 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, selected by Tracy K. Smith!

  Douglas Brown
     for
    Zero to Three

“These poems lead us from the birth cry in a hospital delivery room, to dusk and revelry in Spain, to modern-day Florida and history-laden Mississippi where Trayvon Martin and Emmitt Till were slain.  Even when what Brown has set out to do is grieve loss, his lines move with a buoyant, marrow-deep music, percussive and rich. They move like ‘a train, bound to a destination’ and they arrive with ‘the crackle lightning makes when it hits.’”

--Tracy K. Smith

Zero to Three will be published by The University of Georgia Press in fall 2014. 

Last chance to apply for the 2014 Kundiman Poetry Retreat! Deadline: 2/1/2014, 11:59pm EST

2014 Kundiman Asian American Poetry Retreat
 

Deadline to apply: 2/1/2014

June 18 - 22, 2014
Fordham University
Rose Hill Campus
New York City

Faculty: Marilyn Chin, Eugene Gloria, & Michelle Naka Pierce

Apply now for the Kundiman Asian American Poetry Retreat--and spread the word! Accepted fellows will gather in New York City for five days of writing, community building, and workshopping. Submit five to seven pages of poetry, a cover letter with a brief paragraph explaining what you would like to accomplish at the Kundiman Poetry Retreat, and $15 application fee. Our retreat application is open to anyone who identifies as Asian American. If you are selected to attend, please know that the non-refundable tuition fee is $375. Room and board are free to accepted Fellows. The deadline is February 1st, and we only accept applications online.

Click here to access application: 
https://kundiman.submittable.com/submit/7030

For more information on the retreat, check out this video:
http://vimeo.com/72058947 

and visit our retreat page at:
kundiman.org/retreat

Marilyn Chin is an award-winning poet and the author of Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen, Rhapsody in Plain Yellow, The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty and Dwarf Bamboo. Her writing has appeared in The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. She was born in Hong Kong and raised in Portland, Oregon. Her books have become Asian American classics and are taught in classrooms internationally. 

Eugene Gloria earned his BA from San Francisco State University, his MA from Miami University of Ohio, and his MFA from the University of Oregon. He is the author of three books of poems -- My Favorite Warlord (Penguin, 2012), Hoodlum Birds (Penguin, 2006) and Drivers at the Short-Time Motel (Penguin, 2000). He teaches creative writing and English literature at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana.

Award winning poet Michelle Naka Pierce is the author of four chapbooks and four full-length books, including TRI/VIA (Erudite Fangs/PUB LUSH, 2003) co-authored with Veronica Corpuz; Beloved Integer (Bootstrap/PUB LUSH, 2007); She, A Blueprint (BlazeVOX, 2011) with art by Sue Hammond West; and Continuous Frieze Bordering Red (Fordham, 2012), awarded the Poets Out Loud Editor’s Prize. Pierce has collaborated with artists, dancers, and filmmakers and has performed her work internationally, most recently in France and in Japan. With J’Lyn Chapman, she is the editor of Something on Paper, an online poetics journal: www.somethingonpaper.org. She teaches in and directs the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. Currently, she lives in Colorado with the poet Chris Pusateri.

Thank you, and we look forward to your applications!

If you have any questions, feel free to contact us at info@kundiman.org.

Cheers,

Kundiman

Shelley Wong has three poems up at the Nashville Review

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.

Nov 23 KAYA NATIN! (We CAN DO THIS!): Filipino American Writers' Bayanihan Benefit for Typhoon Yolanda/Haiyan Survivors

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.

Seats are limited! Reserve yours here.

Nov. 21 Natalie Diaz, April Naoko Heck, and Ocean Vuong read at the Asian American Writers' Workshop. Moderated by R.A. Villanueva

Event Details

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

 

Interview with Ansley Moon

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.

Nov. 17 Kundiman & Verlaine featuring Wo Chan, Tung-Hui Hu, & Ansley Moon

November 17

Kundiman & Verlaine Reading

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.

 

Ocean Vuong wins the 2013 Beloit Poetry Journal Chad Walsh Poetry Prize

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.