October 22 & 30: Seattle LitCrawl and YouthCAN Workshop

Kundiman at Seattle LitCrawl

October 22, 8pm
Still Liquor 1524 Minor Ave, Seattle, Washington 98101

Featuring fellows Amy Lam and Neil Aitken, with faculty Rick Barot, from the annual retreat dedicated to the cultivation of Asian American literature. Michelle Peñaloza hosts. [21+]

For the complete Lit Crawl Seattle line-up, please go here:http://litcrawl.org/seattle/2015-schedule
Facebook Event Page: https://www.facebook.com/events/849366475158519/

Neil Aitken is the author of The Lost Country of Sight, winner of the 2007 Philip Levine Prize, and founding editor of Boxcar Poetry Review. A former computer programmer of Chinese, Scottish, and English descent, he was born in Vancouver, BC and raised in Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, and the western United States and Canada. His poems have appeared in American Literary Review, Crab Orchard Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. He recently completed a Ph.D. in literature and creative writing at USC and now lives in Vancouver, WA. His second book of poetry, Babbage’s Dream, is forthcoming from Sundress Publications.

Rick Barot has published three books of poetry with Sarabande Books: The Darker Fall (2002), Want (2008), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and won the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize, and Chord (2015). His poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, The Paris Review, New Republic, Ploughshares, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artist Trust of Washington, the Civitella Ranieri, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer. He lives in Tacoma and directs The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at Pacific Lutheran University. He is also the poetry editor for New England Review.

Amy Lam is the associate editor at Bitch Media, a Kundiman fellow, and former WorldTeach volunteer. She tweets @amyadoyzie and is a Portland Trail Blazers fan.

Michelle Peñaloza is the author of two chapbooks: landscape/heartbreak (Two Sylvias Press) and Last Night I Dreamt of Volcanoes (Organic Weapon Arts). Her poetry can be found in Asian American Literary Review, New England Review, TriQuarterly, The Collagist and elsewhere. She is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the University of Oregon, Kundiman, Artist Trust, 4Culture, and Hugo House, as well as scholarships from VONA/Voices, Vermont Studio Center, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, among others.

YouthCAN Program in Seattle

October 30, 3:30-7pm
Wing Luke Museum
719 S King Street
Seattle, WA 98104

Michelle Penaloza and Jane Wong will be guest facilitating a workshop for Wing Luke's YouthCAN program in Seattle on October 30th. Spread the word to creative youth in the area! 

For more information, please go to http://www.wingluke.org/youthcan

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October 17: Kundiman at SF LitQuake

The American Poem


October 17, 8:30-9:30pm

Dijital Fix
820 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

Featuring Shamala Gallagher, Laura Jew, Geraldine Kim, Kenji C. Liu, MG Roberts, and Candy Shue who explore the complexities of the Asian American experience. Writers confront the liminal spaces of our modern unrest and civil poetics.

For more information about this event, please go here: http://www.litquake.org/events/kundiman-west-presents-american-poem 
For the full LitQuake line-up, find more information here: http://www.litquake.org/event-series/litquake-2015

October 15: Dogeaters in the Diaspora

Dogeaters in the Diaspora

October 15, 7-8:30pm

Fordham School of Law
140 West 62nd Street
New York, NY 10023

A symposium celebrating 25 years of Jessica Hagedorn's groundbreaking Filipino American novel featuring Walter Mosley, Marlon James, Gina Apostol, Mia Alvar, Ralph B. Peña, Mia Katigbak, Jeffrey Santa Ana, Allan Isaac, Nerissa Balce and the author herself, Jessica Hagedorn. Playwright and fiction writer Han Ong will host and moderate.

Free and open to the public. 

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September 18 & 20: #LITINCOLOR at The Brooklyn Book Festival

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Friday, September 18, 2015
7:00 PM
Unnameable Books, 600 Vanderbilt Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11238

Poets Yesenia Montilla and Angel Nafis join non­fiction writer Amarnath Ravva and fiction writer Gina Apostol to celebrate writers of color. The authors will read from New York­-based writers of color that have influenced them, and from their own work. This reading is presented by Asian American literary organizations Kaya Press and Kundiman, who will be sharing a booth at the Brooklyn Book Festival on Sunday Sept. 20th. #LitinColor is a campaign to draw attention to the influence of writers of color on the national imagination.

Bios:

GINA APOSTOL's last novel, Gun Dealers’ Daughter, won the 2013 PEN/Open Book Award and was shortlisted for the 2014 William Saroyan International Prize. Her first two novels, Bibliolepsy and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, both won the Juan Laya Prize for the Novel (Philippine National Book Award). She is working on William McKinley’s World, a novel set in Balangiga and Tacloban in 1901, during the Philippine-American War. She was writer-in-residence at Phillips Exeter Academy and a fellow at Civitella Ranieri in Umbria, Italy, among other fellowships. Her essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Foreign Policy, Gettysburg Review, Massachusetts Review, and others. She lives in New York City and western Massachusetts and grew up in Tacloban, the Philippines. She teaches at the Fieldston School in New York City.

YESENIA MONTILLA is a New York City poet with Afro-Caribbean roots. Her poetry has appeared in the chapbook For the Crowns of Your Head, as well as the literary journals 5AM,Adanna, The Wide Shore and others. She received her MFA from Drew University in Poetry and Poetry in Translation and is a CantoMundo Fellow. Her first collection The Pink Box will be published by Willow Books in October of 2015.

ANGEL NAFIS (Brooklyn, NY) is a Cave Canem Fellow. Her work has appeared in The Rattling Wall, Union Station Magazine, MUZZLE Magazine, Mosaic Magazine and Poetry Magazine. She is an Urban Word NYC Mentor and the founder, curator, and host of the quarterly Greenlight Bookstore Poetry Salon reading series. She is the author of BlackGirl Mansion (Red Beard Press/ New School Poetics, 2012). Facilitating generative writing workshops and reading poems across the United States and Canada, she lives in Brooklyn.

California-based writer AMARNATH RAVVA (Los Angeles, CA) is the author of American Canyon (Kaya Press, 2014). He has performed at LACMA, Machine Project, the MAK Center at the Schindler House, New Langton Arts, the Hammer Museum, USC, Pomona, CalArts, and the Sorbonne. In addition to his writing practice, he is a member of the site specific ambient music supergroup Ambient Force 3000, and for the past nine years he has helped run and curate events at Betalevel, a venue for social experimentation and hands-on culture located in Los Angeles’ Chinatown. He is currently working on a book about Victorian era botanical expeditions called The Glass House.

Facebook Event Page here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1719097484980473/

Kundiman & Kaya Booth at the Brooklyn Book FestivaL

Sunday, September 20th, 10am – 6pm
Table #247

Join Kaya Press and Kundiman for a scavenger hunt and readings by writers of color at Table #247 at The Brooklyn Book Festival. 

September 1: Bryant Park Word for Word Reading

Kundiman partners with Bryant Park's Word for Word Reading Series to present a delightful en plein air reading.

Featuring poets:
Lo Kwa Mei-en
Rickey Laurentiis
Brenda Shaughnessy
Wendy Xu

Tuesday, September 1st, 7PM
Bryant Park Reading Room
6th Avenue and 42nd Street

Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/1476986885954984/

 

Lo Kwa Mei-en is the author of YEARLING (Alice James Books 2015), winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize. Her poems can be found in Black Warrior Review, Boston Review, Guernica, Gulf Coast, The Kenyon Review, and other journals. She is from Singapore and Ohio, where she currently lives and works.

Rickey Laurentiis is the author of Boy with Thorn, selected by Terrance Hayes for the 2014 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, forthcoming from University of Pittsburgh Press in Fall 2015. He is the recipient of 2013 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2012 Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. 

Brenda Shaughnessy was born in Okinawa, Japan, and grew up in southern California. She is the author of Our Andromeda (2012), Human Dark with Sugar (2008), winner of the James Laughlin Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Interior with Sudden Joy (1999). Shaughnessy’s poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Harper’s, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Rumpus. She is an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University, Newark and lives in New Jersey with her husband, son, and daughter.

WENDY XU is the author of You Are Not Dead (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2013) and the recipient of a 2014 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship

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Kundiman & The Home School Partnership

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Kundiman and The Home School would like to announce their inaugural partnership and name Rajiv Mohabir as the recipient of a Home School Miami 2016 scholarship! He will be receiving a full tuition waiver (1175 USD) plus a travel honorarium (500 USD) for the full residency as the winner of the 2015 Kundiman Book Prize.

The Home School organizes weeklong conferences for poets and artists. Home School participants spend six days immersed in an intensive program that foregrounds interdisciplinary experimentation and collaboration.

Apply to The Home School residency by the free early-bird deadline of August 31 to participate in Home School activities. 

Miami Beach, Florida: 
JANUARY 3RD-8TH, 2016

Home School Miami 2016 will feature core poetry faculty: Timothy Donnelly, Adam Fitzgerald, Cathy Park Hong, Dorothea Lasky, Tan Lin, Maggie Nelson and Mónica de la Torre. Visiting poets: Natalie Diaz, Renee Gladman, Mira Gonzalez, Jorie Graham and Derek Walcott. 

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July 28: Kundiman with Lunchtime Poems in Military Park

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Kundiman is reading with the Lunchtime Poems reading series on Tuesday, July 28, 12:30 - 1:30pm. Reading will be held on the Plaza in Military Park, Newark, NJ. 

Tuesday, July 28 from 12:30 - 1:30pm
Military Park in Newark, NJ
Admission is free

Featured readers are Wo Chan, Chen Chen, Amy Meng, and Alison Roh Park.

BIOS:

Wo Chan is a queer Fujianese poet and drag performer. A recipient of fellowships from Poets House, Kundiman, and Lambda Literary, Wo’s work has been published in cream city review, BARZAHK, and VYM Magazine. As a member of Brooklyn-based drag alliance, Switch n' Play, Wo has performed at venues including Brooklyn Pride, The Trevor Project, and the Architectural Digest Expo. Wo is a 2015 AAWW Margins Fellow.

Chen Chen is the author of the chapbook Set the Garden on Fire (Porkbelly Press, 2015). His poems have appeared/are forthcoming in Poetry, The Massachusetts Review, Narrative, [PANK], The Best American Poetry 2015, among others. He is the winner of the Matt Clark Award from New Delta Review and the Joyce Carol Oates Award, selected by Ishion Hutchinson. He holds an MFA from Syracuse University and this fall he will be joining the PhD program in English & Creative Writing at Texas Tech University. Visit him at chenchenwrites.com

Amy Meng’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Cream City Review, Indiana Review, The Literary Review, The Normal School, North Dakota Quarterly, Pleiades, and Slice Magazine. She is a Kundiman Fellow and was a finalist for the Margins fellowship. Currently, she teaches creative writing at Rutgers University and serves as a poetry editor at Bodega Magazine.

Alison Roh Park is a Kundiman fellow, Pushcart nominated poet, and past winner of of the PSA New York Chapbook Fellowship, Poets & Writers Magazine Amy Award, and Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant. She teaches ethnic studies at Hunter College and is a founding member of The Good Times Collective of emerging poets writing in the tradition of Lucille Clifton.

 

In case of rain, readings will be held in the New Jersey Historical Society as 52 Park Place. Co-sponsored by the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival and the Military Park Partnership. Admission is free.