MEET THE INTERVIEWEES
We are grateful to the community members who contributed their stories to this Oral History. Learn more about each interviewee below.
Megan Kamalei Kakimoto
Megan Kamalei Kakimoto is a Kundiman community member who has served as Co-Chair of Kundiman’s Hawaiʻi Regional Group since March 2024.
Megan Kamalei Kakimoto is the Japanese and Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) author of the story collection Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare (Bloomsbury 2023), a USA Today national bestseller. Her work has been featured in the Guardian, Granta, Conjunctions, Joyland, and elsewhere. She has been a finalist for the Keene Prize for Literature and has received support from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She received her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers, where she was a Fiction Fellow. Currently a Visiting Faculty in Fiction at Antioch University Los Angeles low-residency MFA in Creative Writing program and a Fiction Editor for No Tokens journal, she lives in Honolulu.
Listen to Megan Kamalei Kakimoto’s oral history interview excerpts here.
Photo by Margarita Corporan
Matthew Olzmann
Matthew Olzmann is a Kundiman Fellow and Fellows Council member who has also served as Kundiman Retreat Faculty and Retreat Staff. In addition, his first collection Mezzanines was the winner of the 2011 Kundiman Poetry Prize.
Matthew Olzmann’s newest book, Constellation Route, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in January 2022. He’s the author of two prior collections of poems, Mezzanines and Contradictions in the Design. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, the Kresge Arts Foundation, and Kundiman, Olzmann's poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Prizes, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Southern Review, and elsewhere. He is a Senior Lecturer of Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and also teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Listen to Matthew Olzmann’s oral history interview excerpts here.
Photo by Natasha Singh
Purvi Shah
Purvi Shah is a Kundiman Fellow who attended the inaugural Retreat in 2004. She has since facilitated a Kundiman Retreat as well as a retreat for the Kundiman Staff and Board.
Purvi Shah seeds healing and transformation through anti-violence advocacy and creating art. She won a South Asian Social Service Excellence Award for her leadership fighting violence against women. During the 10th anniversary of 9/11, with Kundiman, Purvi directed Together We Are New York, a community-based poetry project amplifying Asian American voices. Her most recent book, Miracle Marks (Northwestern UP, 2019), investigates gender violence and sacred survivals. Her prize-winning debut, Terrain Tracks (New Rivers Press, 2006), plumbs migration and loss. She is working on a third poetry collection addressing racial inequity. With Anjali Deshmukh, she creates interactive public art like Missed Fortunes, a community healing archive which documented pandemic rituals through poetry & visual art prints. Purvi relishes sparkly eyeshadow, raucous laughter, and seeking justice.
Listen to Purvi Shah’s oral history interview excerpts here.