MEET THE INTERVIEWEES

We are grateful to the community members who contributed their stories to this Oral History. Learn more about each interviewee below.

CHING-IN CHEN

Ching-In Chen (they/them) is a Kundiman Fellow who has also served as Kundiman Retreat Faculty and Retreat Staff. Chen is currently the Co-Chair of Kundiman’s Pacific Northwest Regional Group. In addition, as of October 2024, Chen serves as Treasurer for Kundiman’s Board of Trustees.

Ching-In Chen is author of recombinant (2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry), The Heart's Traffic: a novel in poems; and Shiny City as well as chapbooks to make black paper sing and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Leslie Scalapino Finalist). Chen is co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities. They are a Kelsey Street Press collective member, Airlie Press editor and Nonfiction Coordinator for Best of the Net. They serve on Seattle's Cultural Space Agency’s Governing Council and on Seattle City of Literature’s board. They received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat, Imagining America, Jack Straw Cultural Center, EmergeNYC, Intercultural Leadership Institute and Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship as well as the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. They collaborate with Cassie Mira on Breathing in a Time of Disaster, a performance, installation and speculative writing project exploring breath through meditation and environmental justice. They teach in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and the MFA program in Creative Writing and Poetics at the University of Washington Bothell.

Listen to Ching-In Chen’s oral history excerpts here.

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.

JEN LUE

Jen Lue is a Kundiman Fellow, and attended her first Kundiman Retreat in 2013. She has been President of the Fellows Council since November 2022.

Jen Lue is a former Center for Fiction/Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellow and a 2021 NYSCA/NYFA fiction finalist. She is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Kundiman, VONA/Voices, Tin House, Jerome Foundation, and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, among others. Her work has been featured in The Margins, BOMB Magazine, Narrative and Joyland.

Listen to Jen Lue’s oral history interview excerpts here.

TARIQ LUTHUN

Tariq Luthun (he/him) is a Kundiman Fellow and Fellows Council member.

Tariq Luthun is a Detroit-born, Dearborn-raised community organizer, data consultant, and Emmy Award-winning poet who invites you to join him in demanding an end to the siege on Gaza and the illegal military occupation of Palestine, from the river to the sea. Luthun — an artist who has earned a number of fellowships, residencies, and publications — calls for the right of return and land back for indigenous peoples globally. Luthun received his MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and currently serves as a board member of The Offing.

Listen to Tariq Luthun’s oral history interview excerpts here.

JOSHUA NGUYEN

Joshua Nguyen (he/him) is a Kundiman Fellow who has served as Co-Chair of Kundiman’s South Regional Group since 2022.

Joshua Nguyen is the author of Come Clean (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021), winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, the Writers' League of Texas Discovery Award, and the Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters Poetry Award. He is also the author of the chapbooks, American Lục Bát for My Mother (Bull City Press, 2021) and Hidden Labor & The Naked Body (Sundress Publications, 2023). He is a Vietnamese American writer, a collegiate national poetry slam champion (CUPSI), and a native Houstonian. He has received fellowships from Kundiman, Tin House, Sundress Academy For The Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. He has been published in Wildness, The Texas Review, Honey Literary, and elsewhere. He is a humor editor for The Offing Mag, the Kundiman South co-chair, a bubble tea connoisseur, and loves a good pun. He received his MFA/PhD from The University of Mississippi. He currently teaches at Tufts University and Boston College.

Listen to Joshua Nguyen’s oral history excerpts here.

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 is the author of Constellation Route as well as two previous collections of poetry: Mezzanines and Contradictions in the Design. A recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, MacDowell, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Olzmann’s poems have appeared in the New York Times, Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Prizes, Kenyon 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.

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.