2014 will go down as an historic year for poetry. We’re feting Sally Wen Mao‘s debut Mad Honey Symposium. Dave Eggers likes its “gritty, world-wise sense of humor that gives her work heavyweight swagger.” Also just released: Cathy Linh Che‘s Split, a tender exploration of  war, diaspora, and violence, and Tarfia Faizullah‘s Seam, based on interviews with women survivors of the 1971 Pakistani army atrocities Dhaka, Bangladesh. R.A.Villanueva will preview his new book Reliquaria, due out later this year, which discusses, among other things, the “Bodies” exhibition.

We’re celebrating with a reading, of course, but in place of wine and polite conversation afterwards we’re throwing a pinata bash and dance party.

Sally Wen Mao is the author of a forthcoming book of poems, Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books, 2014), the winner of the 2012 Kinereth Gensler Award. Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2013 and is published or forthcoming Colorado Review, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Third Coast, and West Branch, among others. The recipient of fellowships from Kundiman and Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, she holds a B.A. from Carnegie Mellon University and an M.F.A. from Cornell University, where she is currently a lecturer.

R.A. Villanueva is the author of Reliquaria, winner of the 2013 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. A founding editor of Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art, his honors include the 2013 Ninth Letter Literary Award for poetry and fellowships from Kundiman and The Asian American Literary Review. His writing has appeared widely in journals and anthologies including AGNI, The Common, DIAGRAM, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Virginia Quarterly Review. He lives in Brooklyn.

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. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares,The Missouri Review, Passages North, New Ohio Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Southern Review, Mead, Poetry Daily, Mid-American Review, and elsewhere. A Kundiman fellow, she is a graduate of the Virginia Commonwealth University program in creative writing.

Cathy Linh Che is a Vietnamese American poet from Los Angeles, CA. She has received awards from The Asian American Literary Review, The Center for Book Arts, The Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, Hedgebrook, Kundiman, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Residency, and Poets & Writers. She is a founding editor of Paperbag.

Co-sponsored by Kundiman and Asia Society New York. This event was funded in party by Poets & Writers, Inc. through public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

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