Join us for a special reading about migration and reconfiguring literal and imagined borderlands with writers Vi Khi Nao, Brandon Shimoda and Celina Su. Celina Su’s debut collection of poetry, Landia, is a series of border crossings and questioning the social contract of the state and citizenship. Brandon Shimoda will read from forthcoming prose and poetry about the forced internal migration of Japanese incarceration and its ongoing aftermath. Vi Khi Nao’s experimental writing across poetry, essay, fiction and drama grasps a new vocabulary for grief, placelessness, and healing. Moderated poet-scholar Dorothy Wang and introduced by AAWW Board Member Monica Youn, this event is presented as part of “Where My Dreaming and My Loving Live, Poetry & the Body, the second annual initiative of the Poetry Coalition.

RESERVE A SEAT!
$5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Vi Khi Nao was born in Long Khanh, Vietnam. She is the author most recently of Umbilical Hospital; the short stories collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture, which won FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize in 2016; the novel, Fish in Exile (Coffee House Press, 2016); and the poetry collection, The Old Philosopher, which won the Nightboat Books Prize for Poetry in 2014. She holds an MFA in fiction from Brown University where she received the John Hawkes and Feldman Prizes in fiction and the Kim Ann Arstark Memorial Award in poetry.

Brandon Shimoda is a poet. His most recent books are Evening Oracle (Letter Machine Editions), which received the 2016 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America; its sequel, The Desert (forthcoming from The Song Cave); and his first book of nonfiction, an ancestral memoir called The Grave on the Wall (forthcoming from City Lights). He lives, for now, in the desert.

Celina Su was born in São Paulo, Brazil, and lives in Brooklyn. Her writing includes two poetry chapbooks Plurality Decree (MIEL Books, 2015) and Beyond Relief (with Ariana Reines, Belladonna*, 2013), three books on the politics of social policy and civil society, and pieces in journals such as n+1, Harper’s, and Boston Review. Su is the Marilyn J. Gittell Chair in Urban Studies and an Associate Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York. She has received several distinguished fellowships, including a Berlin Prize and a Whiting Award for Excellence in Teaching. Landia is her first book of poetry.

Dorothy Wang is an Associate Professor in the American Studies Program at Williams College. She is the author of Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry (Stanford University Press, 2013), which won the Association for Asian American Studies’ 2016 award for best book of literary criticism. An annual conference on race and creative writing is named after the book. During the academic year 2017-2018, she will be in residence at the Graduate Center, CUNY on an ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship, working with Ammiel Alcalay, and Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative.

This event is co-sponsored by Lost & Found/Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY and will be livestreamed on the Asian American Writers’ Facebook page.

The Poetry Coalition is a national alliance of organizations dedicated to working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture and the important contribution poetry makes in the lives of people of all ages and backgrounds.

NOTE ON ACCESSIBILITY
*The space is wheelchair accessible. No stairs. Direct elevator from ground floor to 6th floor.
*We strongly encourage all participants of the space/event to be scent-free.
If you all have any other specific questions about accessibility, please email Tiffany Le at tle@aaww.org with any questions on reserving priority seating.

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