Join hosts and curators Tina Chang and Tracy K. Smith for the fifth annual collaboration between Cave Canem and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Featuring readings by Ken Chen, Eric Gamalinda, Tyehimba Jess and Patricia Smith.

Detroit native Tyehimba Jess’s leadbelly was a 2004 National Poetry Series selection. Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named it one of the “Best Poetry Books of 2005.” Additional honors include a 2004 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2004-5 fellowship at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, a 2006 Whiting fellowship, a 2000-2001 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry, and the 2001 Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Award. A Cave Canem graduate fellow and New York University alumnus, he is Assistant Professor of English at the College of Staten Island.

Patricia Smith is the author of five books of poetry, including Blood Dazzler, a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award, and Teahouse of the Almighty, a National Poetry Series selection. Her work has appeared in many literary journals, including Poetry, The Paris Review, TriQuarterly, and she has received a Pushcart Prize. She is currently at work on a dance/theater production based on Blood Dazzler and the verse memoir Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah. Smith is a professor at the City University of New York/College of Staten Island, and is on the faculty of both Cave Canem and the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine.

Ken Chen’s debut collection, Juvenilia, was selected for the 2009 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award (Yale University Press, 2010). His work has been published or recognized in Best American Essays 2006, Best American Essays 2007, and The Boston Review of Books. He is a former editor of Arts & Letters Daily,which he helped found in 1998, and in 2002, he established the monthly arts magazine Satellite. Chen is a graduate of Yale Law School, and he is the executive director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. He resides in Brooklyn, NY.

Eric Gamalinda was born and educated in Manila and lives in New York City. He has won several awards and grants for his writing and experimental films, including the Asian American Literary Award, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Philippine Centennial Literary Prize, the Philippine National Book Award, the Asiaweek short story prize. His poetry, fiction and non-fiction have been published in the Philippines, the US, and Europe, and have been anthologized in various journals around the world. He has received fellowships in multiple countries including residencies at the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo.

$5 suggested donation. This event is open to the public.