On May 6, NOTICE, a series of readings and performances exploring the moment of stepping off the cliff and into the abyss, comes to the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Join us for an intoxicating evening navigating fear, resolve, panic, exhilaration, death, and rebirth as featured artists Joseph O. Legaspi, Kamilah Aisha Moon, Samantha Thornhill,Samantha Chanse, and Bushra Rehman creatively announce, investigate, and question their next bold moves.

Joseph O. Legaspi is the author of Imago, a poetry collection, from CavanKerry Press. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including North American Review, Gulf Coast, Crab Orchard Review, and Bloomsbury Review and the anthologies Contemporary Voices of the Eastern World, PinoyPoetics, and Titling the Continent. A recipient of a poetry fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), Joseph co-founded Kundiman(www.kundiman.org), a non-profit organization serving Asian American poets.

Kamilah Aisha Moon‘s work has been featured or is forthcoming in several journals and anthologies, including Harvard Review, jubilat, Sou’wester,Oxford American, Gathering Ground, Callaloo, and Bloom. A featured poet in conferences and venues around the country, Moon is looking forward to working on her novel at the Vermont Studio Center in June, interspersed with bouts of good mischief.

Samantha Thornhill is an international poet whose work has been featured in Crab Orchard Review,Indiana Review, and Poets and Writers Magazine, among other publications. She travels the globe performing regularly at universities, schools, and festival stages from Budapest to Brooklyn—the borough where she resides. Samantha teaches poetry at the Juilliard School and also serves as writer in residence at the Bronx Academy of Letters. Her young adult novel, Seventeen Seasons, is forthcoming from Penguin/Putnam.

Samantha Chanse is a writer/performer, theater artist, educator, and arts organizer based in New York and San Francisco. A member of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab and currently a playwriting MFA candidate at Columbia University, her work has been presented with the New York International Fringe Festival, HERE Arts Center, Bowery Poetry Club, and others. She is the recipient of an Individual Artist Commission from the San Francisco Arts Commission, an Artist In Motion residency from Footloose/Shotwell Studio, and an Emerging Artists Residency from Tofte Lake Center. She also co-runs a multidisciplinary, bicoastal salon series called Laundry Party. Her first solo play, Lydia’s Funeral Video, will be published by Kaya Press in 2011.

Bushra Rehman‘s mother says Bushra was born in an ambulance flying through the streets of Brooklyn. Her father is not so sure, but it would explain a few things. Bushra was a vagabond poet who traveled for years with nothing more than a greyhound ticket and a book bag full of poems. She is co-editor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism(Seal Press 2002). She has been featured on BBC Radio 4, KPFA, the Brian Lehrer Show and in theNew York Times, India Currents, and NY Newsday. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including Crab Orchard Review, Sepia Mutiny, andColor Lines, and in several anthologies including Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry and Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War, Faith and Sexuality.

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