Come prepared to hear four poets of color mix and remix translation, through love letters, laws, binary code, and Google translate. Bay Area-based Filipina poet Janice Lobo Sapigao will share music and visuals alongside her salvaged family love letters written in Ilocano and a poetic critique of the Silicon Valley, where her mother assembled microchips. Newly minted Philadelphia Poet Laureate Raquel Salas Rivera, the author of the forthcoming lo terciario / The Tertiary, will read from their bilingual poetry collection about US colonialism in Puerto Rico. 2017 Kundiman Poetry Prize winner Adeeba Talukder, a Pakistani-American poet and translator will read her work inspired by Urdu and Persian poetic traditions. Asiya Wadud will debut new work on refugees in the Mediterranean and Google translation aided “French” poetry. Don’t miss out on an evening of new decolonial poetics.

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

Raquel Salas Rivera is the author of lo terciario / The Tertiary, a book of poetry which presents a decolonial queer critique in response to the the US involvement in the Puerto Rican Debt crisis. The collection speaks about fluidity, translation, and loss in both Spanish and English. CA Conrad calls the book “A fierce document that fully transfers its radical transformative powers into our bones!” They are the author of Caneca de anhelos turbios (Editora Educación Emergente), oropel/tinsel (Lark Books), and tierra intermitente (Ediciones Alayubia). Currently, they are Co-Editor of The Wanderer, and Co-Editor of Puerto Rico en mi corazón, a collection of bilingual broadsides of contemporary Puerto Rican poets. Rivera is based in Philadelphia and the city’s 2018-19 Poet Laureate.

Janice Lobo Sapigao’s second book of poetry, like a solid to a shadow, examines absence, grief, and language. The collection of documentary poetry centers around Saipago’s discovery of her deceased father’s collection of cassettes containing love “letters” to her mother in their shared language of Ilocano. Cathy Linh Che writes: “Janice Lobo Sapigao’s like a solid to a shadow is a collection about turning the traces of a story into the story itself. Here is a book that uncovers the dual nature of language: Even as it fails to bring the dead solidly back to life, every utterance resurrects that vitality.” Sapigao is a daughter of Filipina/o immigrants. She co-founded an open mic in Los Angeles called the Sunday Jump and is an English professor at San Jose City College. Two of her poems from microchips for millions were excerpted in The Margins.

Adeeba Shahid Talukder is a Pakistani American poet and translator. She translates Urdu and Persian poetry, and cannot help but bring elements from these worlds to her own work in English. Her chapbook What Is Not Beautiful is forthcoming through Glass Poetry Press and her book Shahr-e-jaanaan: The City of the Beloved is a winner of the Kundiman Prize and is forthcoming through Tupelo Press.

Asiya Wadud writes about borders, limits, and the variegated truth. She teaches third grade in the daytime and English to new immigrants and refugees in the evening. Her first book, crosslight for youngbird, will be released by Nightboat Books in September 2018 and her book, Sizable Calamities, is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse in 2019. Her work has been supported by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Dickinson House, and the New York Public Library, among others. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she loves animals.

This event will be livestreamed on the Asian American Writers’ Facebook page.

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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