#asianwomenwriters

• This program also available via live-stream and at the same link after the event.

Supported by the Sam Mazza Foundation

We've moved to an in-person reading—audience welcome!—at The Poetry Center, though you can still attend by webinar (or watch via live-stream), for the concluding event in erica lewis's weeklong Mazza Writer in Residence program for Spring 2022. She'll be joined by Oakland-based poet Christine No, each reading from their work and engaging in conversation with one another and the audience. 

• Please note: proof of vaccination and mask are required in order to attend in person.

• This book [mary wants to be a superwoman, erica lewis] made me suck my teeth and say goddamn, and yes, and thank you. This book hit me right in the ancestors, spoke to me like a sister. erica lewis is aware that time is fiction, in a way that only black women know. A collage of music and memories, language that’s lived before, people we carry and people we try to forget, causes and effects, the proverb that “everything is everything.” This work is both archival and built from scratch. It’s a stunning altar to the past, a balm for the present, and a prayer for what will be.
  —Morgan Parker
   
• Whatever Love Means is a searing ode to abandonment. The poems collected here detail a woman’s pursuit of survival despite the psyche’s cruelest intentions. “Woke up still,” Christine No writes, “a woman hell-bent on her own fantastic demise.” Where one is most vulnerable, one is most resilient, and No’s excavation of exactly that erupts amid these pages. Here, “even the dead are dancing.”
  —Jeanann Verlee

Bios

erica lewis lives in San Francisco where she runs lil’ homie apothecary. Her books include the precipice of jupiter (2009) and camera obscura (2010, both with artist Mark Stephen Finein); murmur in the inventory (2013); the first two books of the box set trilogy: daryl hall is my boyfriend (2015) and mary wants to be a superwoman (2017); and all the real tears (2017). Her work has appeared in various anthologies, journals, and in numerous chapbooks (Afterhours Editions/The Song Cave, Belladonna, Lame House). She was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. 

Christine No is a Korean American poet, filmmaker and daughter of immigrants. She is a Sundance Alum, VONA Fellow, Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Nominee, and has served as Assistant Features Editor for The Rumpus, a Program Coordinator for VONA; and currently serves on the board of Quiet Lightning, a literary nonprofit in the Bay Area. Christine is interested in the power of storytelling at the intersection of healing and social justice. You can find her work online and in print; and, her first full length poetry collection Whatever Love Means is available via Barrelhouse Books.

Related event

Mazza Writer in Residence erica lewis and Divya Victor, reading and in conversation

• This program also available via live-stream and at the same link after the event.

Supported by the Sam Mazza Foundation

Join us online as erica lewis, Poetry Center Mazza Writer in Residence for Spring 2022, is joined by Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and Pen American Open Book Award poet Divya Victor. They'll each be reading from their poetry then joining in conversation with emcee, Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta. 

• mary wants to be a superwoman [erica lewis] is a tapestry of woven continuums. Its images contain a methodical new naturalism where one’s past is the frontier, alternating with the brutal urgency of a witness who would save your life. erica lewis’ poems investigate the practice of identity and the sums of nonlinear biographies. Like a relaxed musician, she has the small secrets of the day at her fingertips.
  —Tongo Eisen-Martin
   
• Divya Victor’s Curb is extraordinary: it is a sobering poetic look at how white supremacy “curbs” the brown civilian who can slip between Muslim and Black, between terrorist and illegal. If they’re not targeted for what they are, they’re mistaken for what they’re not—with sometimes fatal consequences. Victor explores the murders of South Asians in America with piercing acumen, re-arranging historical documents into wholly original compositional strategies that draws me in but also pushes me back. I can never know what happened, only perceive the disquieting absence of lives annihilated by structural violence. Layered, rich, and epic, Curb is an incredible collection that must be read and re-read.
  —Cathy Park Hong

Bios

erica lewis lives in San Francisco where she runs lil’ homie apothecary. Her books include the precipice of jupiter (2009) and camera obscura (2010, both with artist Mark Stephen Finein); murmur in the inventory (2013); the first two books of the box set trilogy: daryl hall is my boyfriend (2015) and mary wants to be a superwoman (2017); and all the real tears (2017). Her work has appeared in various anthologies, journals, and in numerous chapbooks (Afterhours Editions/The Song Cave, Belladonna, Lame House). She was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. 

Divya Victor is the author of CURB (Nightboat Books); KITH (Fence Books/ Book*hug); Scheingleichheit: Drei Essays  (Merve Verlag); NATURAL SUBJECTS (Trembling Pillow, Winner of the Bob Kaufman Award), UNSUB (Insert Blanc), and THINGS TO DO WITH YOUR MOUTH (Les Figues). Her work has been translated into French, German, Spanish, and Czech. She has been a Mark Diamond Research Fellow at the U.S Holocaust Memorial Museum, a Riverrun Fellow at the Archive for New Poetry at University of California San Diego, and a Writer in Residence at the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibit (L.A.C.E.), and her work has been performed and installed at Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) Los Angeles, The National Gallery of Singapore, the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibition (L.A.C.E.) and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Victor has been an editor at Jacket2 (United States), Ethos Books (Singapore), Invisible Publishing (Canada) and Book*hug Press (Canada). She is currently Associate Professor of English at Michigan State University.

Related event

Mazza Writer in Residence erica lewis and Christine No, reading and in conversation

• Video live-streamed to our YouTube channel. Media captioning available there after the event.

Join us for an evening set of readings with poets Wang Ping and Ava Koohbor at the exciting new collectively run SF Mission-based venue, Medicine for Nightmares (formerly Alley Cat Bookshop).

Poet, novelist and artist Wang Ping was born in 1957 in Shanghai, China. She earned a BA in English from Beijing University before immigrating to the United States in 1985. Ping earned an MA in English from Long Island University and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from New York University. She is the author of over 12 books of poetry, prose, and translation, most recently the poetry collection My Name is Immigrant (Hanging Loose, 2020) and the memoir Life of Miracles Along the Yangtze and Mississippi (University of Georgia, 2018), winner of the AWP Creative Nonfiction Award (2017). Wang's work is deeply rooted in her Chinese ancestry and identity and addresses the complexities of language, culture, and gender. She has also been featured in several multi-media solo exhibitions, including “We Are Water: Kinship of Rivers,” a one-month exhibition that brought 100 artists from the Yangtze and Mississippi Rivers to celebrate water (Soap Factory, 2014), and collaborated with filmmakers and composers on multiple projects. Minnesota Poet Laureate for 2021-2023, Wang is the founder of the Kinship of Rivers Project at Macalester College, where she taught creative writing as a Professor of English for 21 years and is now a Professor Emerita. More at wangping.com

Ava Koohbor is a poet, visual, and sound artist. Her poems have appeared in various publications as well the chapbooks Triangle Squared (Bootstrap Press) and Sinusoidal Forms (Lew Gallery), and the full-length collection Death Under Construction (Ugly Duckling Presse/ Bird & Beckett Books). Her latest electronic music performance was broadcasted online in The Modular World Anniversary Series. Her latest assemblages (Eye of Noir), hosted by Colter Jacobson, were exhibited at Right Window Gallery. She believes that each artist is a medium to transfer the world of possibilities to what is. She is now pursuing an MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media at Mills College.

Photo credit: Wang Ping, Kinship of Rivers Project at the Yangtse River, by Fritz Vandover

Event contact: 

The Poetry Center

Event phone: 

(415) 338-2227

Event sponsor: 

The Poetry Center and Medicine for Nightmares

Watch the unedited video at YouTube before the finished program gets posted at Poetry Center Digital Archive

With emcee, Brandon Brown

Co-sponsored with NYRB Poets and Futurepoem

Supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts

This remote-access event starts promptly at 12:00 pm Pacific Time, and is free and open to the public. Media Captioning provided after the event, at our YouTube channel, and at Poetry Center Digital Archive. For other reasonable accommodations please contact poetry@sfsu.edu

Please note early start-time, to accommodate our guest and audience in the UK, and elsewhere.

The Poetry Center is honored to welcome poets Denise Riley, in a rare US appearance, and Jennifer Soong. Joining us, respectively, from London and the Eastern US, the poets will each read from their work, then engage in conversation, along with emcee Brandon Brown, and the audience.
 

      Maybe; maybe not

      When I was a child I spoke as a thrush, I

      thought as a clod, I understood as a stone,

      but when I became a man I put away

      plain things for lustrous, yet to this day

      squat under hooves for kindness where

      fetlocks stream with mud—shall I never

      get it clear, down in the soily waters.
 

      —Denise Riley, from Say Something Back

British poet Denise Riley is one of the finest and most individual writers at work in English today, and well-known among her peers as one of a generation of poets whose works and correspondences reach across the Atlantic. A distinguished philosopher and feminist theorist as well as poet, Riley has produced a body of work both intellectually uncompromising and emotionally open. Her first collection of poems from an American press appeared in 2020 in the New York Review of Books Poets series—Say Something Back / Time Lived, Without Its Flow includes her widely acclaimed lyric meditation on bereavement, composed, as she has written, “in imagined solidarity with the endless others whose adult children have died, often in far worst circumstances.” The accompanying prose work returns to the subject of grief. Time Lived, Without Its Flow is a book, as she indicates, “not…about death, but an altered condition of life.”

Riley’s poetry collections include Marxism for Infants (1977), Dry Air (1985), Mop Mop Georgette (1993), two selections in the Penguin Modern Poets series (with Douglas Oliver and Iain Sinclair, 1996; and, in 2017, with Maggie Nelson and Claudia Rankine), and, most recently, Selected Poems 1976–2016 (2019). Her critical and philosophical works include War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother (1983); “Am I That Name?”: Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History (1988); The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony (2000); The Force of Language (with Jean-Jacques Lecercle, 2004); and Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect (2005).

      The Augurs

      Come July, the yolk of a year

      is dragged to lie on lawns of velvet sheen.

      Dark-light blades, one-tenth-an-inch wide

      over which the red sun hunches, immobilized.

      With what do we lie, waiting the night

      and the hot black earth to erupt from us

      a muddled report? How little we do.

      How little we rest. How much we demand

      from the daily murders passing

      Vulture-like, like stars.

      —Jennifer Soong, from Near, At
 

Jennifer Soong was born in central New Jersey in the nineties. Her writing has appeared in Social Text, Berfrois, Prelude Magazine, DIAGRAM, and Fanzine, among other places, and been translated into Spanish. She holds a B.A. in English and Visual Studies from Harvard College and is currently a doctoral candidate at Princeton University, where she works on poetry and forgetting. Near, At is her first book.

With emcee, Isabelle Thuy Pelaud

Co-sponsored with DVAN@SFSU, the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network

Supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts

This remote-access event starts promptly at 2:00 pm Pacific Time, and is free and open to the public. Real-Time Captioning link will be provided at the event. Media Captioning provided after the event, at our YouTube channel and at Poetry Center Digital Archive. For other reasonable accommodations please contact poetry@sfsu.edu

Prolific and multi-faceted writers and artists Vi Khi Nao and Dao Strom will be presenting a variety of work and engaging in conversation with one another and with founding director of DVAN and Professor of Asian American Studies at SF State, Isabelle Thuy Pelaud as emcee. We are delighted to work in collaboration once again with DVAN@SFSU for this event. Please note early start time.

• "Vi Khi Nao's language isn't made of words like everyone else's." —Joanna Ruocco
• "We are no longer used to the heart’s engine revving with such quiet, lonely, insistent, anatomical intensity. Not so many people have traveled in Vi Khi Nao’s language mind before. Here is your ticket, a vagrant fragrance."
  —C.D. Wright

Vi Khi Nao is the author of four poetry collections: Human Tetris (11:11 Press, 2019), Sheep Machine (Black Sun Lit, 2018), Umbilical Hospital (Press 1913, 2017), The Old Philosopher (winner of the Nightboat Prize for 2014), and of the short stories collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture (winner of the 2016 FC2 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize), and the novel, Fish in Exile (Coffee House Press, 2016). Her work includes poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration. The Proscenium, “a satire on production and feminism [that] acts as an antithetical or opposition to male’s prolixity on the canvas of the literary canon,” is just out from Ugly Duckling Presse. Vi Khi Nao was the Fall 2019 fellow at the Black Mountain Institute, in Las Vegas, Nevada. More here.

• "Dao Strom’s beautiful poem/memoir/travelog/contemplation, presented in fully bilingual format with Vietnamese translation by Ly Thuy Nguyen, takes us to another place in the struggle: the struggle within the self, for origin, for belonging, for a state of home.... Strom’s fraught and beautiful journey, with its clash and melding of language, allows us to find in the impossibility of homeliness, in the elusiveness of origin, the persistent intelligence of the one who seeks, and who is alive." —Genève Chao, on You WIll Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else

Dao Strom is an artist who works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of the poetry collection, Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020), "an experiment in multimodal poetics—inhabiting a synergistic blend of poetry, music, and visual art," with its musical companion piece, Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press, 2018), which was a finalist for the 2019 Firecracker Award in Poetry; a hybrid-form memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West (2015); and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys (Counterpoint Press, 2019, 2006) and Grass Roof, Tin Roof (Mariner Books, 2003). 

Strom is also the co-founder and creative director of She Who Has No Master(s), a collective project of women writers of the Vietnamese diaspora and a program of the Diaspora Vietnamese Artists Network; and De-Canon, a library/social engagement art project highlighting books and works by writers of color. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of northern California and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop. She lives in Portland, Oregon. More here.

Featured: 

Vi Khi Nao interviewed by Louis Elliot, at BOMB, April 16, 2020

"Artifice Is Part of the Process: An Interview with Dao Strom," by Meghan Lamb, at LA Review of Books, March 16, 2020

"Living in Dreams: Isabelle Thuy Pelaud in Conversation with Vi Khi Nao," at DiaCritics, February 7, 2019