This event is cosponsored by Eastwind Books of Berkeley.
According to scholar Dorothy Wang, “politics and aesthetic concerns are intimately intertwined.” With white supremacist violence against Asians increasing under the COVID-19 pandemic, the call for artistic practices that are intertwined with politics--but also radically anti-racist--is louder than ever. Kazumi Chin, Muriel Leung, and Michelle Lin are three Asian American poets whose work reflects the contestation of racialized violence and the construction of futures beyond hierarchy and dominance. Join us for a reading and conversation, led by MT Vallarta, on what it means to curate an anti-racist Asian American poetics.
Participant Bios:
Kazumi Chin is the author of Having a Coke With Godzilla (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). They are a queer scholar, poet, educator, and game designer. They also co-produce the Kearny Street Workshop podcast We Won't Move: A Living Archive.
Muriel Leung is the author of Imagine Us, The Swarm, forthcoming from Nightboat Books and Bone Confetti, winner of the 2015 Noemi Press Book Award. She is the Poetry Co-Editor of Apogee Journal and co-hosts The Blood-Jet Writing Hour podcast with Rachelle Cruz and MT Vallarta. She is a member of Miresa Collective, a feminist speakers bureau. An Andrew W. Mellon Humanities in a Digital World Fellow, she is completing her PhD in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California.
Michelle Lin is a poet, mixed media artist, and author of A House Made of Water (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). She is the co-host and co-producer of We Won't Move: A Living Archive, a podcast from Kearny Street Workshop about Asian Pacific American arts activism, and the curator of KSW Presents, a reading series for emerging APA writers in the Bay Area.
MT Vallarta is a poet and Ph.D. candidate in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside, and forthcoming Guarini Dean's Pre- to Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian American Studies at Dartmouth College. Their scholarship and poetry can be found in The Velvet Light Trap, VICE, The Bind, Nat. Brut, Apogee Journal, and others.
This event is generously supported by the Friends of the Berkeley Public Library.