AWP Cave Canem/Kundiman Reading and Salon: Wednesday, April 7, 2010 – 8pm
An AWP Off-Site Event
Cave Canem & Kundiman Reading & Salon at the Mercury Café: an AWP Off-Site Event.
Featuring Toi Derricotte, Sarah Gambito, Cornelius Eady, Oliver de la Paz, Dawn Lundy Martin & Kazim Ali + a salon featuring Cave Canem and Kundiman fellows & family (bring a poem to share!).
Emceed by Ching-In Chen & Tara Betts.
The Mercury Café
2199 California Street
Denver, CO 80205
(303) 294-9281
http://www.mercurycafe.com
$3 suggested donation -- to benefit Cave Canem & Kundiman (no one turned away for lack of funds).
About Our Featured Readers:
Toi Derricotte is the author of a memoir, The Black Notebooks, and four books of poetry, Tender, Captivity (which won the Paterson Poetry Prize), Natural Birth, and Empress of the Death House. She has received numerous awards, including a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, and two Pushcart Prizes. The Black Notebooks received the Anisfield—Wolf Award and was a New York Times Notable book of the year. In 2008, she received the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers, Inc., the Distinguished Alumni/Alumnae Award from New York University Graduate School of Arts and Science, and the Elizabeth Kray Award for Service to Poetry from Poets House. She is the co-founder of Cave Canem, the historic workshop/retreat for African American poets.
Sarah Gambito is the author of the poetry collections Delivered (Persea Books) and Matadora (Alice James Books). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Iowa Review, The Antioch Review, Denver Quarterly, The New Republic, Field, Quarterly West, Fence and other journals. Her honors include the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets and Writers and grants and fellowships from The New York Foundation for the Arts, Urban Artists Initiative and The MacDowell Colony. She is Assistant Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Fordham University. Together with Joseph O. Legaspi, she co-founded Kundiman, a non-profit organization serving Asian American poets.
Cornelius Eady is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Hardheaded Weather (Penguin, 2008). Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, (Ommation Press, 1986) won the 1985 Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets; The Gathering of My Name, (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1991) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama, and a production of Brutal Imagination (with a score by Diedre Murray) won the 2002 Oppenheimer award for the best first play by an American Playwright. He is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Literature; a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry; a Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Traveling Scholarship; a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to Bellagio, Italy; The Prairie Schooner Strousse Award (1994); and the Elizabeth Kray Award for service to the field of poetry from Poets House. With Toi Derricotte, he is co-founder of Cave Canem. He is associate professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.
Oliver de la Paz is the author of three collections of poetry, Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby (SIU Press 2001, 2007), and the forthcoming Requiem for the Orchard (U. of Akron Press 2010), winner of the Akron Prize for poetry chosen by Martìn Espada. He co-chairs the advisory board of Kundiman, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of Asian American Poetry. A recipient of a NYFA Fellowship Award and a GAP Grant from Artist Trust, his work has appeared in journals like Virginia Quarterly Review, North American Review, Tin House, Chattahoochee Review, and in anthologies such as Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation. He teaches at Western Washington University.
Kazim Ali's books of poetry include The Far Mosque, The Fortieth Day, and a cross-genre memoir Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities. He is also the author of two novels, Quinn's Passage and The Disappearance of Seth, and a translation of Marguerite Duras' novel Love. In 2010, his Orange Alert: Essays on Poetry, Art and the Architecture of Silence will be published by the University of Michigan Press in their Poets on Poetry Series. In addition to his work as a yoga teacher and political organizer, Kazim teaches at Oberlin College and in the Stonecoast low-residency MFA program. Kazim also co-founded Nightboat Books in 2004 with Jennifer Chapis.
Dawn Lundy Martin was awarded the Cave Canem Poetry Prize by Carl Phillips for her manuscript, A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering (University of Georgia Press, 2007). She is the author of The Morning Hour, selected in 2003 by C.D. Wright for the Poetry Society of America's National Chapbook Fellowship. Among her many honors include Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists Grants for Poetry in 2002 and 2006 and the 2008 Academy of American Arts and Sciences May Sarton Prize for Poetry. Excerpts from her new manuscript, DISCIPLINE, can be found in Daedalus, Tuesday: An Art Project, Hambone and Jubilat. She is a founding member of the Black Took Collective, a group of experimental black poets that performs at universities and colleges around the country; co-editor of a collection of essays, The Fire This Time: Young Activists And The New Feminism (Anchor Books, 2004); and a founder of the Third Wave Foundation in New York, a national young feminist organization. She is an assistant professor of English in the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh.
About Our Emcees:
Ching-In Chen is the author of The Heart's Traffic (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press). The daughter of Chinese immigrants, she is a Kundiman, Macondo and Lambda Fellow.
Tara Betts is the author of Arc & Hue. She teaches creative writing at Rutgers University, and she is a Cave Canem fellow.
About Our Organizations:
Cave Canem is a home for the many voices of African American poetry and is committed to cultivating the artistic and professional growth of African American poets. In addition to an annual writing retreat, programs include two book prizes with prestigious presses; workshops in New York City; Legacy Conversations; a Poets on Craft series; nationally based readings and panels; and the publication of two anthologies. http://www.cavecanempoets.org/
Kundiman is an organization dedicated to the creation, cultivation and promotion of Asian American poetry by creating an affirming and rigorous space where Asian American poets can explore, through art, the unique challenges that face the new and ever changing diaspora. In order to help mentor the next generation of Asian-American poets, Kundiman sponsors an annual Poetry Retreat for emerging Asian American poets. http://kundiman.squarespace.com/