June 15 – 19, 2016
Fordham University
Rose Hill Campus
New York City
Now accepting applications for the
2016 Kundiman Asian American Writing Retreat
In order to help mentor the next generation of Asian American writers, Kundiman sponsors an annual Retreat in partnership with Fordham University. During the Retreat, nationally renowned Asian American poets and writers conduct workshops with fellows. This year's faculty members are Jaswinder Bolina, Kimiko Hahn, Lee Herrick, Porochista Khakpour, R. Zamora Linmark, and Bich Minh Nguyen. Kundiman provides a safe and instructive environment that identifies and addresses the unique challenges faced by emerging Asian American writers. Our hope is that fellows are able to forge a deeper relationship to their artistic process and are able to encounter their work with renewed focus and energy.
To apply, submit a cover letter and a brief writing sample of your genre. For poets, submit a writing sample of 5–7 pages. Fiction writers, submit a writing sample of 5 pages (1250 words max). The deadline to apply is January 5th, 2016. Accepted fellows will be notified in late January.
For the poetry application, please click here: https://kundiman.submittable.com/submit
For the fiction application, please click here: https://kundiman.submittable.com/submit
For more information about the Retreat, watch this video: https://vimeo.com/72058947
Photo Credit: Margarita Corporan
Poetry Faculty
Jaswinder Bolina is author of the poetry collections Phantom Camera, winner of the 2012 Green Rose Prize from New Issues Press, and Carrier Wave, winner of the 2006 Colorado Prize for Poetry. His recent poems are collected in the digital chapbook The Tallest Building in America (2014). They have also appeared in numerous U.S. and international literary journals and in The Best American Poetry series. His essays have appeared on The Poetry Foundation, The Huffington Post, The State, The Writer, and in several anthologies including Poets on Teaching (University of Iowa Press 2011), Language: A Reader for Writers (Oxford University Press 2013), and in the forthcoming 14th edition of The Norton Reader. Bolina is a professor of poetry in the MFA Program at the University of Miami.
Kimiko Hahn has been attracted to disparate source material over her nine collections of poetry—whether Flaubert's sex-tour in The Unbearable Heart, an exhumation in The Artist's Daughter or classical Japanese forms in The Narrow Road to the Interior. Rarefied fields of science prompted her latest collections Toxic Flora and Brain Fever. An advocate of chapbooks, her latest is The Cryptic Chamber. She is a distinguished professor at Queens College, City University of New York.
Lee Herrick is the Fresno Poet Laureate and the author of two books, Gardening Secrets of the Dead and This Many Miles from Desire. His poems have appeared in The Bloomsbury Review, ZYZZYVA, Highway 99: A Literary Journey Through California’s Great Central Valley, 2nd edition, and Indivisible: Poems of Social Justice, among others. Born in Daejeon, South Korea and adopted at ten months, he lives in Fresno, California and teaches at Fresno City College and in the low-residency MFA Program at Sierra Nevada College.
Fiction Faculty
R. Zamora Linmark is the author of the best-selling novel Rolling the R’s, the novel Leche, and three collections of poetry. He has received fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission. His stage adaptation of Rolling the R’s premiered in Honolulu in 2008 to critical and commercial success. He has lectured and taught, as a distinguished visiting professor in Creative Writing, in universities in the U.S. and the Philippines. Linmark divides his time between Manila and Honolulu.
Bich Minh Nguyen is the author of the novel Short Girls, which was named an American Book Award winner in fiction and a Library Journal best book of the year. Her memoir, Stealing Buddha's Dinner, received the PEN/Jerard Award from the PEN American Center and was a Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year. Her most recent novel is Pioneer Girl. Nguyen has taught fiction and creative nonfiction in the MFA Program at Purdue University and the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco. She and her family live in the Bay Area.
Porochista Khakpour was born in Tehran, raised in Los Angeles and lives in New York City. She the author of the forthcoming memoir Sick (HarperPerennial, 2017), and the novels The Last Illusion (Bloomsbury, 2014)—a 2014 "Best Book of the Year" according to NPR, Kirkus, Buzzfeed, Popmatters, Electric Literature, and more— and SONS AND OTHER FLAMMABLE OBJECTS (Grove, 2007), the 2007 California Book Award winner in “First Fiction,” one of the Chicago Tribune’s “Fall’s Best,” and a New York Times “Editor’s Choice.” Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming in Harper’s, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera America, Bookforum, Slate, Salon, Spin, The Daily Beast, Elle,and many other publications around the world. She is currently Editor at Large at The Scofield and Contributing Editor at The Offing, and Writer in Residence at Bard College.
To see a full list faculty from previous years, please click here: http://kundiman.org/faculty/
Photo Credit: Margarita Corporan
Testimonials
"As soon as I arrived, I was greeted so warmly as if I was among old friends! Here was a group of dynamic people who shared both my struggles—being a writer of color in America—and my passions: a deep devotion to the art of poetry. I've always heard, read, and spoken about the importance of community in any artistic endeavor. The poet's road can be a lonely one; the drifting heart needs its anchors. But I never realized how empowering a community of artists could be until I spent four days with the Kundiman staff, teachers, and fellows. I found there what I failed to find in my MFA program, or in any other poetry workshop I've taken: a deep respect and honor among poets; a desire to talk about race, identity, and history, in conjunction with one's composition process; and a willingness to be brave, to fail, and to look silly. The sillier the better! In fact, the laughter, energy, and spark never expired, despite the hot, long days and even longer nights. I thank the founders of Kundiman and the entire staff for having the vision to create and maintain such a fierce
––Brynn Saito
"Kundiman has been a transformative experience toward courage and sensitivity. Never have I been surrounded by such an instant sense of family and fellowship, of bread-breaking over poetry. Writing and reading poems during the retreat were rare opportunities to be vulnerable without judgment. There are no words for the dams that break when we realize we don't have to apologize for ourselves as poets or minorities and can be our whole, complex selves. The Kundiman retreat and family exist in a pocket outside of real time for me, in a space where I learn to push myself beyond what I thought were grace and poise, to a new kind of balance, support, joy, and permission. Kundiman teaches me to live my poems; my successes are worth little without the celebration of this
––Henry W. Leung
For more testimonials, please visit this link: http://kundiman.org/testimonials/
If you have any questions, please contact us at info@kundiman.org. We look forward to reading your applications!