This year we look to the stars as we celebrate the dreams of what the future holds. Come gather for a luminous evening at Kundiman’s 2018 “Letters to the Future” 15th Anniversary Benefit Gala. Join us in honoring Myung Mi Kim, Ligaya Mishan, and Monique Truong, three visionary writers who have shaped our past, built our present, and guide us towards our brilliant Asian American futures. Tickets are on sale now –– buy yours today! More info about our Benefit can be found here.
More about our honorees:
Myung Mi Kim is James H. McNulty Chair of English at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. Kim is the author of Penury, Commons, River Antes, DURA, The Bounty, and Under Flag, winner of The Multicultural Publisher’s Exchange Award of Merit. Her work has been anthologized in Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women, Premonitions: Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry, American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics, and other collections. She has received fellowships and honors from the Fund for Poetry, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative North American Poetry, and the State University of New York Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activity.
Ligaya Mishan writes the Hungry City column for the New York Times and is a contributing editor at T magazine. Her essay “Born in the U.S.A.: The Rise, and Triumph, of Asian-American Cuisine” was selected for the inaugural edition of the Best American Food Writing, to be published this fall. Her recent work includes pieces on Polynesian chefs and Filipino food’s entry into the American mainstream. Her literary criticism has appeared in the New York Review of Books, the Times Book Review, and The New Yorker, where she was an editor. She is the daughter of a Filipino mother and a British father, and grew up in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Monique Truong is the Vietnamese American author of the bestselling, award-winning novels The Book of Salt (Houghton Mifflin, 2003) and Bitter in the Mouth (Random House, 2010). Her third novel The Sweetest Fruits is forthcoming from Viking Books in Fall 2019. She is also a co-editor of the seminal anthology Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose (Asian American Writers’ Workshop, 1998). A recipient of a Robert W. Bingham Fellowship, Hodder Fellowship, U.S.-Japan Creative Artists Fellowship, and Guggenheim Fellowship, she currently serves as a vice president of the Authors Guild and on the Creative Advisory Council for Hedgebrook and the Advisory Committee of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network. For PEN America, she was the Chair of the Literary Awards Committee from 2014-2017. Truong is also a former refugee, essayist, lyricist/librettist, avid eater, and retired intellectual property attorney (more or less in this order).