Attendees of the Asian American Literature Festival. Photo by Hannah Colen.
Asian American Press and LitHub published articles featuring Kundiman’s work at the Asian American Literature Festival, the bi-annual festival hosted by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Washington, DC, which took place on August 2-4, 2019.
In the piece published in Asian American Press, Pacyinz Lyfoung writes about the literary lounge, workshops on Asian American literature and history, readings by poets such as Ocean Vuong, Sally Wen Mao and many more. Lyfoung conveys the spirit and sense of community that the festival brought, particularly aligning with this year's theme of "Care and Caregiving." On the Queer Literaoke event cohosted by Kundiman, Lyfoung writes:
"And we all laughed and screamed at the power of that moment of absolute community high: this life as Asian American poets and writers is like a huge leap into the glorious unknown and may often end into a dark puddle, but we embrace it with truth, ferocity and fire."
2019 Mentorship Fellow Paul Aster Stone-Tsao also published a wonderful write-up in LitHub, detailing events such as the Pacific Islander Poetry Reading, with poets Christopher Diaz, William Nu’utupu Giles, and Lee Kava, and the VS Podcast Live event, hosted by Danez Smith and Franny Choi and featuring Kundiman’s own Sarah Gambito, Joseph Legaspi, and Cathy Linh Che. Highlighting the powerful necessity of events like these, Stone-Tsao writes:
"As Cathy Linh Che mentioned, there is “a need to write into silence,” to create a sense of integrity in the language/s we choose to learn and speak with a renewed sense of place, present in its multiplicities of culture, race, ethnicity, language. Like a lot of what was touched upon during the Intimate Lectures and Secret Histories talks at the Library of Congress, it is when we choose to interact with our own pasts that we begin to hear the stories the need to be heard now."
Kundiman was thrilled to be a part of a movement that continues to highlight and uplift these very stories that, as Stone-Tsao writes, urgently need to be heard.
Queer Literaoke participants. Photo by Suphada Rom.