September 18 & 20: #LITINCOLOR at The Brooklyn Book Festival

Friday, September 18, 2015
7:00 PM
Unnameable Books, 600 Vanderbilt Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11238

Poets Yesenia Montilla and Angel Nafis join non­fiction writer Amarnath Ravva and fiction writer Gina Apostol to celebrate writers of color. The authors will read from New York­-based writers of color that have influenced them, and from their own work. This reading is presented by Asian American literary organizations Kaya Press and Kundiman, who will be sharing a booth at the Brooklyn Book Festival on Sunday Sept. 20th. #LitinColor is a campaign to draw attention to the influence of writers of color on the national imagination.

Bios:

GINA APOSTOL's last novel, Gun Dealers’ Daughter, won the 2013 PEN/Open Book Award and was shortlisted for the 2014 William Saroyan International Prize. Her first two novels, Bibliolepsy and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, both won the Juan Laya Prize for the Novel (Philippine National Book Award). She is working on William McKinley’s World, a novel set in Balangiga and Tacloban in 1901, during the Philippine-American War. She was writer-in-residence at Phillips Exeter Academy and a fellow at Civitella Ranieri in Umbria, Italy, among other fellowships. Her essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Foreign Policy, Gettysburg Review, Massachusetts Review, and others. She lives in New York City and western Massachusetts and grew up in Tacloban, the Philippines. She teaches at the Fieldston School in New York City.

YESENIA MONTILLA is a New York City poet with Afro-Caribbean roots. Her poetry has appeared in the chapbook For the Crowns of Your Head, as well as the literary journals 5AM,Adanna, The Wide Shore and others. She received her MFA from Drew University in Poetry and Poetry in Translation and is a CantoMundo Fellow. Her first collection The Pink Box will be published by Willow Books in October of 2015.

ANGEL NAFIS (Brooklyn, NY) is a Cave Canem Fellow. Her work has appeared in The Rattling Wall, Union Station Magazine, MUZZLE Magazine, Mosaic Magazine and Poetry Magazine. She is an Urban Word NYC Mentor and the founder, curator, and host of the quarterly Greenlight Bookstore Poetry Salon reading series. She is the author of BlackGirl Mansion (Red Beard Press/ New School Poetics, 2012). Facilitating generative writing workshops and reading poems across the United States and Canada, she lives in Brooklyn.

California-based writer AMARNATH RAVVA (Los Angeles, CA) is the author of American Canyon (Kaya Press, 2014). He has performed at LACMA, Machine Project, the MAK Center at the Schindler House, New Langton Arts, the Hammer Museum, USC, Pomona, CalArts, and the Sorbonne. In addition to his writing practice, he is a member of the site specific ambient music supergroup Ambient Force 3000, and for the past nine years he has helped run and curate events at Betalevel, a venue for social experimentation and hands-on culture located in Los Angeles’ Chinatown. He is currently working on a book about Victorian era botanical expeditions called The Glass House.

Facebook Event Page here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1719097484980473/

Kundiman & Kaya Booth at the Brooklyn Book FestivaL

Sunday, September 20th, 10am – 6pm
Table #247

Join Kaya Press and Kundiman for a scavenger hunt and readings by writers of color at Table #247 at The Brooklyn Book Festival. 

June 26: 2015 Kundiman Retreat Public Reading

KUNDIMAN PUBLIC READING W/ SANDRA LIM, BAO PHI, ARTHUR SZE, GINA APOSTOL, PETER HO DAVIES, & SIGRID NUNEZ 

Come celebrate Kundiman's 12th Annual Writing Retreat as retreat faculty Sandra Lim, Bao Phi, Arthur Sze, Gina Apostol, Peter Ho Davies, & Sigrid Nunez share work with 2015 Kundiman Retreat Fellows. Also sharing their work will be this year's graduating fellows Janine Joseph and W. Todd Kaneko!

Friday, June 26th, 7:00 pm
Fordham University, Lincoln Center
113 W. 60th Street (at Columbus Avenue)
12th Floor Lounge

Directions
Take A, B, C, D & 1 trains to Columbus Circle.
Exit at 60th Street & Broadway. Go west of Columbus Avenue. Upon entering the glass doors inform the security desk that you are attending the Asian American Poetry event. Take escalators up 1 floor to Plaza level. Take elevator up to the 11th floor. Take stairs 1 flight up to the 12th Floor. Enter 12th Floor Lounge.

Free and open to the public. Reception to follow!

***

Sandra Lim is the author of The Wilderness (W.W. Norton, 2014), selected by Louise Glück for the most recent Barnard Women Poets Prize, and a previous collection of poetry, Loveliest Grotesque (Kore Press, 2006). A 2015 Pushcart Prize winner, she has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Getty Research Institute. Lim was born in Seoul, Korea and educated at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell and lives in Cambridge, MA.


Bao Phi has been a performance poet since 1991. A two-time Minnesota Grand Slam champion and a National Poetry Slam finalist, Bao Phi has appeared on HBO Presents Russell Simmons Def Poetry, and a poem of his appeared in the 2006 Best American Poetry anthology. His first collection of poems, Sông I Sing, was published by Coffee House Press in 2011 to critical acclaim. He has been a City Pages and Star Tribune Artist of the Year. He was recently awarded a Minnesota State Arts Board grant to work on his newest manuscript in 2015. He is the Program Director of the Loft Literary Center.


Arthur Sze published three books in 2014: his ninth book of poetry, Compass Rose (Copper Canyon), a collaboration with artist Susan York, The Unfolding Center (Radius Books), and a bilingual selected poems, Chinese/English, Pig’s Heaven Inn (Beijing: Intellectual Property Publishing House). His other books of poetry include The Ginkgo Light, Quipu, The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998, and Archipelago. A professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts, as well as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Sze lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.


Gina Apostol's last novel, Gun Dealers' Daughter, won the 2013 Pen/Open Book Award and was shortlisted for the 2014 William Saroyan International Prize. Her first two novels, Bibliolepsy and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, both won the Juan Laya Prize for the Novel (Philippine National Book Award). She is working on William McKinley's World, a novel set in Balangiga and Tacloban in 1901, during the Philippine-American War. She lives in New York City and western Massachusetts and grew up in Tacloban, Philippines.


Peter Ho Davies is the author of the novel The Welsh Girl and collections The Ugliest House in the World and Equal Love. A new novel, Your Name in Chinese, is due out in 2016. Born in Britain to Welsh and Chinese parents, Davies now makes his home in the US. He has taught at the University of Oregon, Emory and Northwestern and is now on the faculty of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.


Sigrid Nunez has published six novels: A Feather on the Breath of God, Naked Sleeper, Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury, For Rouenna, The Last of Her Kind, and Salvation City. Her most recent book is Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. Nunez received a Whiting Writer’s Award in 1993. She was the 2000-2001 Rome Prize Fellow in Literature at the American Academy in Rome. In 2003, she was elected as a Literature Fellow to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In spring 2005, she was the Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. Nunez has taught at Amherst College, Smith College, Columbia University, Princeton University and the New School. She lives in New York City.