Announcing our Asian American Feminist Writing Workshop

We're very excited to announce our new Asian American Feminist Writing Workshop, developed in collaboration with the Asian American Feminist Collective. Applications open today, October 1st, and close November 1st, 2020.

This program will include workshops, small group writing sessions, and culminate in the creation of a brand-new zine. Classes will focus on exploring the history of Asian American feminism as well as essential writings by feminists of color. This program will run from February 2021–May 2021. More program information and details here!

Welcome Home: A Kundiman Virtual Fundraiser

It brings us great joy to introduce to you all Welcome Home: A Kundiman Virtual Fundraiser on Wednesday, October 21st, 8pm ET/5pm PT through Zoom. For this event, Asian American actors from the stage and screen will share their favorite selections of Asian American literature.

Proudly hosted by Emmy Award-winning journalist, a medical analyst for CNN, doctor, and Kundiman fellow, Seema Yasmin will treat you to an evening of inspiring readings by special guests Vinny Chhibber from The Red Line produced by Ava Duvernay & Greg Berlanti, Ali Ewoldt the first Asian American Christine in Phantom of the Opera on Broadway, Daniel K. Isaac who plays Ben Kim in Showtime's Billions, Ken Leung best known for his roles in the films Rush Hour, Keeping the Faith, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Aparna Nancherla a series regular in Comedy Central’s Corporate and has reprised her role in season 3 of HBO’s Crashing, and Courtney Reed originated the role of ‘Princess Jasmine’ in Disney’s smash Broadway hit Aladdin, a chat and recipe share with superstar chef Angela Dimayuga and acclaimed food writer Ligaya Mishan, an online literary, art, and jewelry auction, and uplifting words from Kundiman’s co-founders, Sarah Gambito and Joseph Legaspi.

All proceeds from the event will support free readings, writing workshops, a community building retreat, in-depth mentorship, and other virtual offerings that raise Asian American voices everywhere.

Purchase your tickets here. If you can't attend, we would appreciate a contribution in honor of the event.

Announcing Kundiman's Poetry Coalition Fellow

We are excited to introduce the newest member of Kundiman’s staff –– Steven Duong, our new Poetry Coalition Fellow! Steven Duong is a Vietnamese American writer and artist from San Diego. His poems have appeared in The Margins, The Massachusetts Review, AGNI, Passages North, Pleiades, and elsewhere. As a 2019 Thomas J. Watson Fellow, he traveled to Malawi, China, Thailand, and Vietnam, conducting his global writing project, "Freshwater Fish and the Poetry of Containment." A 2020 Djanikian Scholar in Poetry for The Adroit Journal, he currently serves as a guest editor at Palette Poetry.

On May 22, 2020, the Poetry Coalition launched the Poetry Coalition Fellowship program, a three-year pilot program that will offer paid fellowship positions to five fellows per year (a total of fifteen fellows) who will each assist a different Poetry Coalition organization for twenty hours per week over the course of a forty-week period. The five organizations hosting the inaugural Poetry Coalition Fellows beginning September 15, 2020 are CantoMundo, Cave Canem, Kundiman, Mizna, and Split This Rock.

One Poem Festival: A Protest Reading in Support of Black Lives

On August 18, 2020, the founding members of the Poetry Coalition, a national alliance of more than 25 organizations dedicated to working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture, presented a live broadcast ONE POEM: A Protest Reading in Support of Black Lives via Crowdcast. You can watch the full reading here.

Please consider giving to organizations and efforts working against racial injustice, including those recommended by the founding members of the Poetry Coalition here.

The poets featured in One Poem: A Protest Reading in Support of Black Lives were Prisca Afantchao, Sojourner Ahebee, Kazim Ali, Kimberly Blaeser, Jericho Brown, Cortney Lamar Charleston, Meera Dasgupta, Kwame Dawes, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Safia Elhillo, Martín Espada, Sesshu Foster, Kimberly Jae, Raina J. León, Mwatabu Okantah, Arsimmer McCoy, Alberto Ríos, Terisa Siagatonu, Matthew Thompson, Emma Trelles, Nikki Wallschlaeger, Monica Youn, and avery r. young.

Bookshop.org Reading Lists

We're on Bookshop.org! Now whenever you purchase a book off one of our Bookshop.org reading lists, 10% of proceeds go to Kundiman.

Some reading lists we've compiled are: Kundiman Summer 2020 Faculty, Poetry & Protest Workshop with Purvi Shah, Black & Asian Feminist Solidarities. 20 Books to Read for Pride Month, and 10 Books to Read for Asian Pacific American Heritage Month.

Click here to explore our Bookshop.org page.

Introducing Kundiman's Summer Sessions

For the month of August, we're offering virtual Summer Sessions for writers across all genres. Each class takes place on one Saturday for 2–3 hours. All classes are open to BIPOC writers and scholarships are available. Registration is open now!

On August 1st from 2:00–5:00 PM ET, Aimee Nezhukumatathil will be teaching a hybrid generative class called "The Edge of the Sea is a Strange & Beautiful Place: Hybrid Poetry & Prose Experiments." The class will interrogate and investigate the "strange and beautiful place" of genre-blurring work. Registration for this class closes on 7/31 at 6 PM EST and scholarship applications are closed.

Jessica Hagedorn, alongside Sarah Gambito and Joseph O. Legaspi, will teach "Tough Love," a generative class for writers in all genres. On August 8th from 2:00–4:00 PM ET, the class will discuss writing and making art in a time of pandemic anxiety and massive civil unrest. This class is now full and scholarship applications are closed.

On August 15th from 2:00–5:00 PM ET, Kimiko Hahn will teach a class on zuihitsu, a Japanese hybrid poetic form that uses fragments, juxtapositions, and contradictions to "follow the brush." Registration for this class will close on 8/14 at 12 PM EST and scholarship applications close on 8/1.

Cathy Park Hong will teach “Documentary Hybrid Forms,” a class that will look at the craft & politics of documentary poetry, essays, and other hybrid forms. On August 22nd from 2:00–5:00 PM ET, we’ll examine how to research, what it means to document, and more. Registration for this class will close on 8/21 at 12 PM EST and scholarship applications close on 8/1.

We hope to offer more virtual programming in the future. Stay in touch!

20 Books to Read for Pride

20 Books to Read for Pride

Here are some of our favorite books by LGBTQIA+ identifying Asian American writers for you to read! Each book links to bookshop.org, where you can purchase a book and also support local independent bookstores.

Curated by Fia Zhang Swanson

Inquisition by Kazim Ali

Queer, Muslim, American, Kazim Ali has always navigated complex intersections and interstices on order to make a life. In this scintillating mixture of lyrics, narrative, fragments, prose poem and spoken word, he answers long standing questions about the role of the poet or artist in times of political or social upheaval, although he answers under duress—an inquisition is dangerous, after all. Ali engages history, politics, and the dangerous regions of the uncharted heart in this visceral new collection.

: once teeth bones coral : by Kimberly Alidio

cheena marie lo writes: “In : once teeth bones coral :, Kimberly Alidio pulls language apart and what remains is as striking as it is spare. The form here is a container, haunting in its spaciousness, and gestures towards landscapes, borders, trauma, tenderness, home. Alidio’s poems reveal the ‘luminous familiar,’ traces of the interior that make visible the simultaneity of histories and futures, the possibilities inherent in queer connection, kinship, and refusal. These fragments are precise and expansive, and will resonate for a very long time.”

If They Come for Us by Fatimah Asghar

If They Come for Us is an imaginative, soulful debut poetry collection that captures the experiences of being a young Pakistani Muslim woman in contemporary America. Orphaned as a child, Asghar grapples with coming of age and navigating questions of sexuality and race without the guidance of a mother or father. These poems at once bear anguish, joy, vulnerability, and compassion, while also exploring the many facets of violence: how it persists within us, how it is inherited across generations, and how it manifests itself in our relationships. In experimental forms and language both lyrical and raw, Asghar seamlessly braids together marginalized people’s histories with her own understanding of identity, place, and belonging.

The Galleons by Rick Barot

These poems are engaged in the work of recovery, making visible what is often intentionally erased: the movement of domestic workers on a weekday morning in Brooklyn; a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, fondly sharing photos of his dog; the departure and destination points of dozens of galleons between 1564 and 1815, these ships evoking both the vast movements of history and the individual journeys of those borne along by their tides. “Her story is a part of something larger, it is a part / of history,” Barot writes of his grandmother. “No, her story is an illumination // of history, a matchstick lit in the black seam of time.”

Crossfire – A Litany for Survival by Staceyann Chin

Crossfire collects Staceyann Chin's empowering, feminist-LGBTQ-Caribbean, activist-driven poetry. According to The New York Times, Chin is “sassy, rageful and sometimes softly self-mocking.” The Advocate says that her poems, “combine hilarious one-liners with a refusal to conform” and note “Chin is out to confront more than just the straight world.”

Soft Science by Franny Choi

Soft Science explores queer Asian American femininity. A series of Turing Test-inspired poems grounds its exploration of questions not just of identity, but of consciousness—how to be tender and feeling and still survive a violent world filled with artificial intelligence and automation. We are dropped straight into the tangled intersections of technology, violence, erasure, agency, gender, and loneliness.

Documents by Jan-Henry Gray

Rooted in the experience of living in America as a queer undocumented Filipino, Documents maps the byzantine journey toward citizenship through legal records and fragmented recollections. In poems that repurpose the forms and procedures central to an immigrant’s experiences—birth certificates, identification cards, letters, and interviews—Jan-Henry Gray reveals the narrative limits of legal documentation while simultaneously embracing the intersections of identity, desire, heritage, love, and a new imagining of freedom.

Connor & Seal by Jee Leong Koh

Inspired by Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah, Connor & Seal is a queering of poetic lineage. These poems innovate the public and private axes of gay love in a tumescent future. We meet Connor, a native Nebraskan and fledgling grant writer, and Seal, a financial analyst from Kingston, Jamaica, as they flummox the space between desire and demise, “the sun again a big orange pill / stuck in the blue throat of the sky.” Connor & Seal serves as almanac to a time not far off, of techno-queer bots, state-sponsored violence, and individual resistance. Each poem in Connor & Seal becomes a cipher of the labor of tomorrow’s construction: “a bench where two old faggots had to stop,” an emblem of a future history, “as quiet as the siren / is alarming.”

The Importance of Being Wilde at Heart by R. Zamora Linmark

This is a tender, quirky story of one seventeen-year-old boy’s journey through first love and first heartbreak, guided by his personal hero, Oscar Wilde. Words have always been more than enough for Ken Z, but when he meets Ran at the mall food court, everything changes. Beautiful, mysterious Ran opens the door to a number of firsts for Ken: first kiss, first love. But as quickly as he enters Ken’s life, Ran disappears, and Ken Z is left wondering: Why love at all, if this is where it leads?

Let It Ride by Timothy Liu

Timothy Liu explores how the necessities of life and art dovetail to open up a vital path forward at midlife. Let It Ride integrates life's struggles at midlife by way of disintegration. These poems argue for a life that is more than amusement—rather, a mythic venture waiting to be embodied, embarked upon. Let It Ride show us that, sometimes, if you happen to get lucky, if you have the good fortune to jot a few things down—you just might stand a chance to walk away from the crowded table with shreds of your soul intact.

Females by Andrea Long Chu

Females is Andrea Long Chu’s genre-defying investigation into sex and lies, desperate artists and reckless politics, the smothering embrace of gender and the punishing force of desire. Drawing inspiration from a forgotten play by Valerie Solanas, Chu aims her searing wit and surgical intuition at targets ranging from performance art to psychoanalysis, incels to porn.

Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden

Acclaimed literary essayist T Kira Mahealani Madden's raw and redemptive debut memoir is about coming of age and reckoning with desire as a queer, biracial teenager amidst the fierce contradictions of Boca Raton, Florida, a place where she found cult-like privilege, shocking racial disparities, rampant white-collar crime, and powerfully destructive standards of beauty hiding in plain sight.

The Cowherd’s Son by Rajiv Mohabir

Rajiv Mohabir uses his queer and mixed-caste identities as grace notes to charm alienation into silence. Mohabir's inheritance of myths, folk tales, and multilingual translations make a palimpsest of histories that bleed into one another. A descendant of indentureship survivors, the poet- narrator creates an allegorical chronicle of dislocations and relocations, linking India, Guyana, Trinidad, New York, Orlando, Toronto, and Honolulu, combining the amplitude of mythology with direct witness and sensual reckoning, all the while seeking joy in testimony.

To Afar From Afar by Soham Patel

This collection hinges on the image of a globe. Composed as three long poems in the second person interrupted by a visual fragmented movement. The modes address (to afar/from afar) are informed by distances made by war and globalization. With collage, maps, lyric nonfictions, storytelling, chants, sonnets, treated screenshots, a sestina, and new family pictures of old places –– this book addresses displacement, memory and the darkness and light they bring.

Marianna’s Beauty Salon by Bushra Rehman

“Bushra Rehman's debut collection singes in its interrogation of the American dream while capturing the lives of a neighborhood in transition. These sly, adept poems work through circumstances under threat with audacity, humor, and wonder. Rehman offers a new kind of fairy tale, surreal yet rooted in harsh, ugly modern realities. Simply and profoundly, her book is a love poem for Muslim girls, Queens, and immigrants making sense of their foreign home--and surviving.” –Joseph O. Legaspi, author of Threshold and Imago

The Foley Artist by Ricco Siasoco

Ricco Villanueva Siasoco’s powerful debut collection opens new regions of American feeling and thought as it interrogates intimacy, foreignness, and silence in an absurd world. These nine stories give voice to the intersectional identities of women and men in the Filipino diaspora in America: a straight woman attends her ex-boyfriend’s same-sex marriage in coastal Maine; a college-bound teenager encounters his deaf uncle in Manila; Asian American drag queens duke it out in the annual Iowa State Fair; a seventy-nine-year-old Foley artist recreates the sounds of life, but is finally unable to save himself.

Fairest by Meredith Talusan

Fairest is a memoir about a precocious boy with albinism, a “sun child” from a rural Philippine village, who would grow up to become a woman in America. Coping with the strain of parental neglect and the elusive promise of U.S. citizenship, Talusan found childhood comfort from her devoted grandmother, a grounding force as she was treated by others with special preference or public curiosity. As an immigrant to the United States, Talusan came to be perceived as white. An academic scholarship to Harvard provided access to elite circles of privilege but required Talusan to navigate through the complex spheres of race, class, sexuality, and her place within the gay community.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.

Lucy 72 by Ronaldo Wilson

Giovanni Singleton writes, "LUCY 72 is an intricate, multi-faceted, rarely used underhand serve executed with the power and skill of a masterful languager. Wilson undertakes and asserts a new kind of self-reflexive portraiture in which all manner of 'body' is addressed. The body historical, the racial body, the flesh body, all gather in an open-air refusal to conform, to resign. Here agency is fiercely nuanced––petaled and thorned...the gloves have come off. Raise your racquet. Loose your head and heart. These poems are a guidebook of rosary beads for crossing the street, returning an out wide serve, and for being transcendently human."

The Year of Blue Water by Yanyi

How can a search for self‑knowledge reveal art as a site of community? Yanyi’s poems weave experiences of immigration as a Chinese American, of racism, of mental wellness, and of gender from a queer and trans perspective. Between the contrast of high lyric and direct prose poems, Yanyi invites the reader to consider how to speak with multiple identities through trauma, transition, and ordinary life. This collection gives voice to the multifaceted humanity within all of us and inspires attention, clarity, and hope through art-making and community.

Introducing Kundiman's Online Classes

With the intention of sustaining warmth, connection, and collective art-making at this time, we're happy to unveil virtual opportunities to write and commune together with a new set of online classes this summer! All classes will meet once a week for 6 weeks and have a scholarship spot available, and are open to all writers of color. Registration is open now!

Starting on June 15th, T Kira Madden will be teaching a course for fiction and nonfiction writers focusing on setups and payoffs called "The Hook."

George Abraham will teach "It's My Party and I'll __ If I Want to: Mess & Memory in Poetry" starting on July 15th.

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan will be helping fiction writers to "Jumpstart Your Novel" beginning July 21st!

We’ll hope to offer more virtual programs in the future. Stay in touch with us if you have any suggestions!

Announcing Our 2020 Mentorship Lab Fellows and Finalists!

We are thrilled to announce the Mentorship Fellows & Finalists for our 2020 Mentorship Lab!

Starting in August, we'll be welcoming these nine emerging writers to our second Mentorship Lab, which includes multi-genre master classes, intimate writing workshops, a $1000 stipend, and individual mentorship meetings. This year's Fellows will be learning alongside Hala Alyan, our Poetry Mentor; Gina Apostol, our Fiction Mentor; Ching-In Chen, our Poetry/Cross-Genre Mentor; and Mayukh Sen, our Creative Nonfiction Mentor! The Mentorship Lab will run from July 2020–December 2020 and close with a culminating reading. We're looking forward to sharing this space of creation, collaboration, and community with everyone involved.

Congratulations to our 2020 Mentorship Fellows:

Veasna Has, Creative Nonfiction Fellow
Promiti Islam, Creative Nonfiction Fellow
Wilson Wong, Creative Nonfiction Fellow
Christopher James Llego, Fiction Fellow
Yasmin Adele Majeed, Fiction Fellow
Sarah Wang, Fiction Fellow
Huiying B. Dandelion, Poetry Fellow
Ayesha Raees, Poetry Fellow
t. tran le, Poetry Fellow

We'd also like to congratulate the finalists of the Mentorship Lab.

Creative Nonfiction Finalists:

Hannah Bae
Julie Chen
Giaae Kwon
Hunter Lu
Nara Shin

Fiction Finalists:

Brandon Choi
Maz Do
Amy Haejung
Sunny Lee
Aarti Monteiro

Poetry Finalists:

Melissa Ho
Mingpei Li
Alice Liang
Angbeen Saleem
Sharanya Sharma

You can learn more about our 2020 Mentorship Lab Fellows and Mentors here. We're grateful to the Jerome Foundation, whose support made this program possible.

2020 Mentorship Lab Fellows, from L-R by row:
Promiti Islam, Huiying B. Dandelion, Ayesha Raaes
Christopher James Llego, Yasmin Adele Majeed, t. tran le
Sarah Wang, Veasna Has, Wilson Wong