Kundiman will be hosting Intersecting Lineages as a part of the 2017 Thinking Its Presence Conference. In this reading Michelle Chan Brown, Jennifer S. Cheng, Chen Chen, Jane Wong, and Jai Dulani will use both their work and the works of other writers to explore the hybrid, cross-community fertilization found in poetry.
Born in London, Michelle Chan Brown grew up in Prague, Krakow, Moscow, Belgrade, and Kiev. She earned a BA and an MFA at the University of Michigan, where she was a Rackham Fellow.
In her poems, Brown pairs psychological and social investigations into themes of identity, distance, and home. A poetry editor for Drunken Boat, Brown has received scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Vermont Studio Center, a Kundiman fellowship and a Fulbright scholarship to Kazakhstan, a journey she recorded in her blog, Year of the Horse. Her work has won such accolades as the Kore First Book Award, and Jean Feldman Poetry Prize.
Jai Dulani is a writer and multimedia artist who has worked for racial and gender justice at the intersections of LGBTQ, youth, immigrant justice and anti-violence movements for over a decade in New York City. He is co-editor of the anthology The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities.
An interdisciplinary storyteller, Dulani has been a Kundiman Asian American Poet Fellow, a VONA/ Voices Fellow, and a BCAT/Rotunda Gallery Multi-Media Artist-in-Residence. His work has appeared in SAMAR, bustingbinaries, Black Girl Dangerous, and the anthology Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academics and the Austin Project. Dulani holds a B.A. from Oberlin College in a self-designed major, Art for Social Change.
Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and out now from BOA Editions. His work has appeared in Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, The Best American Poetry*, and other places. A Kundiman and Lambda Literary fellow, he is currently pursuing a PhD in English and Creative Writing at Texas Tech University.
Jennifer S. Cheng writes at the intersections of poetry and essay. She is the author of HOUSE A, selected by Claudia Rankine as winner of the Omnidawn Poetry Book Prize, and INVOCATION: AN ESSAY (New Michigan Press), an image-text chapbook. Her writing appears in Tin House, AGNI, Mid-American Review, DIAGRAM, The Offing, Entropy, and elsewhere. She received MFA degrees from the University of Iowa and San Francisco State University, and fellowships and awards from the U.S. Fulbright program, Kundiman, Bread Loaf, and the Academy of American Poets. Having grown up in Texas, Hong Kong, and Connecticut, she currently lives and teaches in San Francisco. www.jenniferscheng.com
Jane Wong's poems can be found in anthologies and journals such as Best American Poetry 2015, Best New Poets 2012, Pleiades, Third Coast, and others. A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of scholarships and fellowships from the U.S. Fulbright Program, the Fine Arts Work Center, Squaw Valley, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Along with three chapbooks, she is the author of the book Overpour (Action Books, 2016). She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Western Washington University.