KSW Presents returns in November with a joint reading bringing together fellows from the pre-eminent API and Latinx writing workshops in the country, featuring Kundiman and CantoMundo.
Founded in 1972, during the height of the Asian American cultural movement, Kearny Street Workshop (KSW) is the oldest Asian Pacific American multidisciplinary arts organization in the country. They offer classes and workshops, salons, and student presentations, as well as professionally curated and produced exhibitions, performances, readings, and screenings.
CantoMundo is a national organization that cultivates a community of Latinx poets through workshops, symposia, and public readings. Founded in 2009 by Norma E. Cantú, Celeste Mendoza, Pablo Miguel Martínez, Deborah Paredez, and Carmen Tafolla, CantoMundo hosts an annual poetry workshop for Latinx poets that provides a space for the creation, documentation, and critical analysis of Latinx poetry.
Readers:
MONICA SOK is a Cambodian American poet from Lancaster, PA. She is the author of Year Zero, winner of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. She has received fellowships from the NEA, the Stadler Center for Poetry, the Conversation, Hedgebrook, Kundiman, and elsewhere.
JAVIER ZAMORA was born in El Salvador and migrated to the US when he was nine. He is a 2016-2018 Wallace Stegner Fellow and holds fellowships from CantoMundo, Colgate University, MacDowell, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, and Yaddo. Unaccompanied, Copper Canyon Press Sept. 2017, is his first collection.
LETICIA HERNÁNDEZ-LINARES, a poet, interdisciplinary artist, and educator, is the author of Mucha Muchacha, Too Much Girl, and co-editor of The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the U.S. Widely published, she has performed her poemsongs throughout the country and in El Salvador. She is a three-time San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist grantee and serves on the CantoMundo Organizing Committee. An eviction fighter, she lives, works, and writes in the Mission District––20 years strong. Visit her: joinleticia.com
Nicknamed "small but terrible" by her lola, MELISSA R. SIPIN was born and raised in Carson, CA. She co-edited Kuwento: Lost Things (Carayan Press 2014) and is Editor-in-Chief of TAYO Literary Magazine. Her work is in Guernica Magazine, Slate Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Black Warrior Review, and PEN American Center, among others. Her fiction has won Glimmer Train's Fiction Open and the Washington Square Review's Flash Fiction Prize, as well as scholarships/fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Poets & Writers Inc., Kundiman, VONA/Voices Writers' Workshop, Squaw Valley’s Community of Writers, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. More at: msipin.com
Born in Ecuador and raised in the Bronx, OSCAR BERMEO is the author of four poetry chapbooks, most recently, To the Break of Dawn. He has taught creative writing workshops to inmates in Rikers Island Penitentiary, at-risk youth in the Bronx, foster teens in San Jose, bilingual elementary students in Oakland, and to adults through the Oakland Public Library's Oakland Word program. He is a Bronx Recognizes Its Own, CantoMundo, San Francisco Intergenerational Writers Lab, and VONA: Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation poetry fellow. Oscar makes his home in Oakland, with his wife, poeta Barbara Jane Reyes.
JAYLEE ALDE is a Kundiman Fellow in Fiction. His work has been published in McSweeney's, Thrice, FORTH Magazine, and other fine publications.