Kundiman poets Helene Achanzar, Cathy Linh Che, and Melody S. Gee will be joining dozens of performance and literary artists in Iowa city for the 2018 Mission Creek Festival! Learn more and purchase tickets here

About Mission Creek

Mission Creek is a riveting 6-day artistic experience for our community that builds on the cultural geography and capital of downtown Iowa City. Programming focuses on performance, literature, and special community events.

About Our Poets

Helene Achanzar is a writer and educator from Chicago. She is a Kundiman fellow and a John and Renée Grisham fellow at the University of Mississippi. Her poetry is forthcoming in jubilat. Her other writing can be found on Noisey and On She Goes.

Cathy Linh Che is the author of the poetry collection, Split (Alice James Books), winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize, the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies. She is the Executive Director at Kundiman.

Melody S. Gee was born in Taiwan and raised in Cerritos, California. Her first poetry collection, Each Crumbling House, won the 2010 Perugia Press Book Prize. Her second collection, The Dead in Daylight(Cooper Dillon Books, 2016) was a finalist for the Jacar Press Julie Suk Award.

Her poems and essays most recently appear in Figure One, Two Countries Anthology, The Los Angeles Review, Meridian, Barnstorm Literary Journal, Spillway, The Book of Scented Things Anthology. Her awards include two Pushcart Prize nominations, a Best New Poets nomination, the Robert Watson Literary Prize, and a Kundiman Asian American Poetry Retreat fellowship. Currently, she teaches developmental writing at St. Louis Community College, and lives with her husband and daughters in Saint Louis, MO.