On September 13, 2018, R.O. Kwon and Hieu Minh Nguyen will be reading from their new books (The Incendiaries and Not Here) at the Library of Congress. Following that, they will discuss their work and craft with Gowri Koneswaran. The event is sponsored by The Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, The Library of Congress, and Kundiman. RSVP on Facebook here!

Gowri Koneswaran is a Tamil American writer, performing artist, teacher, and lawyer. She is a Kundiman fellow, poetry coordinator at the non-profit arts organization BloomBars, a former poetry events host at Busboys and Poets, senior poetry editor at Jaggery, and associate editor of Beltway Poetry Quarterly. Gowri has performed her poetry at Lincoln Center Out of Doors, the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage, Smithsonian Folklife Festival, Capital Fringe Festival, SpokenWord Paris, and universities in the U.S. and Canada. Her advocacy work has addressed animal welfare, environmental protection, the rights of prisoners and the criminally accused in the U.S., and justice and accountability in Sri Lanka.

R. O. Kwon’s first novel, The Incendiaries, was published by Riverhead in July of 2018. She is a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, Time, Vice, BuzzFeed, Playboy, Noon, Electric Literature, Asian American Literary Review, and elsewhere. She has received awards from Yaddo, MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Omi International, the Steinbeck Center, and the Norman Mailer Writers’ Colony. Born in South Korea, she has lived most of her life in the United States.

Hieu Minh Nguyen is a queer Vietnamese American poet and performer based out of Minneapolis. Recipient of 2017 NEA fellowship for poetry, Hieu is a Kundiman fellow, a poetry editor for Muzzle Magazine, and an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson College. His work has appeared in PBS Newshour, POETRY Magazine, Gulf Coast, BuzzFeed, Poetry London, Nashville Review, Indiana Review, and more. His debut collection of poetry, This Way to the Sugar (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014) was named a finalist for both the Lambda Literary Award and the MN Book Award. His second collection of poetry, Not Here, is forthcoming with Coffee House Press in April 2018.