Upcoming Kundiman Events:
Kundiman summer Session:
Tough Love
with Jessica Hagedorn & Special Guests,
Sarah Gambito & Joseph O. Legaspi
Saturday, august 8th
2:00 PM–4:00 PM ET
“What I try to share with younger artists, not just writers, is you have to not be afraid. You have to try it. It’s our job. And do your homework while you’re at it. But don’t squash your imagination. I mean, my imagination is all I have. I mean, it’s unique to me, unique to you, unique to my students. They have their own, and they have to learn to trust it.”
––Jessica Hagedorn, LitHub: Jessica Hagedorn on Writing Experimentally and Trusting the Imagination
We will discuss writing and making art in a time of pandemic anxiety and massive civil unrest. Process, craft elements, language, dreams, desires, duende: What does it all mean? Links to visual images, excerpted readings, music, et cetera will be posted in advance to stoke your imagination. Maybe, just maybe, you’ll be inspired to try something new. Or inspired to take a fresh look at something you’ve written that continues to haunt you. A poem, a song, the beginning of a short story or — who knows?
Tough Love welcomes BIPOC writers in all genres. The non-refundable tuition fee is $35. This workshop will be held over Zoom. Scholarships are available: if interested in a scholarship, please apply by July 26th.
Scholarship Applications are now closed.
Registration for this class is now closed.
FACULTY:
Jessica Hagedorn was born and raised in the Philippines and came to the United States in her early teens. Her novels include Toxicology, Dream Jungle, The Gangster of Love, and Dogeaters, winner of the American Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Award.
Hagedorn is also the author of Danger and Beauty, a collection of poetry and prose, and the editor of three anthologies: Manila Noir, Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction, and Charlie Chan Is Dead 2: At Home in the World.
Work for the stage includes adaptations of Dogeaters and The Gangster of Love, collaborations with Fabian Obispo (Felix Starro), Mark Bennett (Most Wanted), Campo Santo (Stairway to Heaven, Fe in the Desert), Han Ong (Airport Music), Robbie McCauley & Laurie Carlos (Teenytown), Urban Bushwomen (Heat), Blondell Cummings (The Art of War/Nine Situations), Lawrence “Butch” Morris (Crayon Bondage), Michael Gregory Jackson (Mango Tango), and Ntozake Shange & Thulani Davis (Where The Mississippi Meets the Amazon).
Hagedorn wrote the screenplay for Fresh Kill, a feature film directed by Shu Lea Cheang. She wrote the scripts for the experimental animated series The Pink Palace, which was created for the first season of the Oxygen Network.
From 1975–85, Hagedorn led a band called The Gangster Choir. One of their signature songs, “Tenement Lover,” is part of John Giorno’s ‘80s music anthology, A Diamond Hidden in the Mouth Of A Corpse.
Honors and prizes include a Gerbode, Hewlett Foundations’ Playwriting Award, a Philippine National Book Award, a Lucille Lortel Playwrights’ Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fiction Fellowship, a Kesselring Prize Honorable Mention for Dogeaters, an NEA-TCG Playwriting Residency Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the Sundance Playwrights’ Lab and the Sundance Screenwriters’ Lab.
She is presently working on a musical play about the pioneering, all-female rock band, Fanny.
Sarah Gambito is the author of the poetry collections Loves You (Persea Books), Delivered (Persea Books), and Matadora (Alice James Books). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Iowa Review, POETRY, Harvard Review, American Poetry Review, The New Republic, and other journals. She holds degrees from The University of Virginia and The Literary Arts Program at Brown University. Her honors include the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets and Writers, The Wai Look Award for Outstanding Service to the Arts from the Asian American Arts Alliance and grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony. She is Associate Professor of English / Director of Creative Writing at Fordham University.
Joseph O. Legaspi, a 2015 Fulbright fellow, is the author of the collections Threshold (CavanKerry Press, 2017) and Imago (University of Santo Tomas Press (Philippines); Cavan Kerry Press (U.S.)), and two chapbooks: Aviary, Bestiary (Organic Weapon Arts), winner of the David Blair Memorial Prize, and Subways (Thrush Press). A graduate of New York University’s Creative Writing Program, his poems appeared or are forthcoming in American Life in Poetry, World Literature Today, PEN International, North American Review, Callaloo, Bloomsbury Review, Poets & Writers, Gulf Coast, Gay & Lesbian Review, and the anthologies Language for a New Century (W.W. Norton) and Tilting the Continent (New Rivers Press). A recipient of a poetry fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, he resides in Queens, NY and works as Assistant to the Administrator at The Pulitzer Prizes.