One Poem Festival: A Protest Reading in Support of Black Lives

On August 18, 2020, the founding members of the Poetry Coalition, a national alliance of more than 25 organizations dedicated to working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture, presented a live broadcast ONE POEM: A Protest Reading in Support of Black Lives via Crowdcast. You can watch the full reading here.

Please consider giving to organizations and efforts working against racial injustice, including those recommended by the founding members of the Poetry Coalition here.

The poets featured in One Poem: A Protest Reading in Support of Black Lives were Prisca Afantchao, Sojourner Ahebee, Kazim Ali, Kimberly Blaeser, Jericho Brown, Cortney Lamar Charleston, Meera Dasgupta, Kwame Dawes, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Safia Elhillo, Martín Espada, Sesshu Foster, Kimberly Jae, Raina J. León, Mwatabu Okantah, Arsimmer McCoy, Alberto Ríos, Terisa Siagatonu, Matthew Thompson, Emma Trelles, Nikki Wallschlaeger, Monica Youn, and avery r. young.

Bookshop.org Reading Lists

We're on Bookshop.org! Now whenever you purchase a book off one of our Bookshop.org reading lists, 10% of proceeds go to Kundiman.

Some reading lists we've compiled are: Kundiman Summer 2020 Faculty, Poetry & Protest Workshop with Purvi Shah, Black & Asian Feminist Solidarities. 20 Books to Read for Pride Month, and 10 Books to Read for Asian Pacific American Heritage Month.

Click here to explore our Bookshop.org page.

Introducing Kundiman's Summer Sessions

For the month of August, we're offering virtual Summer Sessions for writers across all genres. Each class takes place on one Saturday for 2–3 hours. All classes are open to BIPOC writers and scholarships are available. Registration is open now!

On August 1st from 2:00–5:00 PM ET, Aimee Nezhukumatathil will be teaching a hybrid generative class called "The Edge of the Sea is a Strange & Beautiful Place: Hybrid Poetry & Prose Experiments." The class will interrogate and investigate the "strange and beautiful place" of genre-blurring work. Registration for this class closes on 7/31 at 6 PM EST and scholarship applications are closed.

Jessica Hagedorn, alongside Sarah Gambito and Joseph O. Legaspi, will teach "Tough Love," a generative class for writers in all genres. On August 8th from 2:00–4:00 PM ET, the class will discuss writing and making art in a time of pandemic anxiety and massive civil unrest. This class is now full and scholarship applications are closed.

On August 15th from 2:00–5:00 PM ET, Kimiko Hahn will teach a class on zuihitsu, a Japanese hybrid poetic form that uses fragments, juxtapositions, and contradictions to "follow the brush." Registration for this class will close on 8/14 at 12 PM EST and scholarship applications close on 8/1.

Cathy Park Hong will teach “Documentary Hybrid Forms,” a class that will look at the craft & politics of documentary poetry, essays, and other hybrid forms. On August 22nd from 2:00–5:00 PM ET, we’ll examine how to research, what it means to document, and more. Registration for this class will close on 8/21 at 12 PM EST and scholarship applications close on 8/1.

We hope to offer more virtual programming in the future. Stay in touch!

20 Books to Read for Pride

20 Books to Read for Pride

Here are some of our favorite books by LGBTQIA+ identifying Asian American writers for you to read! Each book links to bookshop.org, where you can purchase a book and also support local independent bookstores.

Curated by Fia Zhang Swanson

Inquisition by Kazim Ali

Queer, Muslim, American, Kazim Ali has always navigated complex intersections and interstices on order to make a life. In this scintillating mixture of lyrics, narrative, fragments, prose poem and spoken word, he answers long standing questions about the role of the poet or artist in times of political or social upheaval, although he answers under duress—an inquisition is dangerous, after all. Ali engages history, politics, and the dangerous regions of the uncharted heart in this visceral new collection.

: once teeth bones coral : by Kimberly Alidio

cheena marie lo writes: “In : once teeth bones coral :, Kimberly Alidio pulls language apart and what remains is as striking as it is spare. The form here is a container, haunting in its spaciousness, and gestures towards landscapes, borders, trauma, tenderness, home. Alidio’s poems reveal the ‘luminous familiar,’ traces of the interior that make visible the simultaneity of histories and futures, the possibilities inherent in queer connection, kinship, and refusal. These fragments are precise and expansive, and will resonate for a very long time.”

If They Come for Us by Fatimah Asghar

If They Come for Us is an imaginative, soulful debut poetry collection that captures the experiences of being a young Pakistani Muslim woman in contemporary America. Orphaned as a child, Asghar grapples with coming of age and navigating questions of sexuality and race without the guidance of a mother or father. These poems at once bear anguish, joy, vulnerability, and compassion, while also exploring the many facets of violence: how it persists within us, how it is inherited across generations, and how it manifests itself in our relationships. In experimental forms and language both lyrical and raw, Asghar seamlessly braids together marginalized people’s histories with her own understanding of identity, place, and belonging.

The Galleons by Rick Barot

These poems are engaged in the work of recovery, making visible what is often intentionally erased: the movement of domestic workers on a weekday morning in Brooklyn; a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, fondly sharing photos of his dog; the departure and destination points of dozens of galleons between 1564 and 1815, these ships evoking both the vast movements of history and the individual journeys of those borne along by their tides. “Her story is a part of something larger, it is a part / of history,” Barot writes of his grandmother. “No, her story is an illumination // of history, a matchstick lit in the black seam of time.”

Crossfire – A Litany for Survival by Staceyann Chin

Crossfire collects Staceyann Chin's empowering, feminist-LGBTQ-Caribbean, activist-driven poetry. According to The New York Times, Chin is “sassy, rageful and sometimes softly self-mocking.” The Advocate says that her poems, “combine hilarious one-liners with a refusal to conform” and note “Chin is out to confront more than just the straight world.”

Soft Science by Franny Choi

Soft Science explores queer Asian American femininity. A series of Turing Test-inspired poems grounds its exploration of questions not just of identity, but of consciousness—how to be tender and feeling and still survive a violent world filled with artificial intelligence and automation. We are dropped straight into the tangled intersections of technology, violence, erasure, agency, gender, and loneliness.

Documents by Jan-Henry Gray

Rooted in the experience of living in America as a queer undocumented Filipino, Documents maps the byzantine journey toward citizenship through legal records and fragmented recollections. In poems that repurpose the forms and procedures central to an immigrant’s experiences—birth certificates, identification cards, letters, and interviews—Jan-Henry Gray reveals the narrative limits of legal documentation while simultaneously embracing the intersections of identity, desire, heritage, love, and a new imagining of freedom.

Connor & Seal by Jee Leong Koh

Inspired by Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah, Connor & Seal is a queering of poetic lineage. These poems innovate the public and private axes of gay love in a tumescent future. We meet Connor, a native Nebraskan and fledgling grant writer, and Seal, a financial analyst from Kingston, Jamaica, as they flummox the space between desire and demise, “the sun again a big orange pill / stuck in the blue throat of the sky.” Connor & Seal serves as almanac to a time not far off, of techno-queer bots, state-sponsored violence, and individual resistance. Each poem in Connor & Seal becomes a cipher of the labor of tomorrow’s construction: “a bench where two old faggots had to stop,” an emblem of a future history, “as quiet as the siren / is alarming.”

The Importance of Being Wilde at Heart by R. Zamora Linmark

This is a tender, quirky story of one seventeen-year-old boy’s journey through first love and first heartbreak, guided by his personal hero, Oscar Wilde. Words have always been more than enough for Ken Z, but when he meets Ran at the mall food court, everything changes. Beautiful, mysterious Ran opens the door to a number of firsts for Ken: first kiss, first love. But as quickly as he enters Ken’s life, Ran disappears, and Ken Z is left wondering: Why love at all, if this is where it leads?

Let It Ride by Timothy Liu

Timothy Liu explores how the necessities of life and art dovetail to open up a vital path forward at midlife. Let It Ride integrates life's struggles at midlife by way of disintegration. These poems argue for a life that is more than amusement—rather, a mythic venture waiting to be embodied, embarked upon. Let It Ride show us that, sometimes, if you happen to get lucky, if you have the good fortune to jot a few things down—you just might stand a chance to walk away from the crowded table with shreds of your soul intact.

Females by Andrea Long Chu

Females is Andrea Long Chu’s genre-defying investigation into sex and lies, desperate artists and reckless politics, the smothering embrace of gender and the punishing force of desire. Drawing inspiration from a forgotten play by Valerie Solanas, Chu aims her searing wit and surgical intuition at targets ranging from performance art to psychoanalysis, incels to porn.

Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden

Acclaimed literary essayist T Kira Mahealani Madden's raw and redemptive debut memoir is about coming of age and reckoning with desire as a queer, biracial teenager amidst the fierce contradictions of Boca Raton, Florida, a place where she found cult-like privilege, shocking racial disparities, rampant white-collar crime, and powerfully destructive standards of beauty hiding in plain sight.

The Cowherd’s Son by Rajiv Mohabir

Rajiv Mohabir uses his queer and mixed-caste identities as grace notes to charm alienation into silence. Mohabir's inheritance of myths, folk tales, and multilingual translations make a palimpsest of histories that bleed into one another. A descendant of indentureship survivors, the poet- narrator creates an allegorical chronicle of dislocations and relocations, linking India, Guyana, Trinidad, New York, Orlando, Toronto, and Honolulu, combining the amplitude of mythology with direct witness and sensual reckoning, all the while seeking joy in testimony.

To Afar From Afar by Soham Patel

This collection hinges on the image of a globe. Composed as three long poems in the second person interrupted by a visual fragmented movement. The modes address (to afar/from afar) are informed by distances made by war and globalization. With collage, maps, lyric nonfictions, storytelling, chants, sonnets, treated screenshots, a sestina, and new family pictures of old places –– this book addresses displacement, memory and the darkness and light they bring.

Marianna’s Beauty Salon by Bushra Rehman

“Bushra Rehman's debut collection singes in its interrogation of the American dream while capturing the lives of a neighborhood in transition. These sly, adept poems work through circumstances under threat with audacity, humor, and wonder. Rehman offers a new kind of fairy tale, surreal yet rooted in harsh, ugly modern realities. Simply and profoundly, her book is a love poem for Muslim girls, Queens, and immigrants making sense of their foreign home--and surviving.” –Joseph O. Legaspi, author of Threshold and Imago

The Foley Artist by Ricco Siasoco

Ricco Villanueva Siasoco’s powerful debut collection opens new regions of American feeling and thought as it interrogates intimacy, foreignness, and silence in an absurd world. These nine stories give voice to the intersectional identities of women and men in the Filipino diaspora in America: a straight woman attends her ex-boyfriend’s same-sex marriage in coastal Maine; a college-bound teenager encounters his deaf uncle in Manila; Asian American drag queens duke it out in the annual Iowa State Fair; a seventy-nine-year-old Foley artist recreates the sounds of life, but is finally unable to save himself.

Fairest by Meredith Talusan

Fairest is a memoir about a precocious boy with albinism, a “sun child” from a rural Philippine village, who would grow up to become a woman in America. Coping with the strain of parental neglect and the elusive promise of U.S. citizenship, Talusan found childhood comfort from her devoted grandmother, a grounding force as she was treated by others with special preference or public curiosity. As an immigrant to the United States, Talusan came to be perceived as white. An academic scholarship to Harvard provided access to elite circles of privilege but required Talusan to navigate through the complex spheres of race, class, sexuality, and her place within the gay community.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.

Lucy 72 by Ronaldo Wilson

Giovanni Singleton writes, "LUCY 72 is an intricate, multi-faceted, rarely used underhand serve executed with the power and skill of a masterful languager. Wilson undertakes and asserts a new kind of self-reflexive portraiture in which all manner of 'body' is addressed. The body historical, the racial body, the flesh body, all gather in an open-air refusal to conform, to resign. Here agency is fiercely nuanced––petaled and thorned...the gloves have come off. Raise your racquet. Loose your head and heart. These poems are a guidebook of rosary beads for crossing the street, returning an out wide serve, and for being transcendently human."

The Year of Blue Water by Yanyi

How can a search for self‑knowledge reveal art as a site of community? Yanyi’s poems weave experiences of immigration as a Chinese American, of racism, of mental wellness, and of gender from a queer and trans perspective. Between the contrast of high lyric and direct prose poems, Yanyi invites the reader to consider how to speak with multiple identities through trauma, transition, and ordinary life. This collection gives voice to the multifaceted humanity within all of us and inspires attention, clarity, and hope through art-making and community.

Introducing Kundiman's Online Classes

With the intention of sustaining warmth, connection, and collective art-making at this time, we're happy to unveil virtual opportunities to write and commune together with a new set of online classes this summer! All classes will meet once a week for 6 weeks and have a scholarship spot available, and are open to all writers of color. Registration is open now!

Starting on June 15th, T Kira Madden will be teaching a course for fiction and nonfiction writers focusing on setups and payoffs called "The Hook."

George Abraham will teach "It's My Party and I'll __ If I Want to: Mess & Memory in Poetry" starting on July 15th.

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan will be helping fiction writers to "Jumpstart Your Novel" beginning July 21st!

We’ll hope to offer more virtual programs in the future. Stay in touch with us if you have any suggestions!

Announcing Our 2020 Mentorship Lab Fellows and Finalists!

We are thrilled to announce the Mentorship Fellows & Finalists for our 2020 Mentorship Lab!

Starting in August, we'll be welcoming these nine emerging writers to our second Mentorship Lab, which includes multi-genre master classes, intimate writing workshops, a $1000 stipend, and individual mentorship meetings. This year's Fellows will be learning alongside Hala Alyan, our Poetry Mentor; Gina Apostol, our Fiction Mentor; Ching-In Chen, our Poetry/Cross-Genre Mentor; and Mayukh Sen, our Creative Nonfiction Mentor! The Mentorship Lab will run from July 2020–December 2020 and close with a culminating reading. We're looking forward to sharing this space of creation, collaboration, and community with everyone involved.

Congratulations to our 2020 Mentorship Fellows:

Veasna Has, Creative Nonfiction Fellow
Promiti Islam, Creative Nonfiction Fellow
Wilson Wong, Creative Nonfiction Fellow
Christopher James Llego, Fiction Fellow
Yasmin Adele Majeed, Fiction Fellow
Sarah Wang, Fiction Fellow
Huiying B. Dandelion, Poetry Fellow
Ayesha Raees, Poetry Fellow
t. tran le, Poetry Fellow

We'd also like to congratulate the finalists of the Mentorship Lab.

Creative Nonfiction Finalists:

Hannah Bae
Julie Chen
Giaae Kwon
Hunter Lu
Nara Shin

Fiction Finalists:

Brandon Choi
Maz Do
Amy Haejung
Sunny Lee
Aarti Monteiro

Poetry Finalists:

Melissa Ho
Mingpei Li
Alice Liang
Angbeen Saleem
Sharanya Sharma

You can learn more about our 2020 Mentorship Lab Fellows and Mentors here. We're grateful to the Jerome Foundation, whose support made this program possible.

2020 Mentorship Lab Fellows, from L-R by row:
Promiti Islam, Huiying B. Dandelion, Ayesha Raaes
Christopher James Llego, Yasmin Adele Majeed, t. tran le
Sarah Wang, Veasna Has, Wilson Wong

The Impact of Kundiman's Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon for Asian American Literature

Kundiman is excited to host our fifth Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon in honor of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month this May! We hosted our first Edit-a-Thon with Wikimedia NYC in May of 2018. We wanted to bolster the presence of Asian American literature, writers, and literary organizations online by calling our community to address inaccurate and missing Wikipedia pages related to Asian American literature.

In our past four gatherings in the past two years, we have added 42,530 words to Wikipedia on Asian American writers. We’ve created 33 articles and edited 159 articles. The articles that we’ve edited and added have had over 400,000 views as of May 2020!

Check out our Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon Recap page to see the impact our community has made online. And join us May 17th to May 22nd for a week-long virtual Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon with Wikimedia NYC. You can signup and see the free Zoom training session times on our Wikipedia page now!

Support the Kundiman Forever Recurring Donor Campaign!

Rachna Reddy, Elizabeth “Lizzie” Tran, Melody S. Gee, W. Todd Kaneko, Christopher James Llego, Pik-Shuen Fung, Annesha Sengupta. Photo by Margarita Corporan.

With the support of a community that shares and understands my struggle as an Asian American immigrant, for the first time, I feel empowered to write in order to affirm my identity and voice. Kundiman has shown me that becoming a writer isn’t an impossible and futile journey. And that in fact it can be the most enriching and empowering journey I'll ever embark on. —Nghiem Tran, Kundiman Fellow

As of April 23rd, STOP AAPI HATE has received almost 1500 reports of harassment and assault against Asians. With anti-Asian discrimination on the rise, we need our community more than ever to weather this crisis and amplify brilliant Asian American voices in literature speaking on their own terms.

Participate today in #GivingTuesdayNow and support our month-long Kundiman Forever Recurring Donors campaign goal of $10,000 in new or increased monthly gifts. These funds will create new accessible online workshops to serve our community at large and, to better meet the needs of the local Asian American literary communities, strengthen programming through our 8 Regional Home Groups. Just 36 new recurring donors at $25 a month would help us provide nurturing spaces for Asian American writers everywhere.

Will you stand in solidarity as one of 36 advocates championing Asian American voices?

This Asian and Pacific Islander American Heritage month, strengthen the collective voices of our community and push back against the violence Asians and Pacific Islanders in America have faced by giving to Kundiman Forever today. Every donation is a step toward a future we all deserve. We thank you for your generous support.

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Endless gratitude for the 140 donors who supported our Kundiman Forever Recurring Donors campaign! We are so grateful for your generosity and the leadership of our amazing Team Members - all of you continue to inspire and sustain us!

Jennifer Agbu • Maureen Agbu • Nawaaz Ahmed • Piper Alldredge • Kimberley Arteche • Diana Arterian • Paul Asta • Sarah Audsley • Ava Bai • Eva Bai • Anonymous • MaryAnn Baluyut • Anonymous • Ophelia Barizo • Patrick Barney • Ross Barnett • Rick Barot • Jordan Bascom • Allison Beresky • Christina Berke • Kristen Bies • Alyssa Bluhm • Gabriel Bogart • Alyse Burnside • Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello • Clay Caldovino • Luvimin Capio • Matt Caprioli • Ralph Carter • Marian Centeno • Mikey Centeno • Lumen Chan • Victoria Chang • Anonymous • Evan Chen • Anonymous • Kyle Chu • Darcy Coleman • Mattan Comay • Claire Comstock-Gay • Zoraida Córdova • Geral Crawford • Gwenyth M. Cullen • Michael Dabrowski • Kevin Darby • Oliver de la Paz • Donald DeSantis • H’Rina DeTroy • Michael DiGregorio • Anonymous • MG Dufresne • Melanie Elvena • Vanessa Esperanza • Jennifer Crystal Fang-Chien • Melissa Fu • Patricia Garcia • Dobby Gibson • Nicky Gibson • Alexa Guerra • Jessica Hagedorn • Andrew Hahn • Robert V. Hansmann • Ann Harvieux • Veasna Has • Vireak Heng • Jessica Hester • Kate Hoyle • David Huntsman • Lisa Huntsman • Mary Jackson • Anonymous • Mark Keats • Jennifer Kennedy • Adrian Khactu • Charlene Khoo • Joseph Kim • Susanna Kwan • Marisa Lacuna • Sue Landers • Anonymous • Grace Lee • Anonymous • Muriel Leung • Lillian Li • Daniel Liden • Andrea Louie • Phayvanh Luekhamhan • Yana Makuwa • Chris Malmberg • Jenna Marco • Swati Marquez • Stephanie Martin • Victory Matsui • Lazaro Millares • Emily Mitamura • Anonymous • Jyothi Natarajan • Kirman Nautiyal • Tiana Nobile • Stephanie Niu • Anonymous • Stacy Nguyen • Leslie Norton • Oluwadamilola Obaro • Paul Ocampo • Naomi O’Connor • Monica Ong • Anonymous • Ayesha Pande • Bennett Park • Diana Park • Elsa Pascual • Chandrika Patel • Michelle Peñaloza • Jenna Peng • Angela Qian • C. Quintana • Shivani Radhakrishnan • Josh Rollin • Janice Sapigao • Jasmine Sawers • Sejal Shah • Sadia Shepard • Bridget Smith • Caitlin Sweeny • Colette Tippy • Lizzie Tran • Katie Vlasic • Stephany Weaver • Arhm Wild • Garret Wilkerson • Erin Wilson • Jenni Wu • Joshua Young • James Yu • Joyce Yu

As always, we're grateful to all of our donors, and you can see their names recognized here.

Happy Asian Pacific American Heritage Month!

Happy Asian Pacific American Heritage Month!

To celebrate, we've compiled a list of 10 books by Asian American writers to read this May.
Kundiman, with the help of Wikimedia NYC, is hosting a weeklong Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon for Asian American Literature from May 17th–May 22nd. Join us at any time during the week, from anywhere, and help us reclaim Wikipedia! Over the past 2 years, we have added over 40,000 words to Wikipedia with over 400,000 page views. Visit our Wikipedia recap page to see the full impact.

On May 30th, join us for an online workshop with Purvi Shah exploring Poetry & Protest! This workshop will examine poetic engagement with protest, particularly the connections of public engagement, craft, and lyrical activism on the page and shared aloud in the world. Register here! Our communications intern Helli Fang also curated a collection of Poems of Protest to read for National Poetry Month; read it on our here.

Lastly, join us this May 4th for our Kundiman Forever recurring donors campaign! This campaign will fund the creation of online workshops and strengthen our regional programming to better meet the needs of the Asian American literary community. To support our mission with a gift, click here!

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10 Books to Read for Asian Pacific American Heritage Month

In celebration of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, we've compiled a list of 10 books by Asian American writers to read this May. Check out the list here! 

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Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon for Asian American Literature

May 17th–May 22nd, 2020 

Join Kundiman in this weeklong marathon of Wikipedia editing! Join us at any time during the week, and help us reclaim Wikipedia & address the erasure of Asian American writers online. We will be hosting online trainings via Zoom throughout the week. More info available here. 

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We’ve added 40,000 words to Wikipedia

Over the course of four Edit-a-Thons held in the past two years, we have collectively added 42,530 words to Wikipedia on Asian American literature. The articles that we’ve edited and added have accumulated over 400,000 views as of May 2020! Read the full recap on our website here!

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Poetry & Protest Workshop with Purvi Shah

Saturday, May 30th, 2020
1:00 PM—3:00 PM ET

This workshop will examine poetic engagement with protest, particularly the connections of public engagement, craft, and lyrical activism on the page and shared aloud in the world. This workshop is free and open to all writers who self-identify as Asian American. There are 20 spots available; register here!

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10 Asian American Poems of Protest

Photo courtesy of Corky Lee/UCLA Labor Center

In celebration of National Poetry Month, we’ve curated a list of poems continuing along the theme of the 2020 Poetry Coalition Project, I am deliberate and afraid of nothing: Poetry & Protest, based off the poem “New Year’s Day” by Audre Lorde. Read the poems here.

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Building a Future We All Deserve

Join us this May for the Kundiman Forever recurring donor campaign! Our goal is $10,000 in new or increased monthly gifts. Your gifts will fund the creation of accessible online workshops and will strengthen our Regional programming. To support our mission, click here!