Join Kundiman at Lincoln Center for Poets on the Plaza, an open air performance of thought-provoking and politically driven spoken word, poetry readings and insightful wordplay presented by a mix of the world’s most acclaimed and most promising authors. Come support Kundiman as we present poets Jan-Henry Gray, Eugenia Leigh, Vikas Menon, and Ayesha Raees on July 13th, 2022, Wednesday at 6:00 PM EST. This event is free and first-come, first-served, with no reservations required. Join us!

Jan-Henry Gray is the author of Documents, winner of BOA Editions’ Poulin Poetry Prize, and the chapbook Selected Emails. He’s received fellowships from Kundiman, Undocupoets, and the Cooke Foundation. He is an Assistant Professor at Adelphi University in New York, where he serves as the Director of the Creative Writing MFA Program.

Ayesha Raees عائشہ رئیس identifies herself as a hybrid creating hybrid poetry through hybrid forms. Her work strongly revolves around issues of race and identity, G/god and displacement, and mental illness while possessing a strong agency for accessibility, community, and change. Raees currently serves as an Assistant Poetry Editor at AAWW's The Margins and has received fellowships from Asian American Writers' Workshop, Brooklyn Poets, and Kundiman. Her debut chapbook “Coining A Wishing Tower” won the Broken River Prize, judged by Kaveh Akbar, and is published by Platypus Press. From Lahore, Pakistan, she currently shifts around Lahore, New York City, and Miami.

Eugenia Leigh is a Korean American poet and the author of Bianca (Four Way Books, forthcoming March 2023) and Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows (Four Way Books, 2014). Poems from Bianca were awarded Poetry‘s 2021 Bess Hokin Prize and have appeared in Ploughshares, The Nation, Waxwing, and elsewhere. Eugenia received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and serves as a poetry editor at The Adroit Journal.

Vikas K. Menon is a poet, playwright, and songwriter. He was a 2015 Emerging Poets Fellow at Poets House and his poems have been featured in numerous publications. He helped create and co-write Priya’s Shakti, the first of a series of ongoing augmented reality comic books that address gender-based violence (GBV). He also co-wrote the groundbreaking shadowplay “Feathers of Fire,” which had its world premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2016 and went on to tour 23 U.S. cities and 6 countries. He is an Advisory Board Member of Kundiman, dedicated to nurturing generations of writers and readers of Asian American literature. He received his M.F.A (Poetry) from Brooklyn College and his M.A. in Literature from St. Louis University.