kundiman retreat
Fordham University, Rose Hill
New York City
june 26–30, 2024

This project is made possible by lead funding from Fordham College at Rose Hill, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, The New York State Council on the Arts, and The National Endowment for the Arts.

INTRODUCTION

In order to mentor and build community among AAPI writers, Kundiman sponsors an annual Retreat in partnership with Fordham University. During each Retreat, six nationally renowned AAPI poets and fiction writers conduct craft classes and mentorship meetings. Readings, writing circles, and informal social gatherings are also scheduled. Through this Retreat, Kundiman hopes to provide a safe and instructive environment that identifies and addresses the unique challenges faced by emerging AAPI writers. This five-day Retreat takes place from Wednesday to Sunday.

CRAFT CLASSES & mentorship meetings

A nationally renowned AAPI writer facilitates each craft class. Fellows are assigned a home group for the duration of the Retreat, and each home group takes one craft class with each faculty member in their genre. Craft classes will not exceed six students. The Kundiman Retreat is generative in nature and so craft classes are focused on new work that is written at the Retreat. Craft classes include a craft talk, readings and prompts / exercises to generate this new work. Poetry and fiction Fellows will receive 25-minute mentorship meetings where they can speak with a faculty member about craft, career, and the writing life. Our hope is that Fellows are able to forge a deeper relationship to their artistic process and are able to encounter their work with renewed focus and energy.  

LOCATION

The Kundiman Retreat is held at Fordham University's beautiful Rose Hill Campus located in the Bronx, NYC.

If you have any questions about accessibility or if you need any accommodations, please email info@kundiman.org.

ELIGIBILITY

Anyone who self-identifies as AAPI can apply to the Retreat. 

LOGISTICS

It is expected that Fellows and faculty are in residence at Fordham University for the duration of the Retreat. We will ask that you not invite in outside visitors, or make plans to meet with visitors during the Retreat. If you would like to explore New York City separate from the Retreat, please make plans to arrive in New York a few days before or after the Retreat to make arrangements for this. If you know that you will not be able to be in residence for the entirety of the Retreat, it is recommended that you select another year to attend.

Everyone in attendance will be required to be vaccinated and boosted to attend the Retreat, and to take a COVID test before arrival. Masks are required to be worn at all mandatory indoor events except when drinking or eating. Further guidance on COVID protocol will be provided to admitted Fellows at a later date.

APPLICATION PROCESS

Between December 1st and January 15th, apply to the Kundiman Retreat by clicking on one of the below buttons. Submit a cover letter and brief writing sample 5–7 pages of poetry or 5 pages of prose (1250 words max). Notification on application status will be given by mid-March.  

 Frequently Asked questions

Please click here for Frequently Asked Questions regarding the Retreat.

2024 Poetry Faculty

Descended from ocean dwellers, Ching-In Chen is a genderqueer Chinese American writer, community organizer and teacher. They are author of The Heart's Traffic: a novel in poems (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press, 2009) and recombinant (Kelsey Street Press, 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry) as well as chapbooks to make black paper sing (speCt! Books) and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, Leslie Scalapino Finalist). Chen is co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (South End Press, 1st edition; AK Press, 2nd edition) and currently a core member of the Massage Parlor Outreach Project. They are also a Kelsey Street Press collective member and an Airlie Press editor. They have received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat, Imagining America, Jack Straw Cultural Center and the Intercultural Leadership Institute as well as the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. They are currently collaborating with Cassie Mira and others on Breathing in a Time of Disaster, a performance, installation and speculative writing project exploring breath through meditation, health and environmental justice. They teach in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and the MFA program in Creative Writing and Poetics at University of Washington Bothell and serve as the Poet Laureate of the City of Redmond. www.chinginchen.com

Divya Victor is the author of CURB (Nightboat Books, winner of PEN America Open Book Award and the Kinglsey Tufts Poetry Award); KITH (Fence Books/ Book*hug); Scheingleichheit: Drei Essays  (Merve Verlag); NATURAL SUBJECTS (Trembling Pillow), UNSUB (Insert Blanc), THINGS TO DO WITH YOUR MOUTH (Les Figues). Her work has been collected in numerous venues, including BOMB, the New Museum’s The Animated Reader, Crux: Journal of Conceptual Writing, The Best American Experimental Writing, POETRY, and boundary2. Her work has been translated into French, German, Spanish, and Czech. She has been a Mark Diamond Research Fellow at the U.S Holocaust Memorial Museum, a Riverrun Fellow at the Archive for New Poetry at University of California San Diego, and a Writer in Residence at the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibit (L.A.C.E.). Her work has been performed and installed at Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) Los Angeles, The National Gallery of Singapore, the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibition (L.A.C.E.) and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). She has been an editor at Jacket2 (United States), Ethos Books (Singapore), Invisible Publishing (Canada) and Book*hug Press (Canada). She is currently an Associate Professor of English at Michigan State University.

2024 Fiction Faculty

Zeyn Joukhadar is the author of the Lambda Literary and Stonewall Book Award-winning novel The Thirty Names of Night as well as The Map of Salt and Stars, which won the Middle East Book Award. His work has appeared in Electric Literature, Salon, The Paris Review, [PANK], the anthologies Letters to a Writer of Color and This Arab Is Queer, and elsewhere, and has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Joukhadar serves on the board of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI) and mentors emerging writers of color with the Periplus Collective.

Akil Kumarasamy is the author of the novel, Meet Us by the Roaring Sea (FSG, 2022), and the linked story collection, Half Gods (FSG, 2018), which was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, was awarded the Bard Fiction Prize and the Story Prize Spotlight Award, and was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Her work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, American Short Fiction, BOMB, among others. She has received fellowships from the University of East Anglia, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Yaddo, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She is an assistant professor in the Rutgers University-Newark MFA program.

C Pam Zhang is the author of two bestselling novels, How Much of These Hills Is Gold and Land of Milk and Honey. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree, a Booker Prize nominee, and the winner of the Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award, the Asian/Pacific Award for Literature, and the California Book Award. She has been a finalist for awards from PEN America, the National Book Critics Circle, and the Center for Fiction. Zhang’s writing appears in Best American Short Stories, The Cut, The New Yorker, and The New York Times.