fellows

Rachelle Cruz and Melissa Roxas with poems up at Poetas y Diwatas, guest edited by Barbara Jane Reyes. Read their work at The Bakery!

Rachelle Cruz is from Hayward, California. She is the author of the chapbook, Self-Portrait as Rumor and Blood (Dancing Girl Press,2012). Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in Bone Bouquet, PANK Magazine, Muzzle Magazine, Splinter Generation, KCET’s Departures Series, Inlandia: A Literary Journey, among others. She hosts The Blood-Jet Writing Hour on Blog Talk Radio. An Emerging Voices Fellow, a Kundiman Fellow and a VONA writer, she lives and writes in Southern California.

 

My Imelda Marcos
after Margaret Rhee

O, Imelda Marcos, I wear your hair like a woven flag of sharp stars and bees. Something I can’t touch.

 

Click here to read more of Rachelle's poetry.

 

Melissa Roxas is a poet, health worker, and human rights activist. For over fifteen years she has done community and social justice work in the United States and in the Philippines. She is a co-founder of Habi Arts, a Los Angeles-based cultural organization dedicated to promoting community empowerment and social justice through the arts.

Melissa is a survivor of enforced disappearance and torture by the Philippine military. While conducting health care work in the Philippines on May 19, 2009, she was abducted at gunpoint and held in secret detention in a Philippine military camp and tortured for six days. Melissa continues to write and speak out against human rights violations and to demand justice for victims all over the world.

 

Light the Bonefire

for Raymond Manalo

Wood lights a fire within the body.

And yes,

there is ash before the burning.

 

Click here to read more of Melissa's poetry.

Podcast up on The Collagist! W. Todd Kaneko pays homage to Macho Man Randy Savage as he reads from "The Dead Wrestler Elegies"

 

Congrats, dear Todd, for his podcast up at The Collagist. 


W. Todd Kaneko lives and writes in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His work has appeared in Bellingham Review, Los Angeles Review, Southeast Review, Lantern Review, NANO Fiction, the Collagist, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from Kundiman and the Kenyon Review Writer’s Workshop. He teaches at Grand Valley State University. Visit him at www.toddkaneko.com.

Tamiko Beyer and Ching-In Chen in the Trans/Queer edition of Evening Will Come

Experience Tamiko's poetry/visual art collaboration "Subterranean Haibuns" here.

Tamiko Beyer is the author of We Come Elemental, winner of the 2011 Kinereth Gensler Award from Alice James Books, and bough breaks from Meritage Press. She is the Advocacy Writer at Corporate Accountability International and lives in Cambridge, MA. Find her online at wonderinghome.com.

 

Read Ching-In's "Dialektik Skool, a Sampling of Correspondance, Interrogation, and Other Materials" here.

 

Ching-In Chen is author of The Heart’s Traffic (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press) and co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (South End Press). They are a Kundiman, Lambda and Norman Mailer Poetry Fellow and a member of the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation and Macondo writing communities. A community organizer, they have worked in the Asian American communities of San Francisco, Oakland, Riverside and Boston. www.chinginchen.com

Congrats to our dear Kundiman alums!

Tarfia Faizullah with a beautiful poem and audio recording up at the New Ohio Review

Dhaka Nocturne

I admit that when the falling hour
begins to husk the sky free of its
saffroning light, I reach for anyone

willing to wrap his good arm tight
around me for as long as the ribboned
darkness allows.

Hear and read the rest of the poem here.

Tarfia Faizullah is the author of Seam(Southern Illinois University Press, 2014), winner of the 2012 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Her poems and prose appear in Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, The Southern Review, LA Review of Books, Massachusetts Review, Mid-American Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. A Kundiman fellow, she received her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, and is the recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Project Award, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, scholarships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Kenyon ReviewWriters’ Workshop, and other honors.

Cathy Linh Che has an interview up on the Ploughshares blog

"At this year’s Split This Rock Poetry Festival, Patricia Smith talked about ‘the pressure of stories.’ Stories help to change the conversation. My parents’ stories and my stories aren’t part of the dominant American narrative, and why I write, I suppose—to write us in.

Read the rest of the interview here.

Cathy Linh Che is the author of Split (Alice James, 2014), the winner of the 2012 Kundiman Poetry Prize. She received her MFA from New York University and is the recipient of fellowships from The Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, Hedgebrook, and Poets House. She currently teaches at NYU Poly and is Program Assistant for Readings/Workshops (East) at Poets & Writers."

April Naoko Heck Finds Poetry Next to the Microwave–now up at Poets & Writers


Congrats, dear April!

"This reading by students, alumni, and staff of the Jimenez-Porter Writers’ House is the culmination of an evening of good eats, speeches, games, and door prizes to celebrate the House’s ten-year anniversary.

As a former assistant director and instructor (2004-‘07), I arrived too late for the crab rangoon and sushi, but I enjoyed a slab of red velvet cake, catching up with old students, meeting new ones, sharing my poetry, and most of all, cheering on the program’s remarkable ten-year run. The House has flourished through the toughest of economic times—a testament to the University’s commitment to educating young writers."

Read the rest of her blog post here. 

April Naoko Heck was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1971, and moved to the United States seven years later. Her poems have most recently appeared in Artful Dodge, Borderland: Texas Quarterly Review, Epiphany, and Shenandoah. She has received an AWP Intro Journals Award and held a writers residency at VCCA. Her first book of poems, A Nuclear Family, is forthcoming from UpSet Press in Fall 2013.

Congrats to Pushcart Prize Nominees: Monica Ong, Matthew Olzmann, Ocean Vuong, and Tarfia Faizullah

Congrats to Monica Ong for her nomination in Tidal Basin Review for her poem "Bo Suerte."

Monica Ong, artist and poet in new media, creates narrative installations that investigate social hierarchies and cultural silences in the context of public health. Monica completed her MFA in Digital Media at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2006. Her research has included fellowships at the Oral History Summer Institute at Columbia University, and the Writing the Medical Experience Workshop at Sarah Lawrence College. She is also a Kundiman Fellow in poetry whose work has been published most recently in the Lantern Review, as well as forthcoming issues of Drunken Boat, and The New Sound: A Journal Interdisciplinary Art & Literature.

Congrats to Matthew Olzmann for his nomination from B O D Y for his poem "A RIVER, BRIEFLY PARALLEL TO AN EIGHT-LANE SUPER HIGHWAY" and for his nomination from the New England Review for his poem "The Tiny Men in the Horse's Mouth."

Matthew Olzmann's first book of poems, Mezzanines, was selected for the Kundiman Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Alice James Books.

Congrats to Ocean Vuong for his Pushcart nomination from the South Dakota Review for his poem "Time Maker."

Born in 1988 in Saigon, Vietnam, Ocean Vuong was raised by women (a single mother, aunts, and a grandmother) in housing projects throughout Hartford, Connecticut. He received his B.A. in English Literature at Brooklyn College, CUNY. His first chapbook Burnings was released by Sibling Rivalry Press, 2010. A Kundiman fellow, other honors include a 2012 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize for Younger Poets, an Academy of American Poets prize, the Connecticut Poetry Society’s Al Savard Award, as well as four Pushcart Prize nominations. Poems appear in the American Poetry Review, Guernica, and Drunken Boat, amongst others.

Congrats to Tarfia Faizullah for her Pushcart nominations from Blackbird and from Passages North for her poem "Register of Eliminated Villages."

Tarfia Faizullah is the author of Seam (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014), winner of the 2012 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry's First Book Award. Her poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in The Missouri Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Massachusetts Review, Ninth Letter, LA Review of Books, Mid-American Review, Blackbird, and elsewhere. A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, an AWP Intro Journals Award, a Ploughshares Cohen Award, and other honors, as well as scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Sewanee Writers' Conference, and the Kenyon Review Writers' Workshop. 

Ocean Vuong with a fabulous interview up at Rhino

Congrats, dear Ocean!

VB: We published your poem “Pedicures” in RHINO 2012, so I’d like to begin with a couple of questions about it. We love the sensuous and sensory language in this poem, and the deeply respectful—even reverent—portrait of the speaker’s aunt as she gives yet another pedicure to a perfect stranger: “Her fingers slide along each lathered / and tortured vein. […] She scrubs and scrubs. / She shines—until the foot gleams / immaculate”.

Can you speak a bit about what or who inspired you to write this poem? And about your favorite language used to describe her in the poem?

OV: The speaker’s aunt is my own. But she is also my mother, grandmother, uncle, cousin, and father. For many Vietnamese living in America, the nail salon is often the vital backbone behind each family. Thousands of lawyers, doctors, musicians, scholars, and writers can trace their achievements directly back to the humble little nail salon. However, the salon is also a lifeline for Vietnam as well: many salon workers send money back to the motherland, often supporting multiple families on a salary of as little as $12,000.00 a year.

For the full interview, click here