Kundiman Reading and Salon Celebrating Asian American Poetry!

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Kundiman West, Flying Fists Collective and Habi Arts invite you to a

Kundiman Reading and Salon celebrating Asian American poetry!

Featuring Melissa Roxas, Nicky Schildkraut, Ngoc Luu, Jackson Bliss, Oliver de la Paz

+ a salon celebrating Asian American poetry (bring a poem by your favorite Asian American poet + your own to share!)

Emceed by Neil Aitken and Ching-In Chen.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010, 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM

Casa Princesa
4527 York Blvd (two blocks east of Eagle Rock Blvd)
Los Angeles, CA 90041
(323) 474-6860
casaprincesa.com

$3 – 10 suggested donation — to benefit Kundiman (no one turned away for lack of funds).

About our featured readers:

Melissa Roxas is a poet, writer, and human rights activist. For the past 15 years, she has done community work in Southern California and in the Philippines. While conducting community health work in May of 2009, she was abducted and tortured by the Philippine military. This experience has deepened her commitment to human rights work and to continue writing for truth and justice.

Nicky Schildkraut’s poems have appeared in Asian American Poetry and Writing, Salmagundi, The New England Review, The Mississippi Review, The Sante Fe Review Online, the 2007 Korean-English anthology I Didn’t Know Who I Was, and has prose poems in the March issue of The Offending Adam. She is working on a Ph.D. degree in English Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Southern California and currently serves as the President for the Circle For Asian American Literary Studies. She is also an incoming Kundiman Fellow.

Ngoc Luu received her undergraduate degree in English at UC Berkeley and completed her MFA in Creative Writing at UC Riverside. She was given a full scholarship to attend the Summer Poetry in Idyllwild and participated in the Kundiman Asian American Poetry Retreat during its inaugural year. She was offered a merit scholarship to study in the Summer Literary Seminars in 2006 and the John Woods Scholarship from the Summer in Prague Program in 2004. Additionally Ngoc has been published in the Naranjas y Nopales poetry broadside.

Hailing from Chicago, Jackson Bliss is the winner of the La Vie de Bohème Literary Award and the 2007 Sparks Prize in Fiction. Jackson has lived in Seattle, Portland, New York, West Africa and Argentina and is a former Americorps and Peace Corp volunteer, crossing lines of longitude whenever he can both in his writing, his volunteer service and his travels. Armed with a MFA from the University of Notre Dame, Jackson is now a PhD student in Literature + Creative Writing at USC. His short stories have been published in Fiction, Kenyon Review, ZYZZYVA, Notre Dame Review, Connecticut Review, African American Review, Stand (UK), South Loop Review, Writers Post-Journal, Ink Collective, Pittsburgh Quarterly, 3:am Magazine, Word Riot, Fringe, DJ Booth and Denver Syntax, among others.

Oliver de la Paz is the author of three collections of poetry, Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby (SIU Press 2001, 2007), and the forthcoming Requiem for the Orchard (U. of Akron Press 2010), winner of the Akron Prize for poetry chosen by Martìn Espada. He co-chairs the advisory board of Kundiman, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of Asian American Poetry. A recipient of a NYFA Fellowship Award and a GAP Grant from Artist Trust, his work has appeared in journals like Virginia Quarterly Review, North American Review, Tin House, Chattahoochee Review, and in anthologies such as Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation. He teaches at Western Washington University.

About our emcees:

Ching-In Chen is the author of The Heart’s Traffic (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press). The daughter of Chinese immigrants, she is a Kundiman, Macondo and Lambda Fellow.

Neil Tangaroa Aitken is the author of The Lost Country of Sight and a Kundiman Fellow. Neil serves as the editor of Boxcar Poetry Review, an online literary journal focused on publishing poetry and showcasing reviews and interviews pertaining to first books of poetry.

About our organizations:

The Flying Fists Collective is a crew of talented Asian-American writers, poets, photographers, graphic novelists + artists around the world. We believe three simple things: 1. There needs to be more Asian art in the world. 2. Culturally speaking, art is crucial in the world. 3. Art needs to kick (your) ass in some way. Based out of Southern California, the FFC is now a global organization open to all people that want to interact with, contribute to, and help support Asian art in all of its forms.

Habi Arts is a Los Angeles-based Filipino cultural organization dedicated to promoting community empowerment and progressive social change through the arts. habi-arts.org

Kundiman is an organization dedicated to the creation, cultivation and promotion of Asian American poetry by creating an affirming and rigorous space where Asian American poets can explore, through art, the unique challenges that face the new and ever changing diaspora. In order to help mentor the next generation of Asian-American poets, Kundiman sponsors an annual Poetry Retreat for emerging Asian American poets. kundiman.org