On Thursday, June 22, we hosted a celebratory reading for PRIDE on our virtual stage, featuring our co-presenter Kay Ulanday Barrett, Chrysanthemum Tran, Diamond Forde, and Ryka Aoki!
KAY ULANDAY BARRETT is a poet, essayist, cultural strategist, and A+ napper. They are the winner of the 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly Award for Poetry, a winner of the 2022 Next Book Residency with Tin House, and a recipient of a 2020 James Baldwin Fellowship at MacDowell. Their second book, More Than Organs (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020) received a 2021 Stonewall Honor Book Award by the American Library Association and is a 2021 Lambda Literary Award Finalist. They have featured at The United Nations, The Lincoln Center, The Hemispheric Institute, Symphony Space, The Ford Foundation, Brooklyn Museum, Princeton, Columbia University, Yale, Manchester PRIDE, Sesame Street, & more. Their contributions are found in The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, Colorlines, Literary Hub, The Advocate, Al Jazeera, NYLON, Vogue, The Rumpus, The Lily, and elsewhere. For more info: kaybarrett.net
CHRYSANTHEMUM TRAN is a Vietnamese American poet, writer & performance artist. She’s the recipient of a MacColl Johnson Fellowship from the Rhode Island Foundation & an Artist Residency at Williams College. A finalist of the Women of the World Poetry Slam representing her home venue at the Providence Poetry Slam, Chrysanthemum produced & wrote ANTHEM at the American Repertory Theater’s OBERON. Profiled by PBS & WBUR, her writing appears in The Nation, Them, Bettering American Poetry, The Offing, among others. Her work confronts the historical inconsistencies rooted in the clinical & legal vestiges of empire. Outside of poetry, she moonlights as a queer health researcher & community historian.
DIAMOND FORDE’S debut collection, Mother Body, is the winner of the 2019 Saturnalia Poetry Prize. Forde has received numerous awards and prizes, including a Pink Poetry Prize, a Furious Flower Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award fromClaremont Graduate University. A Callaloo, Tin House, and Ruth Lilly Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fellow, Forde’s work has appeared in Poetry, Obsidian, Massachusetts Review, and more. In her spare time, Forde also serves as the interviews editor of Honey Literary and the fiction editor of Nat. Brut.
RYKA AOKI (she/her) is a poet, composer, teacher, and novelist. Her latest novel, Light From Uncommon Stars, was an Alex, SCKA, and Otherwise Award winner, and was also a finalist for the Hugo, Locus, and Ignyte Awards.Ryka is a two-time Lambda Literary Award finalist for her collections Seasonal Velocities, and Why Dust Shall Never Settle Upon This Soul, and her first novel, He Mele a Hilo, was called one of the “10 Best Books Set in Hawaii” by Bookriot. She has been recognized by the California State Senate for “extraordinary commitment to the visibility and well-being of Transgender people,” and her work has appeared or been recognized in publications including Vogue, Elle, Bustle, Autostraddle, PopSugar, and Buzzfeed, as well as the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center. She was also honored to work with the American Association of Hiroshima Nagasaki A-Bomb Survivors, where two of her compositions were adopted as the organization’s “songs of peace.”
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Founded in 1991, Asian American Writers’ Workshop (AAWW) is devoted to creating, publishing, developing and disseminating creative writing by Asian Americans, and to providing an alternative literary arts space at the intersection of migration, race, and social justice.