On Thursday, June 15, we hosted a reading and roundtable on interdisciplinary approaches to migration, earth, empire, and mental health featuring Filipinx poets Angela Peñaredondo, Jan-Henry Gray, Jen Soriano, and Christine Imperial! We witnessed each poet’s work and had a moderated conversation with Kay Ulanday Barrett centering sounds and textures of interdisciplinary writing as well as the intuitive and dissonant outcomes of this interweaving.
ANGELA PEÑAREDONDO is a writer, artist, and assistant professor of Creative Writer. Peñaredondo is the author of nature felt but never apprehended (Noemi Press), All Things Lose Thousands of Times (Inlandia Institute, Winner of Hillary Gravendyk Regional Prize) and the chapbook, Maroon (Jamii Publications). Their work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets, Pleiades Magazine, Michigan Quarterly Review, Southern Humanities Review and elsewhere. They received fellowships from Hedgebrook, Kundiman, and Macondo; and awards from TinHouse, Community of Writers and others. They are based in unceded lands of the Tongvan, Serrano and Tataviam nations with their partner and many cramped, wild plants. You can find them at angelapenaredondo.com and @domainedenarwhal
CHRISTINE IMPERIAL is a PhD Cultural Studies student at UC Davis where she was awarded the Dean’s Distinguished Graduate Fellowship. Her first book Mistaken for an Empire is published with Mad Creeks Books, an imprint of the Ohio State University, as the 2021 Gournay Prize Winner. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the California Institute of the Arts. At CalArts, she was the 2020 Emi Kuriyama Thesis winner and a 2020-2021 REEF Fellow. Her work has been published in Poets & Writers, POETRY, Inverted Syntax, TLDTD, among others.
JEN SORIANO (she~they) is a Filipinx writer and movement builder who has long worked at the intersection of grassroots organizing, narrative strategy, and art-driven social change. Jen has won the International Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction, the Fugue Prose Prize, and fellowships from Hugo House, Vermont Studio Center, Artist Trust, and the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat. Jen is also an independent scholar and performer, author of the chapbook “Making the Tongue Dry,” and co-editor of Closer to Liberation: A Pina/xy Activist Anthology. Originally from a landlocked part of the Chicago area, Jen now lives with her family in Seattle, near the Duwamish River and the Salish Sea. Her debut essay collection Nervous, will be published August 22, 2023 by Amistad Books.
JAN-HENRY GRAY is the author of Documents (BOA Editions, Ltd.), selected by D.A. Powell as the winner A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and the chapbook Selected Emails (speCt! Books). He’s received fellowships from Kundiman, Undocupoets, and the Cooke Foundation. He was born in the Philippines and has lived in San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, and Brooklyn. He is an Assistant Professor at Adelphi University in New York.
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
This event will be streamed on Zoom Webinar. Please RSVP to receive a Zoom link via email in advance of the event. The event will be uploaded to the AAWW KZfaq channel at a future date.
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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.