Kundiman at the Spirit Room: A Fall Reading

Kundiman is a national organization based in NYC, which was inspired by Cave Canem, and which supports and promotes the work of Asian American writers. Kundiman Northeast will hold its first western New York reading at the wonderful Spirit Room, Sunday, October 28 at 7:00 PM. Come join us!

Host: The Spirit Room and Sejal Shah

Our readers:

1. Mara Ahmed has lived and been educated in Belgium, Pakistan and the United States. She is an activist, artist and filmmaker whose third documentary “A Thin Wall,” a film about the partition of India, was released in 2015. Last year, Mara gave a Tedx talk about the meaning of borders entitled “The edges that blur.” She is now working on a film about racism in America, for which she is interviewing women of color exclusively. It’s inspired by Claudia Rankine’s book, “Citizen: An American Lyric.” Mara blogs at maraahmed.com and is based in Rochester.

2. Albert Abonado teaches creative writing at SUNY Geneseo. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, The Margins, Zone 3, and elsewhere. He is a recipient of a NYFA fellowship for poetry. Every Thursday from 2-3PM, he hosts the poetry radio show Flour City Yawp on WAYO 104.3 FM-LP. He also curates the CityVerse column for City Newspaper. He lives in Rochester with his wife, and a hamster named Jellybean.

3. Chen Chen (Kundiman Fellow, BOA poet, and you should follow him on twitter) Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, the GLCA New Writers Award, the Texas Book Award for Poetry, and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. He is the 2018-2020 Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University. He lives with his partner, Jeff Gilbert and their pug dog, Mr. Rupert Giles.

More about KUNDIMAN:

Kundiman creates an affirming and rigorous space where Asian American writers can explore, through art, the unique challenges that face the new and ever changing diaspora. We see the arts as a tool of empowerment, of education and liberation, of addressing proactively the legacy we will leave for our future.