6th Annual Kundiman Retreat Reading

Friday, July 10, 2009 | 8pm

For six years now, Kundiman has held a summer retreat at UVA, where 18 emerging Asian American poets are selected from a competitive national pool to work closely with three master poets.  Each summer, Kundiman holds a reading for the UVA-Charlottesville community to spotlight faculty and fellows.  This year, we are proud to hold our annual retreat reading at The Bridge, which will feature our 2009 faculty Rick Barot, Staceyann Chin, and Myung Mi Kim. Our poets span a range of aesthetics—from meditative lyric to experimental to performance; this will be a reading that impresses the audience with the exuberance and diversity of today’s Asian American poetry.  Reception to follow.

For more information: www.kundiman.org

Biographies:

Rick Barot is the author of The Darker Fall, winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize, and Want. His poems and essays have appeared in The New England Review, The New Republic, Poetry, and Virginia Quarterly Review, and he is the recipient of a 2001 NEA Fellowship.  He lives in Tacoma, WA and teaches at both the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and Pacific Lutheran University.

Staceyann Chin’s has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and featured on 60 Minutes, and her one-woman show Hands Afire appeared in 2002 at the Bleecker Theater. She was featured on the second and third seasons of the HBO series, Def Poetry Slam.  Winner of the 1998 Lambda Literary Slam and 1999 Chicago People of Color Slam, Chin was a co-writer and original cast member of Russell Simmons’s Tony Award-winning Def Poetry Jam on Broadway.

Myung Mi Kim’s books include Commons, DURA, The Bounty, and Under Flag, winner of the Multicultural Publisher’s Exchange Award.  Her poems have been anthologized in Asian American Literature: An Anthology, Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women, Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry, Primary Trouble: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, and other collections.  She is Professor of English at SUNY-Buffalo.