"AA & NH/PI Writers & Activism"
On Monday April 18, the Department of English presents the final event of our 2021-2022 series responding to increased and continuing violence against Asian Americans. This discussion on writing and activism features Jan-Henry Gray (author of the poetry collection Documents); Julie Ae Kim (co-founder of the Asian American Feminist Collective); and Sun Yung Shin (author of four poetry collections and editor/co-editor of three anthologies, including A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota); with moderation by MFA student Asha Thanki, an essayist and fiction writer.
Register for this Zoom webinar.
For questions about accessibility services, please email Terri Sutton at sutt0063@umn.edu. This event is free and open to the public.
Jan-Henry Gray is the author of Documents (BOA Editions Ltd.), chosen by D.A. Powell as the winner of the Poulin Poetry Prize, and the chapbook Selected Emails (speCt! Books.) His writing can also be found in Nepantla: An Anthology for Queer Poets of Color, The Rumpus, Tupelo Quarterly, DIAGRAM, The Margins, and other journals. Gray was born in the Philippines, grew up in California, and worked as a chef in San Francisco for more than 12 years. He lived undocumented in the US for more than 32 years. A graduate of San Francisco State University and Columbia College Chicago’s MFA program, he received the inaugural Undocupoets Fellowship and awards from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation and the Academy of American Poets. A Kundiman fellow, he currently lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Adelphi University where he is an Assistant Professor and Director of the Creative Writing MFA Program.
Julie Ae Kim is an organizer and writer from Queens, NYC. She is the co-founder of the Asian American Feminist Collective and the co-editor of the Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities Project at The Margins.
Sun Yung Shin was born in Seoul, Korea and was raised in the Chicago area. She is a poet, writer, and cultural worker. She is the editor of What We Hunger For: Refugee and Immigrant Stories on Food and Family (2021) and of A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota, author of poetry collections The Wet Hex; Unbearable Splendor (finalist for the 2017 PEN USA Literary Award for Poetry, winner of the 2016 Minnesota Book Award for poetry); Rough, and Savage; and Skirt Full of Black (winner of the 2007 Asian American Literary Award for poetry), co-editor of Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption, and author of bilingual illustrated book for children Cooper’s Lesson. She lives in Minneapolis where she co-directs the community organization Poetry Asylum with poet Su Hwang.
Asha Thanki (moderator) is an essayist and fiction writer based in Minneapolis. Her work has appeared in The Southern Review, Platypus Press’ wildness, The Common, Catapult, The Nashville Review, Hyphen, and more. She is the winner of the 2019 Arkansas International’s Emerging Writers Prize, judged by Sigrid Nunez, and fourth prizewinner of Zoetrope: All Story’s 2020 Short Fiction Competition. Her work has received support from the Speculative Literature Foundation, Tin House, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and more. Thanki is currently a candidate for the University of Minnesota’s MFA in Creative Writing, with a concentration in fiction, and a graduate minor in public policy from the Humphrey School of Public Affairs. Prior, she attended Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, where she studied International Political Economy and International Development. She is working on an intergenerational and speculative novel, as well as a short story collection focused on memory, loves, and societal collapse in their kaleidoscopic forms.