Thursday, April 22, 2010
The Asian American Writers' Workshop
New York, NY
The Voice that Speaks Across the Distance: A Celebration of Meena Alexander's Poetics of Dislocation and Reetika Vazirani's Radha Says
Meena Alexander and Reetika Vazirani have played a pivotal role in naming a collective language of loss and migration. In Poetics of Dislocation, Guggenheim fellow Meena Alexander’s essays on poetry discuss what it means to become an American poet and to make your own place in a time of violence. The essays offer a rare look into the process of a real force in Asian American poetry. We also honor Radha Says, Reetika Vazirani’s posthumous collection of poems and the first book published by Drunken Boat. A book of absence and lyrical triumph, Vazirani’s poems rise above her premature passing from suicide in 2003 to a key place in contemporary poetry. Introduced by Drunken Boat managing editor Leslie McGrath. Former friends and colleagues, including poets Patrick Rosal and Harriet Levin, will read from Vazirani’s work.
Meena Alexander, poet, novelist, scholar, and essayist, is winner of multiple awards and fellowships, including those from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Fulbright Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and Arts Council of England. Her six volumes of poetry include the collection, Illiterate Heart (Triquarterly, 2002), which won the PEN Open Book Award. Her autobiography, Fault Lines, chosen as one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 1993, and is now regarded as a post-colonial classic. She is Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY.
Leslie McGrath is the managing editor of Drunken Boat, an online journal of the arts. Her poems have appeared in Agni online, Alimentum, Beloit Poetry Journal, DIAGRAM, Poetry Ireland, and elsewhere. Her literary interviews have appeared in the Writer’s Chronicle and on public radio. Winner of the 2004 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, her first collection of poetry, Opulent Hunger, Opulent Rage, was published by Main Street Rag Press (2009.) She is also the editor, along with Ravi Shankar, of Radha Says, the posthumous poetry collection of Reetika Vazirani, published by Drunken Boat Press.
Harriet Levin is the author of The Christmas Show (Beacon Press, 1997), Philadelphia Inquirer Notable Book of the Year and winner of a Barnard New Women Poet's Prize, a Poetry Society of America Alice Fay di Catagnola Award and an Ellen LaForge Memorial Poetry Prize. A new collection, Girl in Cap and Gown (Mammoth Books) was a 2009 National Poetry Series Finalist. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Cimarron Review, Drunken Boat, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner and Harvard Review. She lives in Philadelphia, where she is Writing Program Director at Drexel University and a founder of The Reunion Project, which reunites Lost Boys and Girls of Sudan with their mothers.
Patrick Rosal is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive, which won the Members' Choice Award from the Asian American Writers' Workshop, and more recently, My American Kundiman, which won the Association of Asian American Studies 2006 Book Award in Poetry as well as the 2007 Global Filipino Literary Award. His poems and essays have been published widely in journals and anthologies including American Poetry Review, New Orleans Review, Harvard Review, Crab Orchard Review, Indiana Review, North American Review, The Literary Review, Pindledyboz, Black Renaissance Noire, Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Non-Fiction. Awarded a 2009 Fulbright grant,, he has received teaching appointments at Penn State Altoona, Centre College, the University of Texas, Austin, and Drew University.
Reetika Vazirani was born in India in 1962 and emigrated to the United States with her family as a child. She received her BA from Wellesley College and her MFA from the University of Virginia. Her first collection of poetry, White Elephants, (Beacon Press, 1996) won the Barnard New Women Poets Prize. Her second collection, World Hotel, (Copper Canyon Press, 2002) won the 2003 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. Vazirani received a Pushcart Prize, a Poets & Writers Exchange Program Award, the Glenna Luchei Award from Prairie Schooner, and a “Discovery”/The Nation award. She was writer-in-residence at Sweet Briar College and later at the College of William and Mary in 2002. Vazirani took her own life and that of her son, Jehan Vazirani Komunyakaa, on July 16, 2003. Her posthumous collection, Radha Says, edited by Leslie McGrath and Ravi Shankar, was published by Drunken Boat in January.
The Asian American Writers' Workshop
New York, NY
The Voice that Speaks Across the Distance: A Celebration of Meena Alexander's Poetics of Dislocation and Reetika Vazirani's Radha Says
Meena Alexander and Reetika Vazirani have played a pivotal role in naming a collective language of loss and migration. In Poetics of Dislocation, Guggenheim fellow Meena Alexander’s essays on poetry discuss what it means to become an American poet and to make your own place in a time of violence. The essays offer a rare look into the process of a real force in Asian American poetry. We also honor Radha Says, Reetika Vazirani’s posthumous collection of poems and the first book published by Drunken Boat. A book of absence and lyrical triumph, Vazirani’s poems rise above her premature passing from suicide in 2003 to a key place in contemporary poetry. Introduced by Drunken Boat managing editor Leslie McGrath. Former friends and colleagues, including poets Patrick Rosal and Harriet Levin, will read from Vazirani’s work.
Meena Alexander, poet, novelist, scholar, and essayist, is winner of multiple awards and fellowships, including those from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Fulbright Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and Arts Council of England. Her six volumes of poetry include the collection, Illiterate Heart (Triquarterly, 2002), which won the PEN Open Book Award. Her autobiography, Fault Lines, chosen as one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 1993, and is now regarded as a post-colonial classic. She is Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY.
Leslie McGrath is the managing editor of Drunken Boat, an online journal of the arts. Her poems have appeared in Agni online, Alimentum, Beloit Poetry Journal, DIAGRAM, Poetry Ireland, and elsewhere. Her literary interviews have appeared in the Writer’s Chronicle and on public radio. Winner of the 2004 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, her first collection of poetry, Opulent Hunger, Opulent Rage, was published by Main Street Rag Press (2009.) She is also the editor, along with Ravi Shankar, of Radha Says, the posthumous poetry collection of Reetika Vazirani, published by Drunken Boat Press.
Harriet Levin is the author of The Christmas Show (Beacon Press, 1997), Philadelphia Inquirer Notable Book of the Year and winner of a Barnard New Women Poet's Prize, a Poetry Society of America Alice Fay di Catagnola Award and an Ellen LaForge Memorial Poetry Prize. A new collection, Girl in Cap and Gown (Mammoth Books) was a 2009 National Poetry Series Finalist. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Cimarron Review, Drunken Boat, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner and Harvard Review. She lives in Philadelphia, where she is Writing Program Director at Drexel University and a founder of The Reunion Project, which reunites Lost Boys and Girls of Sudan with their mothers.
Patrick Rosal is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive, which won the Members' Choice Award from the Asian American Writers' Workshop, and more recently, My American Kundiman, which won the Association of Asian American Studies 2006 Book Award in Poetry as well as the 2007 Global Filipino Literary Award. His poems and essays have been published widely in journals and anthologies including American Poetry Review, New Orleans Review, Harvard Review, Crab Orchard Review, Indiana Review, North American Review, The Literary Review, Pindledyboz, Black Renaissance Noire, Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Non-Fiction. Awarded a 2009 Fulbright grant,, he has received teaching appointments at Penn State Altoona, Centre College, the University of Texas, Austin, and Drew University.
Reetika Vazirani was born in India in 1962 and emigrated to the United States with her family as a child. She received her BA from Wellesley College and her MFA from the University of Virginia. Her first collection of poetry, White Elephants, (Beacon Press, 1996) won the Barnard New Women Poets Prize. Her second collection, World Hotel, (Copper Canyon Press, 2002) won the 2003 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. Vazirani received a Pushcart Prize, a Poets & Writers Exchange Program Award, the Glenna Luchei Award from Prairie Schooner, and a “Discovery”/The Nation award. She was writer-in-residence at Sweet Briar College and later at the College of William and Mary in 2002. Vazirani took her own life and that of her son, Jehan Vazirani Komunyakaa, on July 16, 2003. Her posthumous collection, Radha Says, edited by Leslie McGrath and Ravi Shankar, was published by Drunken Boat in January.
