S168.
Living as Exposition: Asian American Poets in the Southern United States
Saturday, March 26, 2022
12:10 pm to 1:25 pm
Asian Americans are rarely depicted as Southerners. Ours is an invisible history and a conspicuous existence. So to whom do we write? Whom do we preserve by writing? Heritage has long concealed a threat in Southern lexicon. And yet at the root, heritage is an act of transmission from one generation to the next. Join panelists in a discussion to push Southern poetics towards wholeness by asserting that the Asian American experience in the South is vaster than one generation.
Participants
Asa Drake is a Filipina American writer and public services librarian in central Florida. She has received fellowships from Tin House and Idyllwild Arts and is a 2020 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest winner. Her poems are published in Adroit, Copper Nickel, and the Paris Review.
Ina Cariño holds an MFA in creative writing from North Carolina State University. Their poetry appears in Apogee, Wildness, Waxwing, New England Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. They are the winner of the 2021 Alice James Award for their manuscript Feast, forthcoming from Alice James Books.
Tiana Nobile is the author of Cleave. She is a Korean American adoptee, Kundiman fellow, recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, and a finalist of the National Poetry Series and Kundiman Poetry Prize.
Sasha Pimentel is author of For Want of Water, winner of the National Poetry Series, and Insides She Swallowed, winner of the American Book Award. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, PBS NewsHour, and the American Poetry Review. She was the 2018–19 Picador Professor, is a 2019 NEA fellow, and is an associate professor at the University of Texas at El Paso.
Adrienne Su is the author of five books of poems, most recently Living Quarters and Peach State. Her awards include an NEA fellowship and several appearances in Best American Poetry. She teaches at Dickinson College.
