F148.
Far from the Coasts: Multigenre Asian Diasporic Writers Recrafting Place
Friday, March 10, 2023
10:35 am to 11:50 am
This panel explores the relationship between place and craft through the work of multigenre, Asian American writers from the Midwest. Our work foregrounds our embodied, Asian American experiences that disrupt public imagination about the Midwest. Experiments with literary form across genres allow us to interrogate the link between social mythologies such as “Midwestern nice” and “the model minority,” and mark the longstanding presence of Asian American writers rooted in Midwestern America.
Participants
Jasmine An is the author of two chapbooks of poetry: Naming the No-Name Woman and Monkey Was Here. She has been awarded residencies at Hedgebrook and Willapa Bay AiR. She is the poetry editor for Agape Editions, and she is pursuing a PhD in women’s studies and English at the University of Michigan.
Carlina Duan is the author of Alien Miss (Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2021) and I Wore My Blackest Hair (Little A, 2017). She received her MFA in poetry from Vanderbilt University, and is currently a PhD candidate in the Joint Program in English & Education at the University of Michigan.
Divya Victor is the author of Curb (Nightboat) and Kith (Fence), among others. Her work has earned the PEN America Open Book Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. She is currently associate professor of English and the director of the creative writing program at Michigan State University.
Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint is the author of the novel The End of Peril, the End of Enmity, the End of Strife, A Haven (Noemi Press, 2018), which won an Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and Names for Light: A Family History (Graywolf Press, 2021), which won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize.
Urvi Kumbhat graduated from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, where she is currently a Zell Fellow. Her work appears in The Margins, Protean magazine, Poet Lore, Cherry Tree, Lit Hub, and other publications. She is a 2022 Tin House Resident. She grew up in Calcutta.
