For You, I Make This Offering
In this participatory ritual, you are invited to join in offerings of language, letters, food, and kinship between poets Jennifer S. Cheng, Monica Sok, and Muriel Leung. In invoking a communal space of poetry and care, we hope to acknowledge the connection between making art, politics, and the intimacies of Asian American friendships. You are welcome to share space and, if you wish, to participate alongside as we offer up these blended rituals as a version of a hybrid art practice.
This event is made possible through an individual artist grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission.
Our Zoom room registration is now at max capacity, you can watch the livestream at KSW’s YouTube Page (https://youtube.com/kearnystreetworkshop) when the event begins.
Artist Bios
Jennifer S. Cheng's work includes poetry, lyric essay, and image-text forms exploring immigrant home-building, shadow poetics, and the feminine monstrous. Her book MOON: LETTERS, MAPS, POEMS was selected by Bhanu Kapil for the Tarpaulin Sky Award and named a “Best Book of 2018” by Publishers Weekly and Entropy. She is also the author of HOUSE A, selected by Claudia Rankine for the Omnidawn Poetry Prize, and INVOCATION: AN ESSAY, an image-text chapbook. She received awards and fellowships from Brown University, the University of Iowa, the National Endowment for the Arts, the U.S. Fulbright program, Kundiman, Bread Loaf, and the Academy of American Poets. Having grown up in Texas and Hong Kong, she lives in San Francisco. www.jenniferscheng.com
Monica Sok is a Cambodian American poet and the daughter of former refugees. She is the author of A Nail the Evening Hangs On (Copper Canyon Press, 2020). Her work has been recognized with a "Discovery" Prize from 92Y. She has received fellowships and residencies from Poetry Society of America, Hedgebrook, Elizabeth George Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Kundiman, Jerome Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Saltonstall Foundation, and others. Currently, Sok is a 2018-2020 Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and has taught poetry to Southeast Asian youths at Banteay Srei and the Center for Empowering Refugees and Immigrants in Oakland, California. She is originally from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. www.monicasok.com/
Muriel Leung is the author of Imagine Us, The Swarm, forthcoming from Nightboat Books and Bone Confetti, winner of the 2015 Noemi Press Book Award. A Pushcart Prize nominated writer, her writing can be found in The Baffler, Cream City Review, Gulf Coast, The Collagist, Fairy Tale Review, and others. She is a recipient of fellowships to Kundiman, VONA/Voices Workshop and the Community of Writers. She is the Poetry Co-Editor of Apogee Journal. She also co-hosts The Blood-Jet Writing Hour podcast with Rachelle Cruz and MT Vallarta. She is a member of Miresa Collective, a feminist speakers bureau. Currently, she is a Dornsife fellow in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California. She is from Queens, NY. http://www.murielleung.com/