Friday March 19th, 2021 6-8:00pm
Online on Zoom
Curated by Michelle Lin and Kazumi Chin
On Friday, March 19th, KSW Presents “Spirit Houses” a reading featuring Maw Shein Win, author of Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn, 2020) and Khaty Xiong, author of Poor Anima (Apogee Press, 2015). This event is a celebration of Maw Shein Win’s newest collection and of both poets’ powerful work performing rituals of grief, pain, and the life after it and with it.
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
We are opening up submissions for writers to be a part of this reading. We will only be able to accept up to five readers.
Eligibility: We welcome writers of all genres, and strive to spotlight those of the Asian Pacific diaspora and people of color. We are especially interested in showcasing emerging writers who have had little stage time or few publications.
At this time, KSW Presents cannot provide payment for writers who submit to be a part of this reading series, but we are actively pursuing funding for this program.
How to Submit: Submit work that explores this upcoming event's theme, that can be read or performed within 3 minutes or less.
Maw Shein Win
is a poet, editor, and educator who lives and teaches in the Bay Area. Her poetry chapbooks are Ruins of a glittering palace (SPA/Commonwealth Projects) and Score and Bone (Nomadic Press). Invisible Gifts: Poems was published by Manic D Press in 2018. Win is the first poet laureate of El Cerrito, California (2016 - 2018). Her full-length poetry collection is Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn, 2020), longlisted for the 2021 PEN America Open Book Award. She often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers and is a Spring 2021 ARC Poetry Fellow at UC Berkeley. mawsheinwin.com
Khaty Xiong
is is a poet from Fresno, California. She is the author of Poor Anima (Apogee Press, 2015), the first full-length collection of poetry published by a Hmong American woman in the United States. She received her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Montana. Her work has been featured in Poetry, Gulf Coast, The Adroit Journal, Academy of American Poets and Poetry Society of America websites, and elsewhere. In 2019, she was awarded Best of the Net for her poem, “Year of the Cardinal’s Song (VII).” Xiong’s honors include the Nadya Aisenberg Fellowship from MacDowell, an Individual Excellence Award and a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council, and a 2020 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Currently, she is working on her second poetry book, a collection of grief work over the sudden loss of her mother.
ABOUT STORAGE UNIT FOR THE SPIRIT HOUSE
The poems in Maw Shein Win’s second book, Storage Unit for the Spirit House, look through physical objects to glimpse the ephemeral, the material, and the immaterial. Nats, Buddhist animist deities from her family’s homeland of Burma, spirits believed to have the power to influence everyday lives, inhabit the storage units and hover around objects while forgotten children sleep under Mylar blankets and daughters try to see through the haze of a father’s cigarette smoke. This careful curation of unlikely objects and images becomes an act of ritual collection that uses language to interrogate how pain in life can transform someone into a nat or a siren that lives on.
ABOUT POOR ANIMA
“Poor Anima is a brilliant and serious collection of poems; poems that foreground the perils of a ‘trapped tongue’ yet darkly pushing for its articulate cry and sonorous divining.” —Prageeta Sharma, author of Undergloom
“Khaty Xiong sings hauntingly of war, violence, and dislocation. Her language, a traumatized body, traverses between welts and wounds, between home and exile.” —Don Mee Choi, author of The Morning News Is Exciting
“Xiong’s poetry is also a sacrificial poetry, both in the sense that it knows and performs ritual, and in the sense that it gives itself up, completely, to currents that it perceives but can’t tame.” —Elizabeth Robinson, author of On Ghosts