Events

  While the last ten years have seen an explosion of South Asian American fiction in the United States, little attention has been given to the flourishing voices in South Asian American poetry until now. Celebrating National Poetry Month, we present the West Coast launch of Indivisible: An Anthology of South Asian American Poetry. Featuring 49 South Asian American poets, including both established writers and younger award-winning authors, this is the first anthology to showcase the works of contemporary South Asian American poets who are rewriting the cultural and literary landscape of America today.    “Rarely does one have the pleasure of seeing so many poets violate the truth that no one can be in two places at once. Indivisible provides hundreds of local poetic delights and deserves a place among the best anthologies of poetry.”       —Billy Collins     Indivisible’s editors will be talking this evening. Neelanjana Banerjee is a poet, fiction writer, and journalist who has been teaching media skills and creative writing to young people for the past six years. Summi Kaipa is a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, author of three chapbooks and a play, and past editor of an Asian American literary magazine. Pireeni Sundaralingam has held national fellowships in poetry and cognitive science; her poetry has been published in Ireland, Sweden, the UK, and the US.    Joining them tonight are contributors Ravi Chandra, M.D., a psychiatrist and writer in San Francisco.  He was active on the slam poetry scene, and regularly writes a blog for the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival;Tanuja Mehrotra's poems have appeared in such journals as The Asian Pacific American Journal, Fourteen Hills, Transfer, Dogwood, ellipsis, and The Alembic. She holds an MA in English Literature and an MFA in Poetry.; and Swati Rana,  a graduate student at the UC Berkeley where she is writing a dissertation on early twentieth-century immigrant literature, and completing a manuscript of poems about the daily journey of work.