Poet Michael Mercurio hosts and curates “What the Universe Is,” a poetry reading series featuring poets and writers Rita Banerjee and Amanda Shaw reading at 7:30 pm EST on Tuesday, February 11, 2025. Register for the reading on Zoom and join the reading live at: bit.ly/WTUIFeb2025! And here’s more information about the reading & writers below:
Make some time for poetry during this shortest of months. Come hear two exceptional poets read for you on Zoom, so you don’t have to leave the house in these cold & dark days. Let these poets bring you light & warmth!
Rita Banerjee is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She is author of Disobedient Futures,CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing, Echo in Four Beats, “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps, and Cracklers at Night, and co-writer of the documentary Burning Down the Louvre. Her work appears in Academy of American Poets,Poets & Writers, PANK, Nat. Brut., Hunger Mountain, Tupelo Quarterly, Isele, Vermont Public Radio, and elsewhere. She serves as Senior Editor of the South Asian Avant-Garde and Executive Creative Director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop. She received a Vermont Arts Council Creation Grant for her new memoir and manifesto on female cool, and one of the book’s opening chapters “Birth of Cool,” was a Notable Essay in the 2020 Best American Essays, and another chapter, “The Female Gaze,” was a Notable Essay in the 2023 Best American Essays.
Amanda Shaw is the author of It Will Have Been So Beautiful (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2024). Based in Washington, DC, she is a teacher and editor at the World Bank and other international organizations. Her poems have appeared in LEON Literary Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Mid-Atlantic Review, and Lily Poetry Review, which she recently joined as the reviews editor. Over the last 25 years, she has taught students of all ages and backgrounds in New York, Boston, Detroit, and Rome, Italy.
It’s very easy to register at bit.ly/WTUIFeb2025 — make sure you don’t miss out!
On August 13, the Bryant Park Reading Room (curated by Jason Schneiderman) will feature poets Rita Banerjee, Kate Gale, Erika Meitner, and Jason Schneiderman for a reading from 6:00-7:00 pm EDT.
Rita Banerjee is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She is author of Disobedient Futures, CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing, Echo in Four Beats, the novella “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps, and Cracklers at Night. She received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard and her MFA from the University of Washington. Her work appears in Hunger Mountain, Isele, Nat. Brut., Poets & Writers, Academy of American Poets, Los Angeles Review of Books, Vermont Public Radio, and elsewhere. She received a VAC Creation Grant for her new memoir and manifesto on female cool, and one of the opening chapters of this memoir, “Birth of Cool” was a Notable Essay in the 2020 Best American Essays, and another chapter, “The Female Gaze,” was a Notable Essay in the 2023 Best American Essays.
Dr. Kate Gale is co-founder and publisher of Red Hen Press. She is the author of Under a Neon Sun from Three Rooms Press and The Loneliest Girl from the University of New Mexico Press and of seven books of poetry including The Goldilocks Zone and six librettos including Rio de Sangre, a libretto for an opera with composer Don Davis, which had its world premiere at the Florentine Opera in Milwaukee. Her opera on Esther was written for the singer Hila Plitmann and is in process with the composer Mark Abel.
Erika Meitner is the author of six books of poems, including Useful Junk (BOA Editions, 2022), and Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018)–winner of the 2018 National Jewish Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. Her poems have been published most recently in Electric Literature, Oxford American, The New Yorker, Orion, The New Republic, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Rumpus. Meitner is currently a professor of English and MFA program director at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Jason Schneiderman is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Hold Me Tight (Red Hen, 2020), and including the forthcoming Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire (Red Hen, 2024). He edited the anthology Queer: A Reader for Writers (Oxford UP 2016). His poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. His awards include the Emily Dickinson Award, the Shestack Award and a Fulbright Fellowship. He is longtime co-host of the podcast Painted Bride Quarterly Slush Pile and a guest host for The Slowdown. He is Professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Rita Banerjee’s Hindi/English poem “एक रात में (One Night)” be part of “Time Capsule,” a collection of poems curated by writer and artist Candace Jensen , Emily Zervas, and Michelle Blake and created on a letterpress at the Ruth Stone House for the Putney Public Library. Some poets featured in the “Time Capsule” anthology include Candace Jensen, Ben Pease, Bianca Stone, Amanda Galvan Huynh, Mary Ruefle, Didi Jackson, Major Jackson, Rita Banerjee, and many others.
The reading and release parties for “Time Capsule” will take place on June 15 and July 13 at 1 pm EST at the Putney Public Library (55 Main Street, Putney, VT 05346). More information about Time Capsule and its book launch can be found in the Brattleboro Reformer here.
Copies of “Time Capsule” will be available for sale $50 cash or check to raise money for the library! Bigger donations are always welcome of course. The chapbook contents will be available as an eBook and of course available to borrow from the library! Read more about the “Time Capsule” anthology launch on the Putney Public Library website. And a video of the poem “One Night” can be viewed here:
Rita Banerjee’s poem “Sleep” is featured in “Bijou” Opening Reception at the 2024 Salem Arts Festival from June 7, 2024 – July 31, 2024. The “Bijou” World Poetry Collection is curated by poet Diana Norma Szokolyai and the Chagall Performing Arts Collaborative. You can visit the”Bijou” exhibit at the ChagallPAC / Cambridge Writers’ Workshop Studio at Artist’s Row, 24 New Derby Street, Salem, MA 01970 USA this weekend! More info follows below:
Join us on June 7, 2024 from 7-9 pm ESTfor our Opening Reception for “Bijou,” with live music and mingling.
ChagallPAC is delighted to announce a group exhibition titled “Bijou,” featuring the visual works of Ray Gilbert, Rachel Redux, Zenovia, Osmar K de Leon, Salem Fairy Forest, Diana Norma Sozokolyai, and Holy Crow. This exhibition will run from June 7 – July 31, 2024. Our opening Reception on June 7th will feature some of our artists in attendance, and live music by Victor Pachas.
BIJOU is desirable, sought-after, elegant. A jewel, a trinket, a treasure. Shaped by fingers, ornamental, delicate, prized workmanship. From haunting photos, dreamlike paintings, and bejeweled shrines, the selected works are modern treasure. Rare, handmade, and elegant.
Poets in Exhibition: Anonymous Rita Banerjee Shari Caplan Wang Chien Grace Harrington Murdoch Pete Murdoch Nancy Pantano Corrine Previte J.D. Scrimgeour Diana Norma Szokolyai Jezmina von Thiele Sophia Vassallo Dan Rice Jamie Spallino Maria Silvia Rodrigo Leaman
In 1970, when Shawn Wong was 19 and a student at the University of California at Berkeley, he had to go hunting for Asian American literature on the street.
An English professor told him no such literature existed. But Wong and his friends and fellow writers, Jeffery Paul Chan, Frank Chin and Lawson Fusao Inada, knew that wasn’t true. They had connected over a shared quest to discover Asian American literature. Their dogged search through Bay Area thrift stores and a handful of literary anthologies led them to 14 writers whose work had been largely ignored by mainstream publishers.
As the young editors continued to refine their list of work by overlooked authors, they decided to create an anthology. Chan brought their fledgling manuscript into the Asian American literature class he was teaching at San Francisco State University, while Wong—who would later join the faculty at the UW—used the material in a class he was teaching at Mills College in nearby Oakland. Eventually, the first-time editors published that group of 14 authors, which included UW alumnus John Okada, ’47, ’51, as well as now well-known wordsmiths Toshio Mori, Oscar Peñaranda and Diana Chang. Their radical undertaking culminated in “Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers.”
This year, “Aiiieeeee!” turns 50. First published by the Howard University Press in 1974, the book was republished in 2019 by the University of Washington Press. The new edition holds a foreword by Tara Fickle, associate professor of Asian American studies at Northwestern University, who offers the current generation of readers context about the era and people involved in bringing the book to life. Fickle studied Wong’s correspondence with the writers and his fellow editors. She also looked at the production notes for the book to understand how the collection evolved through the editorial process and what the stakes were for the editors. Fickle’s research into Wong’s archives unearthed the editors’ own reflections on their project. In a letter to Wong, for example, Inada envisioned the anthology’s success. “Our place in history will have the secure feel of real beginnings. After a while, people will refer to us as the fathers … the cornerstones of our culture.”
Inada’s words held true. “Aiiieeeee!” became a foundational text in Asian American Literature, and its editors were credited for both rescuing stories out of time and opening readers to a diversity of voices and experiences from the Asian American community. The anthology’s 14 pieces range from the 1940s to the 1970s, ending in a time when activists and scholars were challenging stereotypical representations and expectations of the Asian American voice and experience to highlight neglected perspectives and more freshly define the culture.
Author and activist Ishmael Reed helped the four writers and would-be editors find their way to the Howard University Press. The Howard editors “were the first to realize the legitimacy of Asian American literature,” Wong says. “It was one of the first 10 books on their list. And it was the only one that wasn’t an African American title.”
Reed dubbed Wong and his friends the “Four Horsemen of Asian-American Literature” and encouraged their efforts to provoke, develop and define an Asian American literary canon. Right away, the book garnered positive reviews in Rolling Stone and The New York Times and advanced Wong and his collaborators along their paths as writers and literary activists.
Today, the UW is steeped in the legacy of their groundbreaking work. A wealth of modern Asian American literary voices includes UW alumni and scholars who studied Asian American literature, English literature and ethnic cultural studies.
Wong joined the UW faculty in 1984, after teaching at Mills College, UC Santa Cruz and San Francisco State. He is currently a professor in the English department and has served as chair of English, director of the Creative Writing Program, director of the University Honors Program and faculty in Cinema & Media Studies.
“The UW has always been a place where you can reinvent yourself,” says Wong. “It’s large enough that I could try different things and bring my perspective to lots of different fields.”
Alongside Wong’s legacy, the University of Washington Press has its own long history of engaging contemporary scholars in republishing and recontextualizing Asian American classics for new generations of readers. It also has a long-standing commitment to supporting Asian American scholarship dating to the early 1970s when editor-in-chief Naomi Pascale saw an opportunity to position the press at the forefront of the discipline. In 1973, the press republished Filipino novelist Carlos Bulosan’s “America Is in the Heart.” Over her decades-long career at the UW Press, Pascale acquired many other titles in this area, including Jade Snow Wong’s “Fifth Chinese Daughter” and Janice Mirikitani’s “Awake in the River and Shedding Silence.”
When Nicole Mitchell became publisher of the press in 2012, she led the redesign and refresh of its Asian American classics series and invited contemporary writers and scholars to develop introductions for these new editions. The UW Press also has published titles from UW faculty across disciplines. “Becoming Nisei,” by professors Lisa Hoffman in the School of Urban Studies and Mary Hanneman, ’91, of the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, looks at Japanese Americans in Tacoma before World War II. Professor Stephen Sumida’s “And the View from the Shore” explores the literary traditions of Hawai’i. The press also has supported prominent Northwest-based Asian American writers including Frank Abe, Peter Bacho, ’74, and Cindy Domingo.
In 2020, Shawn Wong established the Shawn Wong Book Fund at the UW Press to recover forgotten titles, like Louis Chu’s “Eat a Bowl of Tea,” and bring them back into print for the wider public. The newest title in Wong’s series is Willyce Kim’s “Dancer Dawkins and the California Kid”—the first Asian American lesbian novel.
Rising scholars and talented writers are drawn to the UW’s English Ph.D. program. Poet and writer E.J. Koh, ’23, won the Washington State Book Award for her memoir, “The Magical Language of Others.” Her novel, “The Liberators,” was released last fall. At the UW, Koh studied Korean American literature, history and film. Rita Banerjee’s, ’06, recent contemplation on female cool, “The Female Gaze,” was featured in “The Best American Essays” last year. And in her new memoir, “Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City,” Jane Wong, ’16, writes of finding in the literature of other Asian American artists ways to tell her own story… Today is a new day for underrepresented voices, and Asian American literature is flourishing with fresh new voices… Today is a new day for underrepresented voices, and Asian American literature is flourishing with fresh new voices.
In honor of AANHPI month, University of Washington President Ana Mari Cauce’s recently honored the legacy and impact Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities at the University of Washington in her Presidential Blog. President Cauce writes:
Connections to our Asian American (AA) and Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (NHPI) communities run deep at the University of Washington and across the Pacific Northwest. This year’s theme, “Advancing Leaders through Innovation,” offers a terrific lens through which to celebrate the significant role these diverse communities have had in the shaping of America, each through their own language, heritage and culture…
We also celebrate artists like UW Bothell artist-in-residence Anida Yoeu Ali, whose current debut solo show “Hybrid Skin, Mythical Presence” marks Seattle Asian Art Museum’s first exhibition by a Cambodian American artist. And the work of Native Hawaiian astrophysicist Brittany Kamai, cofounder of the Society of Indigenous Physicists (SIP), whose UW course, Pacific Indigenous Astrophysics, focuses uniquely on Indigenous navigation and is available to all UW students.
UW alumni include many talented creators from the AANHPI diaspora, as well, including Washington State Book Award winner E.J. Koh (’23) and Rita Banerjee (’06), whose essay “The Female Gaze,” explores the concept of keeping one’s cool as a woman of color.
This month of awareness is also a time to re-affirm our commitment to fighting anti-Asian racism and take collective responsibility in battling all forms of hatred, bigotry and discrimination here on campus and beyond. Let’s celebrate AA and NHPI communities and contributions — in May and throughout the year — for how they contribute to the University’s uniquely diverse and beautifully rich tapestry of cultures and identities.
Check out the Painted Bride hosts editors and writers Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Jason Schneiderman, Tim Fitts, and Sara Aykit discuss Rita Banerjee’s jazz-inspired poetry on their podcast here. And here’s more information about Episode 27: Suicides and Skeleton Jazz :
This week’s discussion both took us back and made sure that none of us would see the world the same way again. With images of breakdancing, gospel choir, and the not-so-innocent Georgia Brown, we were in it. Whether we’re distinguishing jazz from jazz or figuring out what a clapper is, this episode is filled with risky moves.
Join us in the campaign to have your local library carry lesser-known authors and small presses. Let us know what books you’ll be requesting with #getsomebooks! Let’s support libraries, small presses, and the authors who write for them.
Make sure you follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and let us know what you think of this episode with #longandskinny!
More about the author:
Rita Banerjee is the author of Echo in Four Beats, CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing, the novella “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps, and Cracklers at Night. She received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard and her MFA from the University of Washington, and her work appears in Hunger Mountain, PANK, Tupelo Quarterly, Isele Magazine, Nat. Brut., Poets & Writers, Academy of American Poets, Los Angeles Review of Books, Vermont Public Radio, and elsewhere. She is the co-writer of Burning Down the Louvre, a forthcoming documentary film about race, intimacy, and tribalism in the United States and in France, and serves as Senior Editor of the South Asian Avant-Garde and Creative Director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop. She received a 2021-2022 Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council for her new memoir and manifesto on female cool, and one of the opening chapters of this memoir, “Birth of Cool” was a Notable Essay in the 2020 Best American Essays. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Rita Banerjee will be be featured on WGDR Radio’s “Bon Mot” program at 5 pm EST on Sunday, August 20, 2023. The radio program will air on 91.1 and 91.7 FM Vermont, and can be found in archive here. The show is hosted by Rick Argan and Banerjee will be be reading from her poetry collection Echo in Four Beats and her new memoir manuscript on female cool. The show will also feature readings from Hunger Mountain, Issue 25: Art Saves, which was edited and curated by Erin Stalcup and features poetry, fiction, nonfiction, graphic literature, and hybrid work from the first 25 years of Hunger Mountain literary magazine. The reading also features faculty and students reading from Hunger Mountain: Art Saves from the MFA in Writing & Publishing program at VCFA in Spring 2021. You can listen to the broadcast here.
Adverse Abstraction will be featuring poets and writers Rita Banerjee, Bonnie Jill Emanuel, and Virginia Vasquez during their next monthly reading at Otto’s Shrunken Head on Friday, May 20 at 6 pm Eastern. The Adverse Abstraction monthly artist series is curated in New York City by writers Kristine Esser Slentz and Matthew Gahler, and you can read more about the featured authors below.
Featured Authors:
Rita Banerjee is author of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing, Echo in Four Beats, the novella “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps, and Cracklers at Night. She received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard and her MFA from the University of Washington, and is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Co-Director of the MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing program at the George Polk School of Communications at Long Island University Brooklyn. Her work appears in Hunger Mountain, Isele, Nat. Brut., Poets & Writers, Academy of American Poets, Los Angeles Review of Books, Vermont Public Radio, and elsewhere. She is the co-writer and co-director of Burning Down the Louvre (2022), a documentary film about race, intimacy, and tribalism in the United States and in France. She received a 2021-2022 Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council for her new memoir and manifesto on female cool, and one of the opening chapters of this memoir, “Birth of Cool” was a Notable Essay in the 2020 Best American Essays.
Bonnie Jill Emanuel’s poems appear or will appear in American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, Passages North, The Night Heron Barks, SWWIM, The Laurel Review, Indolent Books Online, Ruminate, Love’s Executive Order, Midwest Review, Chiron Review, and elsewhere. She earned a Creative Writing MFA at The City College of New York in 2020, where she was awarded the Jerome Lowell DeJur Prize in Creative Writing for her full-length thesis manuscript, and the Stark Poetry Prize in Memory of Raymond Patterson for a series of poems she wrote about Detroit. She holds a BA in Creative Writing & Foreign Languages from University of Michigan’s Residential College. Born in Detroit, she now lives in New York.
Virginia Vasquez is a cross-genre writer, multidisciplinary artist, and educator. She taught creative writing at the City College of New York, where she earned her MFA in Creative Writing with a focus on experimental and hybrid poetics. In her artist statement, she explains: “As a multiracial Caribeña, I honor my racial identities, ancestry, and lineage. In my work, I evoke ancestral spirits to give voice to those forgotten and unheard, to bring the ancestors into presence — exalt their pain and sacrifice, resistance and power. My writing is ritualistic, taking on various forms and shapes to challenge perceptions, perspectives, and assumptions about history, identity, and self.” Virginia is also a certified Mental Health First Aid instructor, and has worked in mental health settings for over 6 years. She taught various workshops on mental health at 1199SEIU, and currently facilitates trainings’ for the Mentorship Training Program for Registered Apprenticeship in Healthcare at H-CAP, Inc.
The Ruth Stone Foundation just launched its second issue of Iterant, an interactive multi-media poetry and prose journal. The October 2020 issue of Iterant, “But We Keep Fighting” features the poetry, prose, audio recordings, and art of Anne Carson, Matthew Zapruder, Timothy Liu, Sharon Olds, Dara Weir, Charles Mason III, and Rita Banerjee among other poets and artists.
Here’s is a short excerpt from the poem “String Theory”:
… but like a child learning to speak
or a visitor in a foreign language, I blended the sounds
of their names together. Each hue was a mirage—
a trick of light, a fascination. Each fired
an unpredictable rhythm of cones and cylinders
in the eye. If color was biological, automatic,
mechanical, what sense could the eye hold?
Rita Banerjee 