Blue Selvage Book Launch Reading & Conversation: Preeti Parikh with Kalehua Kim
Blue Selvage Book Launch Reading & Conversation | Preeti Parikh with Kalehua Kim
Join us for an evening of reading and conversation as we celebrate the launch of Blue Selvage, a debut poetry collection by poet, essayist, and interdisciplinary writer Preeti Parikh.
Blue Selvage weaves lyric, essayistic, and documentary modes into an exploration of skin, cloth, color, and the body as living archives marked by gendered, racialized, and colonial histories. This formally daring and deeply embodied meditation moves across shifting homelands, languages, and forms, creating a capacious field of attention where intimacy and history press against one another, and where writing itself becomes an act of unstitching and re-making—an ethical, sensuous practice of staying with what the body remembers and what culture would prefer to erase. Blue Selvage has been named by Debutiful as as a Most Anticipated Debut Book and a Debut Poetry Collection You Need to Read in 2026.
Preeti Parikh will be joined by Seattle poet Kalehua Kim, author of Mele (Trio House Press, 2025).
The event is planned as follows:
- Guest poet Kalehua Kim opens with a reading
- Preeti Parikh reads from Blue Selvage
- Preeti and Kalehua converse, inviting audience comments and questions
- Book signing for Blue Selvage and Mele
Preeti Parikh
Preeti Parikh is the author of the debut poetry collection Blue Selvage, forthcoming from Tupelo Press in November 2026. A Kundiman Fellow and National Poetry Series finalist, she is the recipient of grant awards from Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Ohio Arts Council. Preeti’s writing appears in Beloit Poetry Journal, The Cincinnati Review, Nonwhite and Woman: 131 Micro Essays on Being in the World, and other literary journals and anthologies. An Indian-origin poet, essayist, and interdisciplinary writer, she has a past educational background in medicine and holds a recent MFA from The Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University, with a scholarly interest in cross-genre work, indigo dyeing, and textile arts.
Kalehua Kim
Kalehua Kim is the author of Mele, winner of the inaugural Pasifika Poetry Prize awarded by the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association. She was named one of Poets & Writers featured debut poets for 2025 and was a 2023 winner of the James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poets. Her work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Denver Quarterly, Calyx, and ‘Ōiwi, A Native Hawaiian Journal.
