Kundiman Asian American Fall Writers Showcase
Kundiman and Hugo House present a fall reading showcasing local writers of the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) diaspora. Featuring Liezel Moraleja Hackett, Kalehua Kim, Lavanya Vasudevan and Shankar Narayan with hosts Ari Laurel and Perry Meas, this series of poets and prose writers bring us new work.
Lavanya Vasudevan
Lavanya Vasudevan is an Indian-American writer living near Seattle, WA. Her stories appear in Ploughshares, Chicago Quarterly Review, Wigleaf, The Pinch Journal, and elsewhere. Her work has been selected for Wigleaf Top 50, The Best Small Fictions Anthology, and The Masters Review Anthology. She is an alum of the inaugural American Short Fiction Workshop, the New York State Summer Writers Institute, Kenyon Review Workshop, and Tin House Workshop. Find her online at www.lavanyavasudevan.com and on Twitter at @vanyala.
Liezel Moraleja Hackett
Liezel Moraleja Hackett (she/her) is a Filipino American writer and choreographer whose work often dwells in the space between dance and illness, culture and captivity. Liezel has an MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics from the University of Washington Bothell. She is a contributing writer for Write or Die Tribe, with works in The Minison Project, Sobbing in Seafood City Vol. 1 (Sampaguita Press), Clamor Literary Journal (2017, 2018), Storyboard: A Journal of Pacific Imagery (UOG Press), and The Friday Haiku (Ponyak Press).
Kalehua Kim
Kalehua Kim is a poet living in the Seattle area. Born of Hawaiian, Chinese, Filipino, and Portuguese descent, her multicultural background informs much of her work. A finalist for the James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poetry, her poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Calyx, and ‘Ōiwi, A Native Hawaiian Journal.
Shankar Narayan
Shankar Narayan explores identity, power, mythology, and technology in a world where the body is flung across borders yet possesses unrivaled power to transcend them. Shankar is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the winner of prizes and fellowships from Kundiman, Hugo House, Jack Straw, Flyway, and River Heron. He is a 4Culture grant recipient for Claiming Space, a project to lift the voices of writers of color, and his chapbook, Postcards From the New World, won the Paper Nautilus Debut Series chapbook prize. Shankar draws strength from his global upbringing and from his work at the intersection of civil rights and technology. In Seattle, he awakens to the wonders of Cascadia every day, but his heart yearns east to his other hometown, Delhi. Connect with him at shankarnarayan.net.
