Part of the free and virtual City Lights LIVE! Virtual Event Series: Maw Shein Win and Nathalie Khankan celebrating new Omnidawn Books with Su Hwang and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo reading from new poetry. Click here to register.
Maw Shein Win is the author of Invisible Gifts: Poems and her chapbooks include Ruins of a glittering palace and Score and Bone. Maw is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito (2016–18). She lives and teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Nathalie Khankan teaches Arabic language and literature in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and she is the founding director of the Danish House in Palestine. Her work has previously appeared in the Berkeley Poetry Review, jubilat, and Crab Creek Review. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and daughters.
Su Hwang is a recipient of the inaugural Jerome Hill Fellowship in Literature, the Academy of America Poets James Wright Prize, and writer-in-residence fellowships to Dickinson House and Hedgebrook, among others, Her debut poetry collection BODEGA, published with Milkweed Editions, won the 2020 Minnesota Book Awards in poetry. Born in Seoul, Korea, Su Hwang has called NYC and San Francisco home before transplanting to the Twin Cities to attend the University of Minnesota, where she received her MFA in poetry. She teaches with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop (MPWW), and is the co-founder of Poetry Asylum with poet/educator/activist/healer Sun Yung Shin. She currently lives in South Minneapolis.
Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is the author of Cenzontle, winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. prize (BOA editions 2018), winner of the 2019 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award in poetry, a finalist for the Norther California Book Award and named a best book of 2018 by NPR and the New York Public Library. As one of the founders of the Undocupoets campaign, he is a recipient of the Barnes and Noble "Writers for Writers" Award. He holds a B.A. from Sacramento State University and was the first undocumented student to graduate from the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan. His work has appeared or is featured in The New York Times, The Paris Review, People Magazine, and PBS Newshour, among others. His most recent book is the critically acclaimed Children of the Land published by HarperCollins. He lives in Marysville, California where he teaches poetry to incarcerated youth and also teaches at the Ashland University Low-Res MFA program.
Omnidawn Publishing, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, seeks to support and expand our community of writers and readers through the work they choose to publish, which questions, in both form and content, the prevailing limits of convention. Their intent is to explore internal and external boundaries and push, with compassionate insight, the limits of risk. mnidawn books are frequently reviewed in Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Rain Taxi, Lana Turner, The Journal, Jacket, and Pleiades, and have been reviewed in Chicago Review, American Book Review, The Village Voice, The Midwest Book Review, The Poetry Project Newsletter, HOW2, The New Review of Literature, Small Press Traffic Newsletter, Electronic Poetry Review, Interim, and ARC (Canada's National Poetry Magazine), as well as many other publications.