In town from Austin, TX, Nancy Huang will be reading from her first book of poems, Favorite Daughter. Reading with her are Bay Area poets Arati Warrier and Kiana Young—join us!
Favorite Daughter is a poetry collection trying to uproot America from inside the body, and find where China is buried underneath. Divided into four parts, Daughter explores ideas like navigating hybridity, localism, and harmony in ways that disturb commonly-held notions about broad terms like “belonging” and “cultural struggle.” A compilation of immigration stories, Chinese radio segments, Google translate entries, and dictionary remixes, Huang immerses herself in everything she is uncertain of.
Nan Huang (黄洁) is a queer Chinese-American poet. She is a winner of the 2016 Write Bloody Poetry contest, an Andrew Julius Gutow Academy of American Poets Prize, a James F. Parker Award in Poetry, a 2015 YoungArts Finalist prize, and more. She has received fellowships from VONA and Tin House, and is a former member of UT Spitshine. She competed/resisted at CUPSI 2017 in Chicago, where all her poems were nominated for Washington Post's Best of the Rest. Her debut poetry collection, Favorite Daughter, is out by Write Bloody Publishing.
Arati Warrier is a South Asian American poet from Austin, TX, by way of diaspora. She graduated from UT, Austin in May 2016 with a bachelor’s degree in English and Asian American Studies. She featured on the final stage at Women of the World Poetry Slam 2014, is a recipient of the Andrew Julius Gutow Academy of American Poets prize, and is a 2014 national collegiate poetry slam champion. Familiar with both the stage and the page, Arati has been on five slam poetry teams, was awarded “Best Poem” at the national collegiate poetry slam, and has been published in Junoesq Literary Magazine and The Aerogram. She has opened for poets like Dominique Christina, Denice Frohman, Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, sam sax, and Sarah Kay. Arati's other interests include dancing, reading, and loving intentionally. She currently works as a part time vegetable enthusiast and a full time high school English teacher.
Kiana Young is an unapologetically queer, mixed race Chinese-American poet, educator, and activist from Southern California. In 2016 and 2017, they represented CalSLAM at the CUPSI national collegiate poetry slam, helping their team earn 8th and 13th place, respectively. Kiana was a member of the 2016 Queer Emerging Artist Residency cohort with Destiny Arts Center in Oakland, CA. In 2017, Kiana was a finalist for the Write Bloody Poetry Chapbook contest, and was a featured performer and speaker at Syracuse University. She also has three years of experience as a consent and sexual violence prevention educator in the Bay Area. This year, Kiana will be graduating from UC Berkeley with a B.A. in Rhetoric and Public Discourse and a minor in LGBT Studies––which means that they are a scholarly gay and you shouldn’t argue with them. Currently, she works as a speech and debate coach for middle school and high school youth of color in the Bay Area.