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Join us for an electrifying evening of poetry as four bold writers from diverse backgrounds come together on the stage to explore their common experiences of loss through time and history. Navigating losses of home, of life, and of identity—from a family displaced by war to an examination of videos capturing police killing civilians—these local poets will read from their uncompromising work that perseveres despite loss by searching for ways to rise up and recover.
Chiwan Choi is the author of 3 collections of poetry, The Flood, Abductions, and The Yellow House. He wrote, presented, and destroyed the novel Ghostmaker throughout the course of 2015. Chiwan is a partner at Writ Large Press, a downtown Los Angeles-based indie publisher focused on using literary arts to resist, disrupt, and transgress.
Ashaki M. Jackson is the author of two chapter-length collections – Language Lesson (Miel) and Surveillance (Writ Large Press). Jackson serves as a VIDA: Women in Literary Arts executive board member and is co-founder of Women Who Submit. She is a social psychologist living in Los Angeles, CA.
TK Lê is an LA-based introvert and disorganized organizer. Her writing is often focused on her family, war trauma, and memory. She has two chapbooks, A Roof & Some Refuge and The Labor of Longing, and her latest project is a story about a Vietnamese grandma who gets stuck in a teleportation device. She turns to cats, crafting, and Steven Universe for therapy.
A native of Gainesville, Florida, Natalie J. Graham earned her M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the University of Florida and completed her Ph.D. in American Studies at Michigan State University as a University Distinguished Fellow. Her poems have appeared in Callaloo, New England Review, Valley Voices: A Literary Review, and Southern Humanities Review; and her articles are forthcoming in The Journal of Popular Culture and Transition. She is a Cave Canem fellow and assistant professor of African American Studies at California State University, Fullerton.
