In celebration of artist Helen Pashgian, writers from Kundiman Southwest respond to and engage the sensory ‘presences’; that the installations evoke in this reading of their works in poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and hybrid forms. Seating limited to 50 attendees.

Kundiman is a national nonprofit organization dedicated to the creation and cultivation of Asian American creative writing. In this intersection of the literary and the visual, we are given ‘permission to travel.’ Poets include Dara Elerath, Anushah Jiwani, Elizabeth Lee, Jane Lin, and Edie Tsong.

Dara Yen Elerath is a cross-genre writer. Her first book, Dark Braid (BkMk Press), won the 2019 John Ciardi Prize for Poetry. Her hybrid flash fiction has garnered various awards including the Bath Flash Fiction Award and the New Flash Fiction Review Award. Her poetry and hybrid writing have appeared in journals such as the American Poetry Review, AGNI, Plume, Boulevard, Los Angeles Review, Poet Lore, Tahoma Literary Review and elsewhere. She is an alumna of the Institute of American Indian Arts MFA program and lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Elizabeth Lee’s work has appeared in Santa Fe Noir, Pleiades Magazine, The Chestnut Review and Bad Mouth, a reading and performance art collective based in Albuquerque, NM. Ms. Lee received her BA in English at Brown University and her MFA in Creative Writing at Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe. She is currently working on a novel about two sisters separated during the Japanese occupation in Korea (Island), and a memoir about trauma, womanhood, and infertility (The Remembering Body). She’s a former Fulbright scholar, television producer, documentary filmmaker, and massage therapist. She lives with her husband and two dogs in Santa Fe.

Jane Lin is the author of Day of Clean Brightness (3: A Taos Press, 2017). A Kundiman Fellow, she is a software engineer for an environmental consulting company and lives in Los Alamos.

Edie Tsong is an artist and writer. She has participated in PICA’s TBA Festival, The PASEO, and exhibited internationally. She is the artist/author of Scattered Memory, a limited edition artist book and is a recipient of the SITE Spread 4.0 Grant with Cut+Paste Society for Snow Poems Project. She lives and works in northern New Mexico with her daughter. edietsong.com, @plain_song_