The Bay Area's Hub for Asian Pacific American Community Arts Since 1972

INSTRUCTOR BIOS

Chinaka Hodge is a poet, educator, playwright and screenwriter. Originally from Oakland, California, she graduated from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study in May of 2006. In 2010, Chinaka received USC’s prestigious Annenberg Fellowship to continue her studies at its School of Cinematic Arts. She received her MFA in Writing for Film and TV in 2012. In the fall of that year, she received the SF Foundation’s Phelan Literary Award for emerging Bay Area talent. Chinaka was also a 2012 Artist in Residence at The Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin, CA. For over a decade, Hodge has worked in various capacities at Youth Speaks/The Living Word Project, the nation’s leading literary arts non-profit.  When not educating or writing for the page, Chinaka rocks mics as a founding member of a collaborative Hip Hop ensemble, The Getback. Her poems, editorials, interviews and prose have been featured in Newsweek, San Francisco Magazine, Believer Magazine, PBS, NPR, CNN, C-Span, and in two seasons of HBO’s Def Poetry.

Nayomi Munaweera is a Sri Lankan-American author and artist. Her debut novel, Island of a Thousand Mirrors (Perrera Hussein, 2012), was initially published in South Asia and was released in the U.S. in Fall 2014 by St. Martin’s Press. The novel has received rave reviews from sources as diverse as Mother Jones and Hyphen Magazine. It was long-listed for the Man Asia Literary Prize, making it one of the fifteen best books coming out of Asia in 2012. It was short listed for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and won the Commonwealth Regional Prize for Asia. She is a graduate of the IWL program.

Brynn Saito is the author of The Palace of Contemplating Departure, winner of the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award from Red Hen Press and finalist for the 2013 Northern California Book Award. She also co-authored, with Traci Brimhall, Bright Power, Dark Peace, a chapbook of poetry from Diode Editions. Brynn’s work has been anthologized by Helen Vendler and Ishmael Reed; it has also appeared in Poetry Northwest, Virginia Quarterly Review, Ninth Letter, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Pleiades. Currently, Brynn lives and teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her second book of poems will be published by Red Hen Press in the Spring of 2016.