The Bay Area's Hub for Asian Pacific American Community Arts Since 1972
Three Months. Three Genres. Three Writers
June 2, 2016 - August 18, 2016
Kearny Street Workshop, in collaboration with California Institute of Integral Studies, presents Interdisciplinary Writers Lab (IWL), a 3-month, multi-genre master class for local writers of color happening June 2 - Aug 18, 2016. IWL is a unique program that challenges emerging writers to thoroughly explore and develop their writing skills and styles across multiple genres.
The goals of the IWL program include: providing local emerging writers/artists of color with the opportunity to challenge, develop, and expand their practice by working with established writers in a variety of genres; to contribute to the development of new literary forms and languages that incorporate multiple forms of creative expression; to provide emerging artists with the opportunity to build community and connect with writers in the literary world; and to publish in an online and print anthology that highlights work by exciting new writers committed to exploring new forms and voices.
IWL 2016 Instructors
Ronaldo Wilson
Author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man (University of Pittsburgh, 2008), winner of the 2007 Cave Canem Prize., Poems of the Black Object (Futurepoem Books, 2009), winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and the Asian American Literary Award in Poetry in 2010. His latest books are Farther Traveler: Poetry, Prose, Other (Counterpath Press, 2015) and Lucy 72 (1913 Press, 2016). Co-founder of the Black Took Collective, Wilson is Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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. Her second collection, Power Made Us Swoon, will be published in April, 2016. Brynn is the recipient of a Kundiman Asian American Poetry Fellowship, the Poets 11 award from the San Francisco Public Library, and Key West Literary Seminar’s Scotti Merrill Memorial Award. Currently, Brynn works and teaches at California Institute of Integral Studies and the University of San Francisco.
Brynn Saito
Author of the memoir Somebody’s Someone, Regina Louise has been featured on NPR’s All things Considered, The CBS Early Show, PBS’s The Tavis Smiley Show and NBC11. Ms. Louise’s story has received nationwide attention in newspapers and magazines including The San Francisco Chronicle, Shanghai Times, Los Angeles Times, Hallmark Magazine, Philadelphia Tribune and Chicago Tribune. Somebody’s Someone has also been adapted into a one-woman-show and was the subject of an Emmy-nominated PBS documentary that aired in May 2007.
Regina Louise
IWL 2016 Instructors
Kemi Alabi
Poetry
Kemi Alabi is a Wisconsin native living in Oakland, CA. She coordinates Echoing Ida, a Forward Together program amplifying the thought leadership of Black women within social justice movements. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Guardian, The Toast, Apogee Journal and elsewhere.
Jari Bradley
Poetry
Jari "Sojari" Bradley is a poet and scholar from San Francisco, California. They have received a fellowship from the Callaloo Writing Workshop held at Brown University. Currently, Jari is an Ethnic Studies MA candidate at San Francisco State University.
Michele Carlson
Non-Fiction
Michele Carlson is an artist, writer, and critic working in the greater San Francisco Bay Area. She is currently the Executive Director of Daily Serving and Art Practical and Associate Professor in Visual and Critical Studies. Her work typically negotiates the intersection of race, the construction of social and historical knowledge with visual culture. www.michelecarlson.com
Derrick Carr
Poetry
Derrick Carr has lived in the Bay Area since he was old enough to read. He graduated from Yale in 2011 with a degree in Black people. While there, he co-founded the school's slam team. Since then, he's co-edited Tandem, an annual anthology published through The Lit Slam, a Bay Area based nonprofit working to broaden the conversation around literature. His work is published or forthcoming in Oakland Review and Muzzle Magazine.
Kayan Cheung
Graphic Novels
Kayan Cheung-Miaw is from Hong Kong and New York, and comes from a family of garment and restaurant workers. Her work as the lead organizer for the Yank Sing restaurant workers’ campaign resulted in a historic $4 million settlement for 280 workers. Comics is her favorite medium because she considers it an art for the people.
Jaze Earl
Non-Fiction
Amy Huang
Fiction
Amy Huang is at work on a series of short stories and personal essays. Originally from the East Coast, she is very thankful for the serendipity and magic that have brought her out to San Francisco. She is interested in diasporic literatures and discourses on language, post-colonialism, gender, and identity.
Susan Kanga
Theater
Denise Li
Fiction
Denise Li is a non-technical tech worker based in San Francisco, although she may really be from outer space. She is a graduate of the MFA Writing Program at CalArts. She likes to write about masks and subjectivity, and is curious about sites of encounter between experiential and critical inquiry. Her interests include performance art, consciousness, mental health, feminism, Burning Man, tarot, cheese, and sloths.
Sean Labrado Y Manzano
Poetry
Sean Labrador y Manzano edited the print journal Conversations at the Wartime Café: a Decade of War 2001-2011; is founder of the series "Mixer 2.0, a San Francisco Bay Area M.F.A/PhD reading series;" curated the symposium "From Trauma to Catharsis: Performing the Asian Avant-Garde;". He was selected for the Best American Poetry in 2004 and in response to the Best American Poetry 2015 controversy, on behalf of the Circle for Asian American Literary Studies, he will be moderating a roundtable on "Yellowface" at the American Literature Association Conference in San Francisco in 2016.
Matt Nelson
Non-Fiction
Matt Nelson is the Managing Director of Presente.org — the nation’s largest online Latinx organizing group; advancing social justice with technology, media, and culture. Before his work at Presente.org, Matt was the Organizing Director at ColorOfChange and co-founded several worker-owned cooperatives in multiple midwestern cities. He is a seasoned campaign strategist and community organizer who was recently featured in the first major book on the Ferguson Uprising, entitled, "Ferguson is America: Roots of Rebellion".
Lark Omura
Poetry
Lark Omura was born and raised in Maui and currently resides in Oakland, CA, where she writes by day and waits tables by night, contemplating relationships of class and power while pouring champagne. Her poetry has been recently published in The Berkeley Times, zine Something Worth Revising, and Milvia Street, Berkeley City College's literary publication. She is a member of the Finishing School writing workshop.
Zhayra Palma
Poetry
Zhayra Palma wants to live in a world where hierarchy is a historical anomaly and everyone gets enough sleep. She is the recipient of a Poets 11 Award from the San Francisco Public Library and has been hosting creative writing workshops from her home, coffee houses and wherever else bureaucracy is kept at the bare minimum since 2009. When she’s not erratically clicking keys on her crowdfunded laptop, you can find her admiring every soaring bird and blossoming flower in sight.
Lauren Wheeler
Poetry & Fiction
Lauren Wheeler writes poetry, really short fiction, and what happens when they rub up against each other. A recovering slam poet, she twice competed at the National Poetry Slam and has featured at Cornell University, where she studied English Literature, and around the country. Her work has appeared in publications such as Other Magazine, Monkeybicycle, PANK, The Nervous Breakdown, and Blackberry: a magazine.
IWL 2016 Cohort
