READING: Mari L’Esperance, Lee Herrick, Andre Yang & Michelle Brittan in Celebration of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month
Please join us for an evening of poetry featuring Mari L’Esperance, Lee Herrick, Andre Yang & Michelle Brittan in celebration of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month
Saturday, May 7, 2011 at 7pm • Free Admission
Alice Peters Auditorium (PB191) • CSU Fresno
Born in Kobe, Japan, Mari L’Esperance is a Hapa poet whose first full-length collection The Darkened Temple was awarded the 2007 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry (University of Nebraska Press). An earlier collection Begin Here was awarded a Sarasota Poetry Theatre Press Chapbook Prize. L’Esperance’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in several literary journals and anthologies and have been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. A graduate of the Creative Writing Program at New York University, former New York Times Company Foundation Creative Writing Fellow, and recipient of residency fellowships from Hedgebrook and Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, L’Esperance lives and writes in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Lee Herrick was born in Daejeon, South Korea and adopted at ten months. He is the author of This Many Miles from Desire(WordTech Editions, 2007). His poems have been published in ZYZZYVA, Many Mountains Moving, MiPOesias, and others, including anthologies such as Seeds from a Silent Tree: Writings by Korean Adoptees, Hurricane Blues: Poems About Katrina and Rita, andHighway 99: A Literary Journey Through California’s Great Central Valley, 2nd Edition. His essays have been published in Korean Quarterly and college textbooks, and he has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and was a 2000 Los Angeles Poetry Festival Award finalist. He is editor of New Truths: Writing in the 21st Century by Korean Adoptees, for Asian American Poetry and Writing.
Andre Yang is a founding member of the Hmong American Writers’ Circle (HAWC). Currently studying in the MFA program at California State University, Fresno, he is a Provost Scholar and a Philip Levine Scholar, and works on the editorial staff of The Normal School. Andre is a Kundiman Fellow, and his poetry has appeared in Paj Ntaub Voice, Hyphen Magazine, and the chapbook anthologyHere is a Pen (Achiote Press). He is a coeditor of How Do I Begin? A Hmong American Literary Anthology (Heyday, 2011) due out this August.
Michelle Brittan has work published or forthcoming in the journals Crab Creek Review, Nimrod, The Grove Review, and Calyx, and was the title poet for Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets Under 25, an anthology edited by Naomi Shihab Nye (Greenwillow, 2010). Last year, she won the Academy of American Poets/Ernesto Trejo Poetry Prize judged by Philip Levine. Born in San Francisco of mixed white and Malaysian heritage, she will graduate from the MFA program at California State University, Fresno this spring.
This event is made possible by support from the Chicano Writers and Artists Association (CWAA)
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