The writings of Myung Mi Kim and Eleni Sikelianos punctuate the violent silence felt under empire’s rigid cartography with fragmentary language, call-to-action lyrics, and incisive lines that propose poetry as truth, poetry as dangerous, and poetry as respite from the omniscient nation.
Please join us for an evening of fearless readings by Myung Mi Kim and Eleni Sikelianos.
Myung Mi Kim is the author of Civil Bound (Omnidawn), Penury (Omnidawn), Commons (University of California), DURA (Sun and Moon, Nightboat Books), The Bounty (Chax Press), and Under Flag (Kelsey St. Press), winner of The Multicultural Publisher’s Exchange Award of Merit. Her work has been anthologized in Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women, Premonitions: Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry, American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry, American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics, and other collections. Magazine and journal publications include appearances in Hambone, Sulfur, Conjunctions, How(ever), Poetry, Interval(le)s: CIPA (Centre Interdisciplinaire de Poétique Appliquée) and Cross-Cultural Poetics. She has received fellowships and honors from the Fund for Poetry, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative North American Poetry, and the State University of New York Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activity. Kim was born in Seoul, Korea and immigrated to the U.S. at the age of nine. She is the James H. McNulty Chair of English at the University at Buffalo.
Eleni Sikelianos was born and grew up in California, and has lived in New York, Paris, Athens, and Colorado. She is the author of nine books of poetry, most recently What I Knew (Nightboat), and two hybrid memoirs (The Book of Jon and You Animal Machine). Sikelianos has been the happy recipient of many awards for her poetry, nonfiction, and translations, including two National Endowment for the Arts awards, the National Poetry Series, and Gertrude Stein Awards. Her writings have been widely anthologized and translated, with five books in French and two in Greek. She has taught poetry in public schools, homeless shelters, and prisons, and collaborated with musicians, filmmakers, and visual artists. Since 1998, she has been on guest faculty for the Naropa Summer Writing Program and for many years taught in the PhD program in Creative Writing at the University of Denver, where she founded and ran the Writers in the Schools program. In 2017, she joined the Literary Arts faculty at Brown University.
