Ricepaper Magazine, the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop and the Filipino Canadian Youth Alliance Presents:

“(NA)AWP: North Asian Americans Write Poetry, or Thank You, Canada, For Letting Us Land Our Planes”

Featuring KAZIM ALI, NICK CARBO, TINA CHANG, PAOLO JAVIER, TIMOTHY LIU, AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL, OSCAR PENARANDA, RAVI SHANKAR, PRAGEETA SHARMA, and EILEEN TABIOS

WHEN: Friday, 7:00pm, April 1st 2005
WHERE: Our Town Café, 96 Kingsway ( Corner of Kingsway and Broadway)

BIOS:

KAZIM ALI is the author of the novel “Quinn’s Passage.” He is assistant professor of Liberal Arts at The Culinary Institute of America and an editor with Nightboat Books. His first book of poems “The Far Mosque” will be published this October by Alice James.

TINA CHANG, the author of Half-Lit Houses (Four Way Books, 2004), received an MFA in poetry from Columbia University.
Her poems have appeared in American Poet, Indiana Review, The Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Quarterly West, Sonora Review, among others. She has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Poets & Writers, the Van Lier Foundation among many others.
She currently teaches at Hunter College.

PAOLO JAVIER is the author of two books of poetry, ‘the t ime at the end of this writing’ (Ahadada), and ‘60 Lv Bo(e)mbs’ (O Books, fall 2005).

AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL is the author of _Miracle Fruit_ (Tupelo 2003),winner of the Tupelo Press Judge’s Prize, ForeWord Magazine Poetry Book of the Year, and the Global Literary Filipino Award, and was a finalist for the Asian American Literary Award and the Glasgow Prize. She is assistant professor of English at State University of New York-Fredonia, right in the heart of Western NY’s cherry and berry country, where she lives with her dog, Villanelle.

NICK CARBO’s latest book is Andalusian Dawn. He lives in Hollywood, FL and teaches in the MFA program at University of Miami.

OSCAR PEÑARANDA, longtime community activist, advocate for ethnic studies in the schools, teacher and writer, has two books out recently published by San Francisco publisher/ distributor T’BOLI PUBLISJHING: “Seasons By The Bay, A Collection Of Interrelated Stories” and “Full Deck (Jokers Playing)”, a collection of poetry.

RAVI SHANKAR is poet-in-residence at Central Connecticut State University and the founding editor of the online journal of the arts, . His first book Instrumentality, as published by Word Press in May 2004. His work has previously appeared in such places as The Paris Review, Poets & Writers, Time Out New York, Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review, Descant, LIT, Crowd, The Cortland Review, Catamaran, The Indiana Review, Western Humanities Review, Cake Train, The Iowa Review, Smartish Pace, and the AWP Writer¹s Chronicle, among other publications. He has read at such venues as The National Arts Club, Columbia University, KGB, and the Cornelia Street Café, has held residencies from the MacDowell Colony, Ragdale, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts, has served on panels at UCLA, Poet¹s House, South-by-Southwest Interactive/Film Festival, and the AWP Conference in Baltimore, been a commentator for NPR and Wesleyan radio, reviews poetry for the Contemporary Poetry Review and is currently editing an anthology of South Asian, East Asian, and Middle Eastern poetry. You can read an interview with him at: http://jacketmagazine.com/16/dev-iv-shank.html. He does not play the sitar.

TIMOTHY LIU is the author of five books of poems, including OF THEE I SING, which was named a 2004 Book of the Year by PUBLISHERS WEEKLY. A new book, FOR DUST THOU ART, is forthcoming from Southern Illinois University Press. Recent poems have appeared in Arabic, Chinese and Polish translations. An associate professor of English at William Paterson University and a member of the core faculty at the Bennington Writing Seminars, Liu lives in Hoboken, NJ.

PRAGEETA SHARMA is the author of Bliss to Fill (Subpress Books) and The Opening Question (Fence Books). She teaches in the graduate creative writing program at New School University and in the low residency BA program at Goddard College. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

EILEEN TABIOS, recipient of the Philippines’ National Book Award for Poetry, recently released a multi-genre collection, I TAKE THEE, ENGLISH, FOR MY BELOVED, encompassing poetry, experimental fiction, art monograph, play and conceptual art. In 2006, she will release her 8th poetry collection, THE SECRET LIVES OF PUNCTUATIONS, VOLUME I. She is also the founding editor/ publisher of Meritage Press, a multidisciplinary press based in St. Helena and San Francisco, CA.