[Brooklyn, NY]

Release for Su Hwang's BODEGA with Omotara James and Asiya Wadud
November 19, 2019, 7:00 pm
at Books Are Magic

Join us for a reading in celebration of Su Hwang’s BODEGA, with Omotara James and Asiya Wadud!

This richly lyrical debut collection tells the coming-of-age story of a first-generation Korean American as she views the world from her parents’ bodega in Queensbridge, New York, looking at our nation of immigrants eye-to-eye with humanitarianism and heart.

Born in Seoul, Korea, Su Hwang was raised in New York then called the Bay Area home before transplanting to the Midwest, where she received her MFA in poetry from the University of Minnesota. A recipient of the inaugural Jerome Hill Fellowship in Literature, the Academy of American Poets James Wright Prize, writer-in-residence fellowships to Dickinson House and Hedgebrook, among others, her poems have appeared in Ninth Letter, Water~Stone Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and is the co-founder, with Sun Yung Shin, of Poetry Asylum. Su Hwang currently lives in Minneapolis.

Omotara James is the author of the chapbook, “Daughter Tongue,” selected by African Poetry Book Fund, in collaboration with Akashic Books, for the 2018 New Generation African Poets Box Set. Born in Britain, she is the daughter of Nigerian and Trinidadian immigrants. A former social worker in the field of Harm Reduction, she has been awarded fellowships from Lambda Literary and Cave Canem Foundation. She is a recipient of the 2019 92Y / Discovery Poetry Prize and a recipient of the 2019 Bread Loaf Katharine Bakeless Nason Award in Poetry. In addition, her work has been recognized with the Nancy P. Schnader Academy of American Poets Prize, the “Bridging the Gap” Slice Literary Award for emerging writers, a Luminaire Poetry Award, two Pushcart Prize nominations and one Best of the Net nomination. Recently, she was selected as a 2019 finalist for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in POETRY, The Paris Review, The Academy of American Poets, Literary Hub, Poetry Society of America, The Recluse, Nat.Brut, Winter Tangerine, No Tokens, Cosmonauts Avenue and elsewhere, including various anthologies. She holds an MFA in Poetry from New York University and edits poetry for American Chordata.

Asiya Wadud is the author of Crosslight for Youngbird (Nightboat Books, 2018), day pulls down the sky… a filament in gold leaf written collaboratively with Okwui Okpokwasili (Belladonna, 2019) and Syncope (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019). Her collection No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body (Nightboat Books) is forthcoming in 2020. Her recent work appears in BOMB Magazine, Best American Experimental Writing, Washington Square Review, and Makhzin, among others. Asiya teaches poetry to children at Saint Ann’s School and leads an English conversation group for new immigrants at the Brooklyn Public Library.

Free event. More information here.