Witness a quintet of Asian diasporic poets excavate language material and shapeshift the landscape of traditional verse. In honour of Asian Heritage Month, Winston Lê launches his new chapbook, Thhhhh. Joining Lê will be featured poets Carolyn Nakagawa, Yilin Wang, Rahat Kurd, and Leanne Dunic. Hosted by Grace Kwan. PLEASE REMEMBER TO RSVP. EVENT TICKETS ARE FREE!

Winston Lê (“lay) is a Vietnamese diaspora poet, interdisciplinary artist, and cultural worker who resides on the unceded and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples. His writing has been featured in The End Zine, filling Station, ROOted Rhythms, Composed: anthology of poetry 2024, Poetry Pause, periodicities, Sparkling Tongue Press, Ekphrasis Magazine, and pagefiftyone. He is the author of three poetry chapbooks, translanguaging, hybrid utterance, and most recently, Thhhhh. His debut chapbook, translanguaging was shortlisted for the 2018 Broken Pencil Zine Awards. Winston also has worked on various interdisciplinary collaborations with other artists, including multi-instrumentalist composer, Cameron Catalano, botanical artist, Katrina Vera Wong, and choreographer, Rob Kitsos. In April, Lê was the poet-in-residence at Greywood Arts, an artist residency located in Cork, Ireland.

Grace Kwan is a Malaysian-born sociologist and writer raised in “Vancouver,” the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations. A Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets nominee, their first full-length book THE SACRED HEART MOTEL was published by Metonymy Press in November 2024. Find them at grckwn.com or @sleepyfacegrace.

Carolyn Nakagawa is a fourth-generation Anglo-Japanese Canadian poet and playwright who makes her home in the territory colonized as Vancouver, BC. Nakagawa’s poems appear in the anthologies The Gate of Memory: Poems by Descendants of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration and Alliteration: 25 Years of Ricepaper Magazine; and in publications such as The Malahat Review, CV2, and ARC. She is currently seeking a publisher for her full-length poetry manuscript.

Rahat Kurd is a writer, editor, and poet of Kashmiri origin, based in Vancouver. The Book Of Z is her second book of poetry, forthcoming from Talonbooks this fall 2025. Her first collection of poems, Cosmophilia, was published by Talonbooks in 2015. Kurd draws on multilingual poetics and studies the ghazal tradition in Urdu and Persian literature. Her recent ghazals in English can be read online at Periodicities Journal and in the Winter 2025 issue of EVENT Magazine. The City That Is Leaving Forever: Kashmiri Letters (Talonbooks 2021), is a hybrid of correspondence and poetry exchanged between Vancouver and Kashmir over a five-year period with poet Sumayya Syed.

Yilin Wang (she/they) is a Chinese diaspora writer, poet, and Chinese-English translator. Her debut book The Lantern and the Night Moths (Invisible Publishing, 2024) is the first book of translations from Chinese and from any Asian language to win the John Glassco Translation Prize from the Literary Translators Association of Canada in the 40-year history of the prize. Her writing and translations have appeared in Clarkesworld, Fantasy Magazine, Room, Canthius, Arc Poetry Magazine, Words Without Borders, The Tyee, the anthology The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories (TorDotCom 2022), and elsewhere. She has won the Foster Poetry Prize, the Dwarf Stars Award, and the ALTA Travel Fellowship, and has been a finalist for Canada’s National Magazine Award, the CBC Poetry Prize, and the Aurora Award. She is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop.

Leanne Dunic is a multidisciplinary artist. She’s the fiction editor at Tahoma Literary Review and the leader of the band The Deep Cove. Her most recent works include a book of lyric prose and photographs entitled Wet (Talonbooks 2024) and the chapbook Salt Rich (Small Harbor Publishing 2024). Leanne lives on the unceded and occupied Traditional Territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.

Asians on Edge: poets of diaspora futures

Asians on Edge: poets of diaspora futures

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Winston Le

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