Ink Knows No Borders

by Patrice Vecchione

  Craig Santos Perez is a native Chamoru (Chamorro) from the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam). As a poet, scholar, publisher, critic, artist, and environmental activist, he has co-edited three anthologies of Pacific Islander literature, and he has authored four poetry collections and two spoken word albums. In an interview for NBC Asian America Presents: A to Z, Perez said, “I am inspired by the ecology of the Pacific Islanders, the resilience of the Pacific Islanders, the wisdom of Pacific cultures, the brilliance of Pacific scholarship, and the beauty of Pacific arts,” adding, “The forces of colonialism, militarism, and capitalism are challenges that impact all of us in the Pacific.” About his poem “Off-Island Chamorros,” he says it was “written to share my own migration story from Guam, a territory of the United States, and to provide context for the migration of my native Chamorro people.” Perez teaches in the English department at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. (craigsantosperez.com)

  Spoken-word artist, poet, essayist, and activist Bao Phi was born in Vietnam and came to Minneapolis as a child with his family. He’s a two-time Minnesota Grand Slam champion and a National Poetry Slam finalist, who has appeared on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and was featured in the award-winning documentary The Listening Project. His books include the poetry collections Sông I Sing and Thousand Star Hotel, as well as the picture book A Different Pond, which received a Caldecott Honor Award. BuzzFeed named Thousand Star Hotel one of the best poetry books of 2017, writing, “Bao Phi confronts the stereotype of being a ‘model minority’ . . . exploring Asian American poverty, racism and discrimination, police brutality, violence and trauma, identity, and fatherhood. Written with immense empathy and honesty, [it] is a moving, heartbreakingly beautiful portrait of the lives of Vietnamese refugees in the U.S.” (baophi.com)

  Poet, educator, and performance artist Yosimar Reyes was born in Mexico and came to California with his grandmother when he was three. In an interview with Westword, he said, “When I think of my culture, it is very American, but I lack the proper documentation to say that I’m an ‘American,’ whatever that means. Because I don’t have a social security number and I lack access to a lot of things, I’ve found that art was something that was very accessible . . . Most of what I write focuses on intersections of migration and sexuality.” He is the author of the poetry collection for colored boys who speak softly and artist-in-residence for Define American, the nonprofit media organization that fights injustice and anti-immigrant hate through the power of storytelling. Reyes is the co-founder of the performance ensemble La Maricolectiva, a community-based performance group of queer undocumented poets, which was featured in the award-winning documentary 2nd Verse: The Rebirth. (yosimarreyes.com)

  Alberto Ríos is a Mexican American poet from Nogales, Arizona. “My upbringing [near the Mexico–US border] was wonderful and I would not trade it for anything,” he told an AARP VIVA interviewer. “It showed me how to look at everything in more than one way: different languages, different foods, different laws. The whole world was never simply one-dimensional. And for me as a writer—and later as a poet in particular—that was invaluable.” Arizona’s first poet laureate and an Academy of American Poets chancellor, Ríos is the author of ten books of poetry including, most recently, A Small Story about the Sky, as well as a memoir, Capirotada. (english.clas.asu.edu/content/alberto-rios)

  Michelle Brittan Rosado is the author of the poetry collection Why Can’t It Be Tenderness, which won the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. Her work appears in Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets Under 25 and Only Light Can Do That: 100 Post-Election Poems, Stories, & Essays. Born in San Francisco, she’s of mixed cultural heritage, including Malaysian on her mother’s side. About her poem “Fluency,” she says, “I wrote this poem thinking about the way immigration creates many kinds of distance in a family: not just geographical, but sometimes linguistically and emotionally. At the same time, it also strikes me as miraculous and beautiful that we find ways to bridge such spaces, however we can.” Rosado is a Wallis Annenberg Endowed Fellow and PhD candidate in Creative Writing & Literature at the University of Southern California. (michellebrittanrosado.com)

  Poet, novelist, and essayist Erika L. Sánchez is the daughter of undocumented Mexican immigrants and was raised outside of Chicago. She’s received many fellowships and awards, including, most recently, a Princeton Arts Fellowship, and is the author of the poetry collection Lessons of Expulsion and the New York Times bestselling young adult novel I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, which was a National Book Award finalist. “A ruthless reviser” is what she called herself in an interview for RHINO: “Usually, a poem begins as an image that gets stuck in my brain. I see or hear something grotesque or beautiful or both that startles me and then I become obsessed with it until it becomes a poem. Sometimes it takes me years to complete a poem. Sometimes they require me to leave them alone for months and months before I can revise them again . . . Poetry feels like my brain giving birth to something painful and grotesque.” (erikalsanchez.com)

  Solmaz Sharif was born in Istanbul as her parents made their way from their native Iran to the US several years after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. She is a poet who writes about the human costs of war and the political use of “insidious abuses against our everyday speech.” Her first poetry collection, LOOK, was a National Book Award finalist. She has described her work as both “political” and “documentary,” saying in an interview with the Paris Review that she has felt like an outsider despite growing up in a largely Iranian American community: “Aesthetics and politics have a really vital and exciting give-and-take between them . . . No matter where I went, I was outside of whatever community I found myself in, so that even when I arrived in a place where there was a lot of ‘me,’ I was totally outside again. That probably influenced my artistic impulse . . . to stand outside of and look into, and constantly question and interrogate the collectives that exist. It’s easy for me because I’ve never felt a part of any of them in a real way.” (solmazsharif.com)

  Mahtem Shiferraw is a poet, short story writer, and visual artist from Ethiopia and Eritrea. Her poetry books include Behind Walls & Glass, Fuchsia, which received the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, and Your Body Is War. She’s the founder of Anaphora Literary Arts, a nonprofit organization working to advance the works of writers and artists of color, and co-founder of the Ethiopian Artist Collective. About her approach to writing, Shiferraw told the Massachusetts Review, “I see poems everywhere I go, whatever I’m doing. Sometimes it’s a sound, or a color, or a perplexed expression. Sometimes poems come in the form of a character, or a conversation, and then they are shaped into prose (which eventually becomes part of my fiction writing). My job, besides listening to my characters, becomes then an act of mending of sorts; I patch poems here and there until I begin to acquire some clarity and make sense of a story, a plot line, a theme.” (mahtem-shiferraw.com)

  Terisa Siagatonu is a queer Samoan womyn poet, arts educator, and community organizer, who was born in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2012, she received President Obama’s Champion of Change Award for her activism as a spoken-word poet/organizer in her Pacific Islander community. When asked by the Split This Rock blog to recount a “proud poetry moment,” Siagatonu replied, “Last year, I had the opportunity to visit American Samoa and spend an entire week leading writing workshops for 5 of the high schools on the island, including the one my father attended when he was a teenager . . . I’ve never felt so proud to be both Samoan and a writer. It meant everything to me to be able to share something as important as writing with my people, because both are the reasons why I’m still here and why I know who I am.” (terisasiagatonu.com)

  Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. Her first full-length poetry collection, Cannibal, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and the Phillis Wheatley Award, among many others. In a PEN Ten interview, she said, “It’s hard to remember a time when ‘writer’ was really separate from my sense of identity—I be
gan writing early at 10 or 11 and published my first work at 16 in Jamaica.” Her first realization of what she wanted to write about came in college when she encountered overt racism: “And that was the moment I decided that my responsibility as a poet was to always keep my gaze centered on my Jamaican landscape, to tell the stories of Jamaican womanhood, of blackness and marginalization, to write against postcolonial history and nurture anti-colonial selfhood. To leave no space, no place, not even a sliver of consideration for the venal hegemony of whiteness in my imagination; dark, beautiful, and untamed.” (safiyasinclair.com)

  Cambodian American poet Monica Sok is the daughter of refugees and the granddaughter of Em Bun, a master silk weaver and NEA National Heritage Fellow. Her poetry collection Year Zero won the Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship, and she has received fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, Kundiman, and Stanford University, among others. About “Oh, Daughter,” she says, “Writing this poem allowed me to process what ‘belonging’ means as a Cambodian American daughter. Falling short of both cultural and parental expectations, I am always aware of how others perceive shame. But the spirit of the poem is rooted in defying gendered expectations and embraces such agency.” (@monicasokwrites)

  Gary Soto was born to working-class parents in Fresno, California. While young, he worked in both the fields and factories. It was in high school that he became inspired to write after reading such authors as Hemingway, Frost, Wilder, and Steinbeck. “I was already thinking like a poet, already filling myself with literature,” he recalled, in an interview with UC San Diego. Soto has published more than forty books for children, young adults, and adults, including most recently a new edition of his 1977 debut poetry collection, The Elements of San Joaquin, a pioneering work in Latino literature. The Gary Soto Literary Museum is located at Fresno City College. Of his job as a writer, he has said, “My duty is not to make people perfect, particularly Mexican Americans. I’m not a cheerleader. I’m one who provides portraits of people in the rush of life.” (garysoto.com)

  Filipino American poet Jeff Tagami was born and raised in California. When he was in his twenties, he joined the Kearny Street Workshop, an Asian American artists and writers’ collective, publishing short stories and poems that focused on the struggles of factory and field workers, including Without Names, one of the first Filipino American poetry anthologies. He was featured reading his poem “Song of the Pajaro,” about a day in the life of Pajaro Valley farmers, in the PBS film The United States of Poetry. Tagami died of cancer in 2012, and in an online remembrance, poet Alan Chong Lau said Tagami’s poetry collection October Light “will go down in history as one of the classics of Filipino American literature . . . [It] is one of the first books that documents the history and lives of the rural Filipino and gives them a real voice.”

  Alice Tao was born in China in 1935. Due to Japan’s invasion of China, her family was forced to move often over a period of several years. When they finally settled in a small village, Tao enjoyed a happy childhood in a safe environment, free to wander, picking berries by the river. Later, during the Chinese Civil War, her family fled to Hong Kong, her father certain that life as refugees was better than living under communism. Tao went to Taiwan for college, where she met her husband. From there they went to the United States. For many years, she taught Chinese at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Tao’s love for poetry began when, as a small child, she sat beside her mother as she recited Tang Dynasty poems while rocking her baby sister to sleep.

  Chrysanthemum Tran is a queer and transgender Vietnamese American poet, performer, and photographer, whose parents came to the US as refugees. A teaching artist for the Providence Poetry Slam youth team, she’s the first transfeminine finalist at the Women of the World Poetry Slam, a Rustbelt Poetry Slam champion, and FEMS Poetry Slam champion, whom the Adobe Project 1324 named as one of their “5 Poets You Need to Follow Right Now.” In an interview for the Blueshift Journal, she discussed how she became a poet: “When I was a little baby, when I was in public school in Oklahoma, the shit that changed my life was Maya Angelou. She was my first introduction to poetry that wasn’t written by a cis white man or wasn’t written in inaccessible language.” (chrysanthemumtran.com)

  Paul Tran is a Vietnamese American poet, slam poetry champion, educator, and editor who grew up in a San Diego neighborhood that included Vietnamese, Sudanese, Eritrean, and Mexican immigrants. “It’s powerful,” Tran said in an interview for Northwest Asian Weekly, “seeing refugees, immigrants, and families of color making sense of their new lives in the United States, its tragedies and triumphs, and exacting all their human gifts in the cultivation of futures that are, as many of us hope, brighter and safer than the futures we were once conferred. I saw this each time my mother swallowed the patronizing and racist and sexist ways her customers treated her, each time I took the bus two hours to and from high school . . . [where] wealth and conservatism told me I wasn’t supposed to succeed in life or that I was inadequately built for the privileges others had.” They are a 2018 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow, a poetry editor at the Offing, and a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow in the writing program at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. (iampaultran.com)

  Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is an American poet, essayist, and translator of Palestinian, Jordanian, and Syrian heritage, who has lived and traveled throughout the Arab world. For many years, she volunteered for Seattle’s Arab American community organizations to help people tell their stories of living between two homelands, and her poetry collections Arab in Newsland and Water & Salt are inspired by such experiences. In an interview for Hedgebrook, she said, “My mother’s family is from Syria and Jordan. My father’s family is from Palestine, and many of them became refugees after the 1967 war. My parents immigrated to the United States and I was born in Seattle. When I was three years old we moved back to the Arab world and I spent most of my childhood there. I grew up moving, moving back, travelling around a world I was introduced to as ‘home.’ In some ways, this is a quintessentially Arab experience. The tension between home and homeland, the transitory nature of belonging, these are themes that continue to interest me.” (lenakhalaftuffaha.com)

  Born in Saigon, Ocean Vuong immigrated to the US when he was two as a child refugee and grew up in Connecticut. The author of the multi-award-winning poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds and the novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, he is an assistant professor in the MFA for Poets and Writers program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In an interview for Divedapper, he said, “I think my reckoning with the written word was also the reckoning with racism, which is sad, but also necessary and, in a way, a vital means of confronting the realities of my country, of America.” As for the role of identity in his writing, he sees “[it] more as a thread being pushed through a piece of fabric as it’s being woven, and that all of our identities are fibers woven in that thread. To write is to push all of oneself through that moment, through that space on the page. Of course, no matter what I do or say, I will always be an Asian-American, Vietnamese, Queer, etc., including all the identities that I don’t even have the language for yet.” (oceanvuong.com)

  Award-winning Iranian-born poet and writer Sholeh Wolpé has authored four poetry collections and two plays, edited three anthologies, and translated four volumes of poetry, including, most recently, The Conference of Birds by Attar, the Sufi mystic poet. Her play SHAME was a 2016 Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwright conference semifinalist. In 2018 she was the inaugural Writer-in-Residence at UCLA. Born in Tehran, she spent her teen years in Trinidad and the UK before coming to the US. About her poem “Dear America,” she says, “I kept going back to my journey towards America which in my young life was not a country but a dream space, somewhere out there, like music or a piece of art.” (sholehwolpe.com)

  Jenny Xie, who was born in China and raised in New Jersey, came to the US when she was four years old. Her debu
t poetry collection, Eye Level, won the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and Princeton University’s Holmes National Poetry Prize and was a National Book Award finalist. When asked what advice she has for young writers, she told the blog Speaking of Marvels, “I’ll echo what many poets have said . . . : read avidly and widely. There doesn’t seem to be any substitute to that. You learn to internalize the rhythms of good writing through reading, and you sharpen your inner ear this way.” Xie lives in Brooklyn and teaches at New York University. (jennymxie.com)

  Javier Zamora was born in El Salvador and at the age of nine immigrated unaccompanied to the US through Guatemala, Mexico, and the Sonoran Desert. His poetry collection Unaccompanied, which won a Firecracker Award, explores the impact of migration and the Salvadoran Civil War on his family. He has been awarded numerous fellowships, including a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. About his poem “Second Attempt Crossing,” Zamora says, “I wouldn’t be here without the generosity, the humanity, of someone like Chino. Please acknowledge the humanity of humans that take a wrong path, especially now when Central Americans continue to be dehumanized by this government.” (javierzamora.net)