Please join us for a virtual poetry reading celebrating Shelley Wong's new book As She Appears. For this reading and conversation, Wong will be joined by Cathy Linh Che and Lo Kwa Mei-en. This virtual event will take place on our Crowdcast channel. Register at the link below.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Shelley Wong's debut, As She Appears, foregrounds queer women of color in their being and becoming. Following the end of a relationship that was marked by silence, a woman crosses over and embodies the expanse of desire and self-love. Other speakers transform the natural world and themselves, using art and beauty as a means of sanctuary and subversion. With both praise and precision, Wong considers how women inhabit and remake their environment. The ecstatic joys of Pride dances and late-night Chinatown meals, conversations with Frida Kahlo, trees that "burst into glamour," and layers of memory permeate these poems as they travel through suburban California, perfumed fashion runways, to a Fire Island summer. Wong writes in the space where so many do not appear as an invitation for queer women of color to arrive in love, exactly as they are.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Shelley Wong is the author of As She Appears (YesYes Books, May 2022), winner of the 2019 Pamet River Prize, and the chapbook RARE BIRDS (Diode Editions, 2017). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry 2021, Kenyon Review, and New England Review. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Kundiman, MacDowell, and Vermont Studio Center. She is an affiliate artist at Headlands Center for the Arts and lives in San Francisco.
Cathy Linh Che is the author of Split (Alice James Books), winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize, the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies. She is also the co-author, with Kyle Lucia Wu, of the children’s book A Is for Asian American (Haymarket Books), which will be published in May 2023. She has received awards from MacDowell, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Djerassi, among others. She serves as Executive Director at Kundiman.
Lo Kwa Mei-en wrote YEARLING (Alice James Books) and THE BEES MAKE MONEY IN THE LION (Cleveland State University Poetry Center). She is a Kundiman fellow and social services advocate from Singapore and Ohio, where she lives and works in Cincinnati.
Please note: Our virtual events are recorded and viewable anytime on Women & Children First's Crowdcast Channel. The recordings are later uploaded with closed captioning to our YouTube Channel within a week or two of the event.
Image description: an orange rectangular banner featuring the book cover for As She Appears and photographs of authors Shelley Wong, Cathy Linh Che, and Lo Kwa Me-in. Text reads: Women & Children First presents a virtual event Shelley Wong with Cathy Linh Che and Lo Kwa Me-in, Wednesday, June 15 at 7 PM CT via Crowdcast.
