Tamiko Beyer is the author of bough breaks (Meritage Press) and We Come Elemental (forthcoming, Alice James Books). Her poetry has appeared in DIAGRAM, H_ngm_n, diode, Sonora Review, OCHO, Copper Nickel, The Progressive, and other journals and anthologies. She is a founding member of Agent 409: a queer, multi-racial writing collective in New York City that has performed across the east coast and led workshops at conferences such as the U.S. Social Forum and Split this Rock Poetry Festival. She has received several fellowships and grants, including a Kundiman fellowship, a grant from the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund, and an Olin and Chancellor’s Fellowships from Washington University in St. Louis where received her M.F.A.. She is the poetry editor of Drunken Boat. Tamiko has led workshops for the New York Writers’ Coalition since 2005, where she has worked with homeless LGBT youth and other communities whose voices have been historically silenced. In St. Louis she led a writing workshop for children in an HIV/AIDS supportive housing residence for single parents, and was an instructor for Introduction Poetry Writing at Washington University. She is currently a mentor for a 15-year-old writer through Girls Write Now. With a background in both copy writing/editing and grassroots organizing, Tamiko has worked for a variety of nonprofit organizations, including the news program Democracy Now!, feminist film distributor Women Make Movies, and San Francisco Women Against Rape. She is currently the Advocacy Writer at Corporate Accountability International. Raised in Tokyo, Japan, Tamiko has lived on both the East and West coasts. She received her B.A. from Fairhaven College at Western Washington University and her M.F.A. from Washington University in St. Louis. She lives in Cambridge with her partner and their two gray cats. |
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Women's voices resound in a night of readings from the African American and Asian American poetry communities
Posted Mar 25, 2012 11:46 AM by Tamiko BeyerI hope you can join me for this exciting event on Thursday, April 5th in Brooklyn!Cave Canem & the Asian American Writers' Workshop Present: Robin Coste Lewis, Metta Sama, Tamiko Beyer, and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
Thursday, April 5, 2012
6:30pm
Cave Canem 20 Jay Street
Suite 310-A
Brooklyn, NY 11201
Join us for our sixth annual collaboration between Asian American Writers' Workshop and Cave Canem featuring the dynamic talent from four all-star female poets! Winner of two American Book Awards, MEI-MEI BERSSENBRUGGE molds language with her keen sensibility for visual art. Characteristic of her style is a lush mix of abstract language, collaged images, cultural and political investigation, and unexpected shifts between the meditative and the particular. TAMIKO BEYER’s work work engages with ideas of gender, motherhood, conception, and nature, towards a "queer eco-poetics." ROBIN COSTE LEWIS’s work explores political trauma, migration, fragmentation, and the resilience and loss of the body. A poet, visual artist, story maker and scholar, METTA SÁMA's poetry collections explore themes ranging from parasitic invasions and the nature of bodily disintegration as poetic practice, to the loves and lives of African Americans in the 1930s-1960s.
This event is co-hosted and co-curated by Kyla Marshall and Muriel Leung.
MEI-MEI BERSSENBRUGGE was born in Beijing and grew up in Massachusetts. She is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Empathy (Station Hill Press,) Nest, (Kelsey Street Press) and I Love Artists, New and Selected Poems (University of California Press). A collaboration about weather with artist Kiki Smith is forthcoming from Lelong Gallery and a collaboration with her husband Richard Tuttle about communicating with plants will open in Munich, fall, 2012.. She lives in New York City and northern New Mexico.
TAMIKO BEYER is the author of We Come Elemental, winner of the 2011 Kinereth Gensler Award and forthcoming from Alice James Books, and bough breaks from Meritage Press. She received her M.F.A. from Washington University in St. Louis where she was awarded a Chancellor’s Fellowship. She is a former Kundiman Fellow, a contributing editor to Drunken Boat, and the Advocacy Writer at Corporate Accountability International. She lives in Cambridge, MA. Find her online at wonderinghome.com
ROBIN COSTE LEWIS’s work has appeared in various journals, including The Massachusetts Review, Callaloo, The Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review, GCN, The Pocket Myth Series, and anthologized in Black Silk and The Encyclopedia Project, F-K. She was a finalist for both the War Poetry Prize in 2010, and the National Rita Dove Prize in 2004. She has been awarded residencies and fellowships by the Caldera Foundation, the Ragdale Foundation, and others. Currently, she is a Goldwater Fellow at NYU’s Creative Writing Program. Born in Compton, California, her family is from New Orleans.
METTA SÁMA is author of South of Here (New Issues Press, 2005). Her chapbook, Where Ghosts Camp, is forthcoming from YesYesBooks as both ebook and print. Her poems & book reviews have been published or forthcoming in Blackbird, Crab Orchard Review, Drunken Boat, Diner, Esque, hercircle, Paterson Literary Review, Verse, Vinyl, Zone 3, among others. She is the fiction editor at ragazine.cc. She teaches African American & Women’s Literature at Lehman & Hunter Colleges in NYC.
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Kinereth Gensler Award from Alice James Books
Posted Jan 8, 2012 7:30 AM by Tamiko BeyerMy full-length manuscript has been awarded the Kinereth Gensler Award from Alice James Books, and will be published by them in 2013!