No registration required!
Join us for an enriching event featuring readings and conversations with Kiran Bath and Catherine Chen. Celebrating their debut collections, we will delve into the world of hybrid and experimental writing among Asian poets in particular, such as Mei Mei Brussenge, Bhanu Kapil, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Julietta Singh, and Etel Adnan.
About Instructions for Banno
In her debut poetry collection, Kiran Bath travels through the timelines and geographies of the women in her family to understand the inherited consequences of becoming a South Asian bride (banno). Threading stories of pre-partition matriarchs, migrant mothers, and first generation daughters, she renders themes of subjugation, domestic violence, honor killings, and infanticide alongside unrequited love, sisterhood, motherhood, and devotion in cathartic form. The result is the set of instructions left for BANNO, a diary that ruptures the institution of filial duty and embodies the tradition that survives it—an insistence for declaring our humanity.
About Beautiful Machine Woman Language
BEAUTIFUL MACHINE WOMAN LANGUAGE extrapolates Catherine Chen's experiences as a data transcriptionist for the Amazon Echo in order to examine the emotional--often invisibilized--spaces occupied by the human workers who service AI and other emergent technologies. Beginning with a lyric romance between an unnamed data worker and the AI with whom she falls in love, the collection curates a polyphonic space for how we can imagine our languages of desire for collective dreaming, longing, and archiving.
Kiran Bath is a writer based in New York. She has received fellowships and support from Poets House, the Vermont Studio Center and Brooklyn Poets. Kiran is a Kundiman fellow and a Tin House alumnus. Her writing appears in wildness, The Adroit Journal, The Brooklyn Rail and other journals. Her debut poetry collection, INSTRUCTIONS FOR BANNO, will be released this Summer with Kelsey Street Press.
Catherine Chen is a multidisciplinary poet and performer. They have received fellowships from The Watermill Center, Theater Mitu, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (Arts Center Residency 2021), Lambda Literary, Poets House, and Franconia Sculpture Park. Their poems appear in The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, The Rumpus, Hyperallergic, Apogee, Nat. Brut, among others. Chen is the author of Beautiful Machine Woman Language (Noemi Press, 2023).