Bridges reading
“The one positive thing about doing online readings is that I am able to feature writers from out of state,” says Stan Kusunoki, host/curator of the Bridges Reading Series. “We were bi-coastal in January and for May we are nearly bi-coastal again as we welcome Chia-Lun Chang from New York, and Jefferson Carter from Arizona. Add Bridges veterans Paula Cisewski and Sagirah Shahid, plus a rare fiction writer, V.V. Ganeshananthan, it should be a well-rounded evening.”
Since this is a Zoom reading, those who wish to view it should register with Next Chapter Booksellers to get the link sent to them.
Paula Cisewski's fourth poetry collection, Quitter, won the Diode Editions Book Prize. She is also the author of The Threatened Everything, Ghost Fargo (Nightboat Poetry Prize winner, selected by Franz Wright), Upon Arrival, and several chapbooks, including the lyric prose Misplaced Sinister. Her poems are included in the anthologies Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics, 78: A Tarot Anthology, Rocked by the Waters: Poems of Motherhood, Rewilding: Poems for the Environment, and New Poetry from the Midwest. She lives in Minneapolis, where she teaches writing privately and academically and collaborates with fellow artists and activists.
Jefferson Carter has poems in such journals as Barrow Street, Cream City Review, and Rattle. Chax Press published Get Serious: New and Selected Poems, chosen as a Southwest Best Book of 2013 by the Tucson/Pima County Public Library. In 2019, Presa Press released his eleventh collection, Birkenstock Blues. He lives in Tucson with his wife Connie. He’s a passionate supporter of Sky Island Alliance, a regionally-based environmental organization.
Sagirah Shahid is an African American Muslim poet, arts educator, and performance artist. She is a recipient of a Loft Literary Center mentor series award in poetry and a Twin Cities Media Alliance performance and public art fellowship. Her debut collection of poetry "Surveillance of Joy" is forthcoming from Half Mystic Press in the spring of 2021
V.V. Ganeshananthan is the author of the novel Love Marriage, which was longlisted for the Orange Prize and named one of Washington Post Book World's Best of 2008. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, and Columbia Journalism Review, among others. A recipient of fellowships from Radcliffe, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the American Academy in Berlin, she is at work on a second novel, excerpts of which have been published in Granta, Ploughshares, and Best American Nonrequired Reading. She is the co-host of the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast on Literary Hub and teaches fiction and nonfiction writing in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota.
Chia-Lun Chang is the author of One Day We Become Whites (No, Dear/Small Anchor Press, 2016). Recent work appears in Brooklyn Poets, Poetry Society of America, Pinwheel, Apogee, Sink Review, Poetry Project, and Asiya Wadud: Echo Exhibit. She has received support from Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Tofte Lake Center, Vermont Studio Center, and Poets House. Chia-Lun teaches contemporary Taiwanese poetry at the Brooklyn Public Library and writes for chatbots. Born and raised in New Taipei City, Taiwan, she lives in New York City. You can learn more about her at chialunchang.com.
The BRIDGES Reading series is intended to bring together writers across genres and cultural backgrounds to express themselves, but also build links to each other. The title comes from a performance piece, LANDBRIDGE: THE BERINGIA PROJECT, a performance piece co-written and performed by Kusunoki and Jamison Mahto, an Anishinabe performance poet/trickster coyote. “Starting with conflicting creation myths, we came to a point where we understood and connected with the commonalities of our histories and cultures,” says Kusunoki. “It is the hope of the series that readers and the audience will do the same.”
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