Friday, September 18, 2015
7:00 PM
Unnameable Books, 600 Vanderbilt Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11238

Poets Yesenia Montilla and Angel Nafis join non­fiction writer Amarnath Ravva and fiction writer Gina Apostol to celebrate writers of color. The authors will read from New York­-based writers of color that have influenced them, and from their own work. This reading is presented by Asian American literary organizations Kaya Press and Kundiman, who will be sharing a booth at the Brooklyn Book Festival on Sunday Sept. 20th. #LitinColor is a campaign to draw attention to the influence of writers of color on the national imagination.

Bios:

GINA APOSTOL‘s last novel,Gun Dealers’ Daughter, won the 2013 PEN/Open Book Award and was shortlisted for the 2014 William Saroyan International Prize. Her first two novels, Bibliolepsy and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, both won the Juan Laya Prize for the Novel (Philippine National Book Award). She is working on William McKinley’s World, a novel set in Balangiga and Tacloban in 1901, during the Philippine-American War. She was writer-in-residence at Phillips Exeter Academy and a fellow at Civitella Ranieri in Umbria, Italy, among other fellowships. Her essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Foreign Policy, Gettysburg Review, Massachusetts Review, and others. She lives in New York City and western Massachusetts and grew up in Tacloban, the Philippines. She teaches at the Fieldston School in New York City.

YESENIA MONTILLA is a New York City poet with Afro-Caribbean roots. Her poetry has appeared in the chapbook For the Crowns of Your Head, as well as the literary journals 5AM, Adanna, The Wide Shore and others. She received her MFA from Drew University in Poetry and Poetry in Translation and is a CantoMundo Fellow. Her first collection The Pink Box will be published by Willow Books in October of 2015.

ANGEL NAFIS (Brooklyn, NY) is a Cave Canem Fellow. Her work has appeared in The Rattling Wall, Union Station Magazine, MUZZLE Magazine, Mosaic Magazine and Poetry Magazine. She is an Urban Word NYC Mentor and the founder, curator, and host of the quarterly Greenlight Bookstore Poetry Salon reading series. She is the author of BlackGirl Mansion (Red Beard Press/ New School Poetics, 2012). Facilitating generative writing workshops and reading poems across the United States and Canada, she lives in Brooklyn.

California-based writer AMARNATH RAVVA (Los Angeles, CA) is the author of American Canyon (Kaya Press, 2014). He has performed at LACMA, Machine Project, the MAK Center at the Schindler House, New Langton Arts, the Hammer Museum, USC, Pomona, CalArts, and the Sorbonne. In addition to his writing practice, he is a member of the site specific ambient music supergroup Ambient Force 3000, and for the past nine years he has helped run and curate events at Betalevel, a venue for social experimentation and hands-on culture located in Los Angeles’ Chinatown. He is currently working on a book about Victorian era botanical expeditions called The Glass House.