Book Release Party: A Nail the Evening Hangs On by Monica Sok

Copper Canyon Press presents…
Book Release Party: A Nail the Evening Hangs On by Monica Sok
Sat Feb 29, 7pm
EastSide Cultural Center
2277 International Blvd. Oakland
& Bandung Books
2289 International Blvd. Oakland
FREE COMMUNITY EVENT • accessible venue

Join us for a special evening, as we celebrate Monica Sok’s debut poetry collection, A NAIL THE EVENING HANGS ON. Featuring a traditional blessing dance by Morodok Khmer Performing Arts & readings by poets Safia Elhillo, Charif Shanahan, Janice Lobo Sapigao, sam sax , Hieu Minh Nguyen, and Charleen McClure. After the show, there will be a book signing next door at Bandung Books.

ABOUT THE BOOK: In this staggering poetry debut, Monica Sok illuminates the experiences of Cambodian diaspora and reflects on America’s role in escalating the genocide in Cambodia. A NAIL THE EVENING HANGS ON travels from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap, where Tuol Sleng and other war museums reshape the imagination of a child of refugees; to New York City and Lancaster, where the dailiness of intergenerational trauma persists on the subway or among the cornfields of a small hometown. Embracing collective memory, both real and imagined, these poems move across time to break familial silence. Sok pieces together voices and fragments—using persona, myth, and imagination—in a transformative work that builds towards wholeness.

Learn more here: https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/books/a-nail-the-evening-hangs-on-by-monica-sok/

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Monica Sok is a Cambodian American poet and the daughter of former refugees. She is the author of A NAIL THE EVENING HANGS ON (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) and YEAR ZERO, winner of a 2015 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship, selected by Marilyn Chin. In 2018, her work was recognized with a “Discovery” Prize from 92Y. She has received fellowships from Hedgebrook, Elizabeth George Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Kundiman, Jerome Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Saltonstall Foundation, and others. Currently, Sok is a 2018-2020 Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and has taught poetry to Southeast Asian youths at Banteay Srei and the Center for Empowering Refugees and Immigrants in Oakland, CA. She is originally from Lancaster, PA. [Photo Credit: Andria Lo]

Visit her website here: www.monicasok.com