From Mandalay to the Bay

From Mandalay to the Bay: An Evening of Burmese & Burmese American Poets & Writers

Please join us for a very special event at Alley Cat Books in San Francisco on Monday, January 16th, 2017 at 6pm. Renowned poet, ko ko thett, will be making a rare appearance in the Bay Area to celebrate his latest book, The Burden of Being Burmese (Zephyr). He is also the co-editor of Bones Will Crow: Fifteen Contemporary Burmese Poets (Northern Illinois University Press). He will be joined by Bay Area authors, poets, and translators, Htet Yi Linn, Khin Thiri Nandar Soe, Audrey T. Williams, Maw Shein Win, and Kenneth Wong.

Free.

For more information, please contact maw@redbridgepress.com

Bios of Readers

Htet Yi Linn is an undergraduate pursuing a degree in Business Administration at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. At Cal, she serves as the President of Burma Association at Berkeley where she works hard to bring the Cal community closer to the Burmese culture. Despite moving out of Burma at the age of 14, she remains close to the Burmese culture and language through Burmese novels and by staying close to Burmese communities overseas. She embraces the Burmese culture and literature. She has also worked on multiple translation projects. You can find some of her writings about snippets of her life at heyhtett.wordpress.com.

Khin Thiri Nandar Soe (her pen name is Niyawdar) writes poems and critiques on Burmese political and social culture. She is from Burma and poetry is her first love. Her poems and articles are published in Burmese revolutionary magazines such as Thitsar, Ah Lin Eain, Aharya, Daung O Wai and the literary magazine Kaung Kin (The Sky). Most of her works reflect Burma’s struggle for liberation and human nature.

ko ko thett is a poet by choice and Burmese by chance. He has received an English PEN Translation Award for the seminal Bones will Crow: Fifteen Contemporary Burmese Poets (Northern Illinois University Press, 2013, co-edited with James Byrne). The Burden of Being Burmese (Zephyr, 2015), a collection of ko ko thett’s poems that have appeared in literary journals worldwide, is listed on ‘‘Nota Benes’’ by World Literature Today. He has read at Sharjah International Book Fair, Hong Kong Poetry Nights and Minsheng Art Museum in Shanghai. After a whirlwind tour of Southeast Asia and Europe for about 18 years, ko ko thett moved back to Yangon. He writes in both Burmese and English, and is an honorary fellow in writing at the University of Iowa.

Audrey T. Williams is an Oakland-based writer. She is a Medical Writer by day, and an MFA Candidate in creative nonfiction at California College of the Arts all other times. Audrey grew up in North Carolina. She writes lyrical essays and poems about her multi-cultural family life, being Burmese and African American. She has been deeply exploring her cultural and racial identity formation, focused on social dynamics post-Independence in Burma and post-Integration in America. Just when Audrey thought she had resolved the questions about her ancestry, a conversation with a co-worker from India exposes a family secret…to learn more visit www.audreyTwilliams.com.

Maw Shein Win is a poet, editor, and educator who lives and works in the Bay Area. Ruins of a glittering palace, her collaborative chapbook, with paintings by Mark Dutcher, was published by SPA/Commonwealth Projects. She is a poetry editor for Rivet: The Journal of Writing that Risks and an instructor at the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. Her chapbook Score and Bone on Nomadic Press was recently nominated for a CLMP Firecracker Award. She is the first poet laureate of El Cerrito. http://www.el-cerrito.org/poets

Kenneth Wong is a Burmese-American author and blogger who grew up in Rangoon. He lives in San Francisco, California, and teaches Beginning Burmese at UC Berkeley. His essays, short stories, and poetry translations have appeared in Grain, AGNI, Eleven Eleven, Myanmar Times, Irrawaddy, and the San Francisco Chronicle.