The Ethics of Power & Witness in Poetry, Sponsored by Kundiman
Friday, March 19, 1:45 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. CT
How can poetry show us how to attend to the lives and wounds of others, beyond the boundaries of our bodies, borders, and histories? How can we create and organize alongside one another, and how can we find kin in the ones we write with and for? This event will bring together poets whose work confronts exile, displacement, state violence and surveillance, climate crisis, and environmental grief, showing us how poetry can expand our ways of seeing and speaking about the world.
Carolina Ebeid is a multimedia poet. She is the author of Hide (Graywolf Press, 2026), You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior (Noemi Press, 2016), and the chapbook Dauerwunder: a brief record of facts (Albion Books, 2023). Her work has been supported by the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University, CantoMundo, the NEA, and a residency fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. Her work has been installed and screened at universities and galleries such as Stelo Arts in Portland, Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center, and the Denver Art Museum’s Untitled: Artist Takeover. A longtime editor, she currently edits the multimedia site Visible Binary.
Leora (Lee) Kava is an assistant professor of critical Pacific Islands and Oceania studies, housed within the Department of Race and Resistance Studies at San Francisco State University. She is a poet and musician of mixed, Tongan descent and dedicates her work to her family, community, students, and genealogies of creativity and liberation within and beyond Oceania. Alongside Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Craig Santos Perez, she coedited the anthology Indigenous Pacific Islander Eco-Literatures (UH Press, 2022). Her writing can be found in Amerasia Journal, KorePress.org, Hawai?i Review, Academy of American Poets, and Orion Magazine, with recordings available on the podcasts It’s Lit with PhDJ (based in Honolulu) and For the Qultures (based in the Bay Area).
Divya Victor is a Tamil American poet, essayist, and educator. She is the author of Curb, which won the PEN Open Book Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. She is the recipient of a Creative Capital Award for Kin, her forthcoming collection of essays from Graywolf. She is also the author of Kith, Natural Subjects, Things to Do with Your Mouth, and other books. She is a professor of English and creative writing at Michigan State University, where she is the director of the creative writing program. She has been a citizen of India, Singapore, and the United States, and is at home in all these countries.
Photo Credit: JJ Leaver
Cathy Linh Che is Kundiman’s executive director and the author of Becoming Ghost, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. She also teaches at the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at Antioch University. Che’s expertise in the craft of poetry as both an artist and an educator, as well as her role in leading Kundiman’s work for over ten years, make her the perfect person to moderate this discussion.