Ricepaper Magazine, Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop, Filipino Canadian
Youth Alliance, and the Vancouver Asian Heritage Month Society
Presents:

“(NA)AWP: North Asian Americans Write Poetry, or
Thank You, Canada, For Letting Us Land Our Planes”

Featuring
KAZIM ALI, NICK CARBO, TINA CHANG, PAOLO JAVIER, TIMOTHY LIU, AIMEE
NEZHUKUMATATHIL, OSCAR PENARANDA, RAVI SHANKAR, PRAGEETA SHARMA, and
EILEEN TABIOS

WHEN: Friday, 7:00pm, April 1st 2005

WHERE: Our Town Café
96 Kingsway (Corner of Kingsway and Broadway) Vancouver

BIOS:

KAZIM
ALI is the author of the novel “Quinn's Passage.” He is assistant
professor of Liberal Arts at The Culinary Institute of America and an
editor with Nightboat Books. His first book of poems “The Far Mosque”
will be published this October by Alice James.

NICK CARBO's latest book is Andalusian Dawn. He lives in Hollywood, FL and teaches in the MFA program at University of Miami.

TINA
CHANG, the author of Half-Lit Houses (Four Way Books, 2004), received
an MFA in poetry from Columbia University. Her poems have appeared in
American Poet, Indiana Review, The Missouri Review, Ploughshares,
Quarterly West, Sonora Review, among others. She has received awards
from the Academy of American Poets, the New York Foundation for the
Arts, Poets & Writers, the Van Lier Foundation among many others.
She currently teaches at Hunter College.

PAOLO
JAVIER is the author of two books of poetry, 'the time at the end of
this writing' (Ahadada), and '60 Lv Bo(e)mbs' (O Books, fall 2005).

TIMOTHY
LIU is the author of five books of poems, including OF THEE I SING,
which was named a 2004 Book of the Year by PUBLISHERS WEEKLY. A new
book, FOR DUST THOU ART, is forthcoming from Southern Illinois
University Press. Recent poems have appeared in Arabic, Chinese and
Polish translations. An associate professor of English at William
Paterson University and a member of the core faculty at the Bennington
Writing Seminars, Liu lives in Hoboken, NJ.

AIMEE
NEZHUKUMATATHIL is the author of _Miracle Fruit_ (Tupelo 2003), winner
of the Tupelo Press Judge's Prize, ForeWord Magazine Poetry Book of the
Year, and the Global Literary Filipino Award, and was a finalist for
the Asian American Literary Award and the Glasgow Prize. She is
assistant professor of English at State University of New
York-Fredonia, right in the heart of Western NY's cherry and
berry country, where she lives with her dog, Villanelle.

OSCAR
PEÑARANDA, longtime community activist, advocate for ethnic studies in
the schools, teacher and writer, has two books out recently published
by San Francisco publisher/distributor T'BOLI PUBLISJHING: “Seasons By
The Bay, A Collection Of Interrelated Stories” and “Full Deck (Jokers
Playing)”, a collection of poetry.

RAVI SHANKAR is
poet-in-residence at Central Connecticut State University and the
founding editor of the online journal of the arts. His first
book Instrumentality, as published by Word Press in May 2004. His work
has previously appeared in such places as The Paris Review, Poets &
Writers, Time Out New York, Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review,
Descant, LIT, Crowd, The Cortland Review, Catamaran, The Indiana
Review, Western Humanities Review, Cake Train, The Iowa Review,
Smartish Pace, and the AWP Writer¹s Chronicle, among other
publications. He has read at such venues as The National Arts Club,
Columbia University, KGB, and the Cornelia Street Café, has held
residencies from the MacDowell Colony, Ragdale, and the Atlantic Center
for the Arts, has served on panels at UCLA, Poet¹s House,
South-by-Southwest Interactive/Film Festival, and the AWP Conference in
Baltimore, been a commentator for NPR and Wesleyan radio, reviews
poetry for the Contemporary Poetry Review and is currently editing an anthology
of South Asian, East Asian, and Middle Eastern poetry. You can read an
interview with him at: www.jacketmagazine.com/16/dev-iv-shank.html.
He does not play the sitar.

PRAGEETA SHARMA is the author of
Bliss to Fill (Subpress Books) and The Opening Question (Fence Books).
She teaches in the graduate creative writing program at New School
University and in the low residency BA program at Goddard College. She
lives in Brooklyn, New York.

EILEEN TABIOS, recipient of the
Philippines' National Book Award for Poetry, recently released a
multi-genre collection, I TAKE THEE, ENGLISH, FOR MY BELOVED,
encompassing poetry, experimental fiction, art monograph, play and
conceptual art. In 2006, she will release her 8th poetry collection,
THE SECRET LIVES OF PUNCTUATIONS, VOLUME I. She is also the founding
editor/publisher of Meritage Press, a multidisciplinary press based in
St. Helena and San Francisco, CA.