Join Us at the 2019 Smithsonian APA Lit Fest This Weekend!

Text: "2019 Asian American Literature Festival, August 2–4, 2019, Eaton Hotel, 2012 K Street Northwest, Washington, DC 20005." Accompanying image: watercolor illustration of a city with multiple types of buildings arranged on grassy terraces, including several with many glass windows, brick and stuccoed buildings, and several tents in the foreground (including a thatched one, a round, white yurt-like structure, and a blue one with multicolored designs).
Join us in the Literary Lounge of the 2019 Asian American Literature Festival this weekend!

It’s that time again, and we’re headed off to the second Smithsonian APA Literature Festival this weekend in DC! Come visit us in the Literary Lounge on Friday, where we’ll be giving away awesome stickers featuring some of our contributors, as well as (in keeping with this year’s festival’s theme of “Care and Caregiving”) little poetry care kits designed to provide literary inspiration, activities for creative renewal, and prompts for the writer in need of self-care. Whether it’s tenderness, solidarity, or play that you need, we hope you’ll take a kit home this weekend to nourish your own creative practice or to share one with someone dear to you. The activities and writing prompts included can easily be adapted to share with kids, as well—so if you’re a parent or a teacher of a creative young person, we hope you’ll stop by, too! (Iris will be behind the table and would love to have a conversation with you about APA poetry in the classroom or APA books for young readers.) See you in DC!

Editors’ Picks: Ekphrastic Poetry Resources

As we wrap up the first part of our March theme, we’d like to offer you the following list of resources, which we hope will inspire you to delve deeper into the world of ekphrastic poetry.

Clockwise from Top L: ArtScope Screenshot, Detail of I Gusti Putu Hardana Putra's "Unvoice" (Carrying Across Exhibit), "Camp Scene" (Art of Gaman Exhibit)

Asian American Art: Gallery Exhibits

The Art of Gaman – Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps, 1942-1946
Smithsonian American Art Museum | Renwick Gallery (Washington, D.C.)
March 5, 2010 — January 30, 2011

Carrying Across (curated by Yvonne Lung)
[Multimedia exhibition exploring acts of interpretation and translation]
Asian Arts Intiative (Philadelphia)
Feburayr 19, 2010 — April 30, 2010

Paj Ntaub: Stories of Hmong in Washington
Wing Luke Asian Museum (Seattle)
March 5, 2010 — October 17, 2010

Here and Now: Chapter III — Towards Transculturalism (Chinese Artists in NY)
Museum of Chinese in America (New York City)
February 11, 2010 — March 28, 2010

Poetry in the Galleries

de Young Poetry Series
Part of the”Cultural Encounters: Friday Nights at the de Young” program hosted by the San Francisco’s de Young Museum.  This month, the series is being hosted by Michael Ondaatje and will take place on March 19th. (See our Community Calendar for more details).

Claim the Block: A WritersCorps Reading Series
Student artists from the WritersCorps San Francisco program present their work at a number of gallery venues around the city.  March’s installment will take place at the Contemporary Jewish Museum.

Online Image Archives & Tools

New York Public Library Digital Gallery
A truly useful collection of over 700,000 archival images — you’ll find book illustrations, art prints, photographs, postcards, images from magazines and newspapers, and more.  We did a simple search for “chinatown” and came up with 256 really interesting hits.

SFMOMA ArtScope
If you look at nothing else in this post, you must check out this super-cool art browsing tool.  The SF Museum of Modern Art has made it possible for you to dynamically explore 4,775 individual images from their collection simply by zooming, dragging, and clicking.  Browsing through the wall of images as it expands and contracts in response to your mouse-clicks is a completely mesmerizing experience, not to mention a great free way to familiarize yourself with the museum’s collection.  Adobe Flash Player is required to view the site.

Magazines

poet’sPicturebook
Curated by Marne Kilates, this online journal focuses on ekphrastic poetry, presenting poems artfully alongside the images which inspired them.  Of note: the most recent issue includes work by Luisa Igloria, whose thoughts on ekphrasis were featured in a recent post of ours.

Ekphrasis
Ekphrasis
, says its web site, “is a poetry journal looking for well-crafted poems, the main content of which addresses individual works from any artistic genre . . . Acceptable ekphrastic verse transcends mere description: it stands as transformative critical statement, an original gloss on the individual art piece it addresses.”  Ekphrasis is available by subscription.  Submissions are accepted via postal mail.