Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry
San Francisco Launch Reading & Reception

Saturday, April 3, 2010
The Booksmith
1644 Haight Street, San Francisco
7:30pm
Free

Bollywood, Bullets, and Beyond: The Poetry of South Asian America
Featuring Summi Kaipa, Pireeni Sundaralingam, Ravi Shankar, Bhanu Kapil, Subhashini Kaligotla, and Monica Ferrell

What do a sestina, 9/11, and Amitabh Bachchan have in common? Popular, political, and poetic themes all appear in Indivisible (University of Arkansas Press, 2010), the first anthology of contemporary South Asian American poetry. The collection features emerging and established poets who can trace their ethnic heritages to Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Six extraordinary writers from this collection read from their work.

Thursday, April 7, 2010
Associated Writing Program Conference, Denver 2010
Colorado Convention Center, Street Level, Rooms 102-104
10:30am to 11:45am

From Bombs to Bindis: Stereotypes, Trends & Tensions in South Asian Writing

Join us to hear an engaging panel of South Asian authors—Minal Hajratwala, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Summi Kaipa, Ramola D, and Roohi Choudry—facilitated by Sangeeta Reddy.

Friday, April 9, 2010
Highlands Ranch Library in Denver
6:30pm
Registration Required

Re-writing America: Complicating the Poetics of Identity
Featuring Neelanjana Banerjee, Hayan Charara, Samantha Thornhill, Ching-In Chen, Tim Hernandez, and Summi Kaipa.

Even as the minority surges towards the majority in making up the New America, poets seek out the nurturing spaces of ethno-literary organizations like Kundiman and Cave Canem. Popular ethnic-specific anthologies are being published each year. Yet the work coming out of these cultural boundaries is incredibly diverse in style and influence. This panel examines the ways in which hyphenated American poets are rethinking the concept of identity and, in turn, shaping the national zeitgeist.

Saturday, April 9, 2010
Associated Writing Program Conference, Denver 2010
Colorado Convention Center, Street Level, Room 201
10:30am to 11:45pm

Indivisible: South Asian American Poetry Anthology LA Launch
Monday, April 12, 2010
Machine Project, Los Angeles

Featured poets include Ro Gunetilleke, Vandana Khanna, Bhargavi Mandava, Amar Ravva and editor Pireeni Sundaralingam.

Special musical performance by FIELD: Walter Kitundu & Robin Sukhadia.

Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry
The Poetry Center & American Poetry Archives
Editors: Neelanjana Banerjee, Summi Kaipa, and Pireeni Sundaralingam
Featuring contributors Tanuja Mehrotra and Minal Hajratwala
Two readings on Thursday, April 22, 2010

3:30 pm
The Poetry Center, San Francisco
HUM 512, San Francisco State University
Free

7:30 pm at The Green Arcade
1680 Market (at Gough)
San Francisco
Free

Indivisible at the United States of Asian America Festival
Saturday, May 1, 2010
Mission Cultural Center
More details to come

Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry
Wednesday, May 5
The Poetry Project
at St. Marks Church
131 E. 10th Street, New York
8pm

Earth on Stone on Earth is Naturally So
Curated by Karl Krause
Flashpoint Gallery
August 2007

As part of an installation project interrogating the idea of art and ecology, writers were buried in San Francisco’s Crissy Field and Brooklyn’s Prospect Park and lived to write about it.

Neo-Benshi

According to wikipedia: “The art form’s acknowledged starting point is in Korea, Japan, Taiwan and other East Asian nations during the silent film era. Benshi is a Japanese word referring to the oral “interpreter” who performed a live narrative accompaniment to silent movies, in lieu of showing intertitles with dialogue, etc. In Korean the practice is known as pyônsa. Currently, it is finding a resurgence among experimental poets in the San Francisco Bay area and Los Angeles.”

The New Talkies: Bollywood Night
Curated by Konrad Steiner and Summi Kaipa
Bollyhood Cafe, San Francisco
November 2008

“Bobby”
Benshi Come Home
Curated by Amar Ravva and Harold Abramowitz
Betalevel, Los Angeles
2007

 

Shopdropping: Experiments in the Aisle
Pond Gallery
March-April 2005

‘Tag’ is the text-based component of ‘Shopdropping: Experiments in the Aisle’ (March 11-April 11, 2005), an exhibition organized by Pond that both catalogues and instigates the insertion of art into public places of commerce. For ‘Tag,’ various text-based artists and writers were asked to create labels or tags that were later pinned to garments in local upscale department stores or chain conglomerates.

Intercept: To Thwart, Cradle, Exchange
August 2002 & January 2003

Intercept: To Thwart, Cradle, Exchange was a two-part creative experiment that sought to promote avant-garde Asian American writers in the public and performative sphere, with the intent to draw together a broad-based community of enthusiastic, experimental art-goers. The project aimed to support experimental literature and related genres, to foster community among Asian American artists, and to encourage artists to question constructions of identity in literature. Another primary goal of Intercept was to cultivate a youth audience and to make public literary arts available to young artists in the Bay Area. Both components of Intercept, designed as two distinct events, presented local artists in performance. The first component, held August 23, 2002, was a literary reading and performance art piece around the publication of the literary magazine interlope, at Locus 1640 Post in San Francisco’s Japantown. The second component occurred January 24 and 25, 2003 at Noh Space/Theatre of Yugen and was a production of Summi Kaipa’s play Triptych: Stories of Three South Asian Women. Triptych explored the notions of false historical lineages and badly translated identities, and presented a soap opera-like tale of an intercepted “nationhood,” appropriate to the current political landscape.

Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry
Edited by Neelanjana Banerjee, Summi Kaipa, and Pireeni Sundaralingam
University of Arkansas Press
2010

Interlope: A Journal of Asian American Poetics and Issues
May 1998 to August 2003
Cover art by Colleen Coover
Issues 3, 5, 6, & 7 are sold out.
The issues pictured here (1, 2, 4, 8 & 9) are still for sale. Paypal links coming soon!

Incidental Press
The chapbooks pictured here are available for sale. Paypal link coming soon!

Uncle Chen’s Oriental Slapstick
Chris Chen
2000
$5

Cetris Paribus: All Things Being Equal
Anne Frost
2000
$5

The Language Parable
Corollary Press
2006

One: I Beg You Be Still (from Was.Or.Am.)
Belladonna Books
2003

The Epics
Leroy
1999

bio

SUMMI KAIPA received an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is the author of three chapbooks. Kaipa was founder and editor of Interlope, a magazine featuring innovative writing by Asian Americans (1998–2003), and she is co-editor of Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry (University of Arkansas Press, 2010). Her work has been published in Chain, XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics, the Literary Review, and the anthology Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 2006). She received the Holmes Award from the Fourteen Hills Review and the Portrero Nuevo Fund Prize in 2002. She is currently working on her first full-length collection of hybrid prose poems.