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Indivisible currently holds the #1 best seller spot on Amazon under Asian American poetry. Please help us get to the #1 spot of all Asian American books by buying your copy today! Tell all you friends, please.
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Indivisible Launch at the Booksmith from New America Media on Vimeo.
Three of Dilruba Ahmed’s poems appear in the March 2010 issue of the Collagist. She is the author of Dhaka Dust (Graywolf, 2011), winner of the 2010 Bakeless Literary Prize for poetry, selected by Arthur Sze and awarded by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Ahmed’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Cream City Review, New England Review, New Orleans Review, Drunken Boat, and Pebble Lake Review. Her work will also appear in the forthcoming anthology, Indivisible: Contemporary South Asian American Poetry (University of Arkansas Press, 2010).
Can you talk about the inspiration for “Venice During an Election Year in the U.S.,” “Cathedral,” and “Rumor”? What was on your mind while you were writing these poems?
“Venice” and “Cathedral” are based in part on my experiences backpacking through Europe with my husband. We traveled amidst the heightened anxieties about terrorism as well as anti-American and anti-Muslim sentiments–all the while feeling dismayed by the growing popularity of an incompetent leader who had most likely entered office by fraud. While none of this appears with any specificity in the poem, in Venice I found a landscape that seemed willing to house some of the disillusionment we’d been experiencing.
Click to read the full interviewOn Saturday, April 3, at 7:30 pm, the editors and several contributing poets who are responsible for a wonderful new anthology, will appear at San Francisco’s Booksmith to celebrate the West Coast launch of Indivisible: An Anthology of South Asian American Poetry. Poet Yusef Kumunyakaa has described Indivisible as having a “seamless passion, held together by the will to cross borders and embrace that which is sacred in the individual.” This exciting and valuable contribution to American letters is the result of the hard work of three Bay Area women.
Click here to read the full article.
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Summi Kaipa (Mike Koozmin/Special to The Examiner) |
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Summi Kaipa received a master in fine arts degree in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is the author of three chapbooks, small books of poems or stories. Kaipa served as a board member and literary curator for two San Francisco nonprofits, the Alliance of Emerging Creative Artists and New Langton Arts. She was the founder and editor of Interlope, a magazine featuring innovative writing by Asian Americans. She lives in Berkeley.