Indivisible reaches #1 Best Seller on Amazon!

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.

Thanks everyone!

Video: Indivisible Launch at the Booksmith

Check out an amazing video/book trailer for Indivisible, filmed at our launch event for the anthology at The Booksmith in San Francisco earlier this month. Big props to Min Lee and Ann Bassette for putting this together for us.

Indivisible Launch at the Booksmith from New America Media on Vimeo.

Food at Saturday's Event!

Need some more reasons to go to Saturday's reading at the Mission Cultural Center in San Francisco? The Chai Cart and Zante's Pizza & Indian Cuisine will be providing us with food.

Indivisible on Apex Express Radio

Listen to Indivisible's co-editors on Apex Express ... we're the second segment, so go to around 25 minutes.

Click here to listen

Reading THIS SATURDAY at the Mission Cultural Center in San Francisco!

When: Saturday May 1st
Time: 7:30 - 10:30pm
Where: Mission Cultural Center, 2868 Mission Street, San Francisco

A night of readings from Indivisible will be featured at the 2010 United States of Asian America Festival at the Mission Cultural Center. Featured poets include Ravi Chandra, Shailja Patel and Maya Khosla and editors Summi Kaipa, Pireeni Sundaralingam and Neela Banerjee. Plus, a reception afterwards with drinks, snacks and beats from DJ Tablapusher. This will be the last SF event for Indivisible for awhile, so be sure to come check it out!

$5-$10 sliding scale admission, buy advance tickets here on Brown Paper Tickets: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/106897

RSVP the facebook event invitation

Indivisible Makes Top 10 Book sellers List on Amazon!

At this hour, "Indivisible" holds the number 10 position on Amazon's top 10 sellers Asian American books!

See here!

Congratulations to everyone who has contributed! Thank you to everyone who has bought a book!

Become our Fan on Facebook!

Want more information on the latest news coverage of Indivisible?

Click here to check out our Facebook Fan page!

The Lantern Review Covers AWP Launch

Check it out! The Lantern Review blogged about Indivisible's panel at the AWP Launch!

Click to read the review

Dilruba Ahmed interview with The Collagist

Words from The Collagist:

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 interview

Video from the LA Launch Event featuring LA based poets & FIELD: Kitundu + Sukhadia

Photos from SF Launch!

Poet Tanuja Mehrothra (and daughter) and co-editor Neelanjana Banerjee sign books.















Poets Ravi Chandra and Swati Rana take a break from signing books.















Co-editor, Pireeni Sundaralingam signing books.















Co-editor, Summi Kaipa, looks a camera crew in the eye.













Praveen Madan of The Booksmith introduces Indivisible to a packed house at the launch. (Also includes good shot of the samosas donated by New Delhi Restaurant!)










Setting up for the launch: poet Ravi Chandra and editor Summi Kaipa

Ravi Chandra performs "iPad oGod" at SF Launch!

Ravi Chandra at SF Launch!

SF Examiner Article on "Indivisible"

On 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.

Summi and Neela on Blog Talk Radio

Co-editors Summi Kaipa and Neelanjana Banerjee -- along with Indivisible poet Tanu Mehrotra Wakefield -- on Blog Talk Radio Friday, April 2nd.

Click here to listen!

Co-Editor Summi Kaipa Interview with SF Examiner

Credo: Author Summi Kaipa

By: Lisa Geduldig
Special to The Examiner
March 28, 2010

Summi Kaipa (Mike Koozmin/Special to The Examiner)

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.

Read more at the San Francisco Examiner: http://www.sfexaminer.com/entertainment/Credo-Author-Summi-Kaipa-89249757.html#ixzz0lKWc82fh

Indivisible launches in April 2010!

Hi Everyone,
Just to let you know, our website is getting a makeover -- and we're soon to be found on Facebook and Twitter. In the meantime, for a description of the book and a chance to pre-order it before it hits the bookstores, please visit University of Arkansas Press or Amazon.com.

Hope to see you at our events soon!

Featured Poet: PURVI SHAH

Purvi Shah serves as the Executive Director at Sakhi for South Asian Women, a community-based anti-domestic violence organization. Her debut book of poetry, Terrain Tracks (New Rivers Press 2006), won a Many Voices Project prize. Among other places, her poetry has been published in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Brooklyn Review, Many Mountains Moving, The Massachusetts Review, Meridians, Natural Bridge, NuyorAsian, and Contours of the Heart: South Asians Map North America (which won an American Book Award in 1997.) She served as a poetry editor for The Asian Pacific American Journal, has been a Kundiman fellow, and received the Virginia Voss Poetry Award at the University of Michigan. Her research for her M.A. in American Literature from Rutgers University delved into 19^th and 20^th century women’s and Asian American anthologies.

Q: Name one collection of poetry that you wish you had written and why.

Who am I not to covet brilliance? I would have been bliss-filled had I written many a collection of poems including Agha Shahid Ali’s Half-Inch Himalayas, Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah, Li-Young Lee’s Rose, Paul Monette’s Love Alone, Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf – or even the oeuvre of Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Emily Dickinson. And, yes, T. S. Eliot, Edgar Lee Masters, and Robert Frost too – and not just so that every school kid would be forced to ingest my work but for the love of rhythm, place, and the urgency of living.

For all these reasons and more, though, if I had to settle on one poet – a mandate I don’t subscribe to (my essay in the recent Poet’s Bookshelf attests to that) – I’d elect John Donne’s works. The Holy Sonnets are to be relished – I return to “Death be not proud” and “Batter my heart, three-personed God, for You” each time with amazement anew. I love that Donne’s poems are arguments – that he delves into the paradoxes of life, and, yes, that he puns unceasingly. The mix of faith, human foibles & concerns, and passion in a language of rumination open imagination – and leave me learning, questioning, contemplating, and feeling more through each reading. If my poems were to reach such level of craft and felt knowledge, I would be done.

Q: Describe the place/physical location where you write most regularly.

My job is demanding. It leaves very little room for rest, much less room for writing poetry at leisurely stretches. So I write when & where I can – which is usually on the New York

City subway in my travels through the day. My poems often plumb aspects of migration – it’s fitting that I write on the move. I keep a small journal with me to brainstorm and to craft starts & shells of poems. On another trip, I’ll revise on the subway in this same journal. When the piece feels close to fruition – or when I’ve hit a wall – I’ll write up the work on the computer in my bedroom or kitchen. I’ll ponder ideas, sequences, & word choices, make edits and slash, and then print out the piece so that I can take it on the subway the next day to see if the poem feels ready or right. Mornings being with promise – that expectation of travel and the desire to see what arises in this room of journey.

The subway has become my writing sanctuary and taskmaster. Given time is tight, I focus and deploy short bursts of generating material and revising. Being in the world as I write brings me images, concepts, and words I would not necessarily have settled on had I been writing in the serenity of my home. Since my mind works through association and stitching information, the subway offers a vital space where I can gather and reflect. While I often seek a stretch of day where I could write and write and write, I know that my subway scribbling has a power of its own – and has brought me many an unexpected moment of excitement and joy in language, line, and poetic production.

Q: What South Asian themes are you interested in exploring in your work?

The poems in Terrain Tracks explore migration as potential and loss. They are keenly aware of the context of immigration – as highlighted by the “Immigrant Song” sequence. You can go to Sandhya Nankani’s Literary Safari blog to get one take on the final piece in this lyric sequence. As with other immigrant and/or postcolonial subjects, I’m interested in exploring movement, women’s shifting positions, and American culture.

I also love trains from my early memories of India riding the rails within the hubbub of milkwalas and fellow sojourners and the landscape shifting from dust to fields to dust. In America too, the journey by train carries you through landscape otherwise unseen and brings me a calm and unique topos of rumination. Those elements – as well as a love of nature, science, human exchange, and the urban geography – coalesce in my poems. For example, “Signs there is a hole in Manhattan,” reflects on 9/11 from the vantage of reportage, highlighting the confusion of subway travel – with the frame of a South Asian American New Yorker who lost a friend in that tragedy.

This is to say, as we all know, that identity is complex and experiences (& insights) cannot be predicated on labels. And yet, identity cannot also be javelined. My new work – in conversation with visual artist Nandini Chirimar – examines faith and objects of Hindu worship. At day’s end (and start), what motivates my poetry is a quest for knowledge, a desire to map feeling, and a love of the sensual imagination. What I crave to hear most, though, is what as readers strikes you about my work. Poetry is an amazing avenue of exchange and dialogue – I feel most satisfied when I hear what my poems evoke. That is the subway reaching, after many twists & turns, its destination.

Notes on the Anthology reading

Thanks to Oakland Asian Cultural Center (and directors Mona Shah and April Kim) for ensuring a huge turn-out for our reading. It was standing room only last Friday as we took to the mic. Delighted to see what a warm response the anthology received. Good, too, to find how seamlessly the poems from the anthology dovetailed with readings from our other Asian American writers. Based on the feedback we've since received, the interconnections and resonances seemed to work well in highlighting the anthology's strength as a literary bridge between communities.

Favorite moments?

NEELA: Hearing poems from the anthology read aloud. Especially, hearing Minal Hajratwala read and discuss her poem "Angerfish," which is a poem I have read over and over for the duration of our editing process and loved. It was so enlightening and beautiful to hear Minal read it and discuss its origins. I also loved the two fiction readers -- Mimi Lok and Diana Ip -- and how the theme of Chinese seniors connected the two stories beautifully. I love synchronisity like that in reading.

PIREENI: Good to hear the range of different voices, both among our fiction guests and among our own contributing poets. Hearing the poems read out, in these particular permutations, let me discover new threads of thought between what _had_ seemed like familiar pieces. Good, too, to see how excited the audience were about the anthology: and it's not even out yet...

SUMMI: I was blown away by the resonances between the stories and poems presented by Mimi Loc, Diana Ip, and Aimee Suzara and the poems from our own anthology, by Tanuja Mehrotra, Subashini Kaligotla, and Meena Alexander (read by the editors). The intersections between styles and stories were proof of the benefits of existing in a multi-cultural Asian American space where we can learn from both similarities and differences. It was also great to hear Minal Hajratwala read both her poetry and her fiction. Her live performance made tangible the intent of Writing the Lines of Our Hands, exciting us (the editors) and the audience about the forthcoming anthology.

And here's a blog report from one of our audiences members (poet Barbara Jane Reyes):
http://bjanepr.wordpress.com/2009/05/30/literary-evening-in-oakland-chinatown/

Anthology featured at OACC literary event: May 29

Our very own "Writing the Lines of Our Hands" will be showcased as part of a literary celebration at Oakland Asian Cultural Center (OACC) later this month. The literary night features Asian American women writers from a broad range of backgrounds, including Diana Ip, Aimee Suzara, and Mimi Lok, as well as women poets from our anthology including Minal Hajratwala while anthology editors Summi, Neela and Pireeni will be discussing their experience of editing the anthology over the last few years.

LITERARY NIGHT

Friday 29 May
7:30 - 9: 30
Oakland Asian Cultural Center
388 9th Street, Suite 290
Oakland. CA 94607
Tel: 510.637.0455
Fax: 510.637.0459

www.oacc.cc
$20 - $5 (sliding scale)