Chapbook Launch & Poetry Reading
featuring Marisa Lin and Cianga
Wed April 17, 2024 at 5pm
Arts Research Center, Hearst Field Annex D23
Join the Arts Research Center in celebrating the first chapbook publications of Poetry & the Senses Fellows Marisa Lin and Cianga. Each poet will read for 20 minutes, followed by a book signing. Free & open to the public.
Marisa Lin’s chapbook Dream Elevator is just published by Kernpunkt Press NY. Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow Aileen Cassinetto writes “In this stunning debut chapbook, Marisa Lin delivers a vision that transcends distance and memory to examine race, gender, daughterhood, and the body politic.” You can read a review of Dream Elevator in Heavy Feather Review. Marisa Lin (she/they) is a daughter of immigrants and Minnesota native. She was a 2023 Poetry Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Arts Research Center and her work is published or forthcoming in Poetry South, Porter House Review, Cimarron Review, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day. Her debut chapbook, DREAM ELEVATOR, is published by Kernpunkt Press (2024). Marisa graduates in 2024 with a Master’s Degree of Public Policy from UC Berkeley.
Cianga‘s chapbook, Congo, seen from the heavens, is the third winner of Start A Riot! Chapbook Prize. In response to rapid gentrification and displacement of QTBIPOC+ literary artists in the San Francisco Bay Area, and in celebration of these communities’ revolutionary history, Foglifter Press, RADAR Productions, and Still Here San Francisco joined forces to create a chapbook prize for local emerging queer and trans Black writers, indigenous writers, and writers of color. Cianga (she/they) is a Congolese artist based in California, by way of South Africa. A recipient of the Cave Canem + EcoTheo’s Starshine & Clay Fellowship, Cianga creates interdisciplinary work that seeks to decolonize and disrupt language. They are currently an MFA candidate and have received residency and fellowship support from UC Berkeley’s Arts & Research Center, Brooklyn Poets, and Atlantic Center for the Arts. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Foglifter Journal, Rappahannock Review, EcoTheo Review and elsewhere. They write, draw, compose, perform with the belief of black art as radical joy and critical protest.
Employing visions, hauntings, and a dynamism of forms, DREAM ELEVATOR is an exploration of girlhood, displacement, and movement. The collection traces the trajectory of a daughter and mother from Quanzhou, China to the snowy plains of Rochester, Minnesota. Along the way, these poems traverse dreams and ancestors, silence and rupture, to examine the question: What happens when inheritance is not enough for survival?
read more & purchase at Kernpuknt Press
Congo, seen from the heavens is a collection of poems that journeys through not often told history from the Congolese and Black diaspora to deliver its warnings, lament, and hopes. From the perspective of a refugee, this book addresses the complex relationships between home and survival while rooting itself in the reminder that we are [our] “ancestor’s best outcome.”
read more & purchase at FogLifter