HIGH DAWN 6: Lawrence / Leung / Lou / Basu

Presented by Small Press Traffic and UC Berkeley Poetry Colloquium

Stephon Lawrence and Muriel Leung

Introduction by Angie Sijun Lou

Music by Beast Nest

Stephon Lawrence is a Brooklyn born & based writer, and artist. She is a graduate of the MFA in Writing at Pratt Institute and is co-founder and an editor of The Felt, a journal of otherworldly poetics interested in the creation and cultivation of emancipatory poetic spaces for felt sentiments that have been marginalized, displaced, or estranged from the dominant culture. Her first book u know how much i hate being alone in social situations// is forthcoming from Futurepoem Books. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Cosmonauts Avenue, Horseless Press, Queen Mob's Teahouse, GlitterMOB, Fanzine & other places. Her micro-chap //GERMZ is available from Ghost City Press. And her chapbook //EVIL TWIN is available from Resolving Host. She is a recipient of a Summer Workshop Scholarship at The Fine Arts Work Center. Stephon spends her free time watching anime and kdramas, training muay thai, yelling about white supremacy, and being cute for the 'gram. Her work aims to encapsulate all of this. She is almost always online. You can find her on twitter @nnohpetss and instagram @alphaheaux.

Muriel Leung is the author of Imagine Us, The Swarm, forthcoming from Nightboat Books and Bone Confetti, winner of the 2015 Noemi Press Book Award. A Pushcart Prize nominated writer, her writing can be found in The Baffler, Cream City Review, Gulf Coast, The Collagist, Fairy Tale Review, and others. She is a recipient of fellowships to Kundiman, VONA/Voices Workshop and the Community of Writers. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Gold Line Press and Poetry Co-Editor of Apogee Journal. She also co-hosts The Blood-Jet Writing Hour podcast with Rachelle Cruz and MT Vallarta. She is a member of Miresa Collective, a feminist speakers bureau. Currently, she is a Dornsife fellow in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California. She is from Queens, NY.

Angie Sijun Lou is a writer from Seattle. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in the American Poetry Review, FENCE, Black Warrior Review, the Adroit Journal, the Asian American Literary Review, Hyphen, the Margins, and others. She is a Kundiman Fellow, a PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at UC Santa Cruz, and a calculus instructor at San Quentin State Prison.

Sharmi Basu (they/them/she/her) is an Oakland born and based South Asian woman of color creating experimental music as a means of decolonizing musical language. They attempt to catalyze a political, yet ethereal aesthetic by combining their anti-colonial and anti-imperialist politics with a commitment to spirituality within the arts. Beast Nest, Sharmi's primary performing project, utilizes multi-dimensional soundscapes to transmute trauma and suffering into moments of deep presence. They are an MFA graduate from the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College in Electronic Music and Recording Media and have worked with Fred Frith, Roscoe Mitchell, John Bischoff, Pauline Oliveros, Chris Brown, Maggi Payne, and more. Their workshops on “Decolonizing Sound” have been featured at the International Society for Improvised Music, the Empowering Women of Color Conference, and have reached international audiences. They perform almost 100 times a year and has toured through the US and Canada as well as internationally in Europe. She specializes in new media controllers, improvisation in electronic music, and intersectionality within music and social justice. They also founded and hosted an all people-of-color improvisation and performance group called the MARA Performance Collective in Oakland, CA and was a founder of the Universe is Lit: A Bay Area Black and Brown Punk Fest. They are on the board of directors for Safer DIY Spaces and Soundwave SF. She is also a certified mediator and much of her multimedia work centers on familial healing, transformative justice, accountability, and the investigation of interpersonal harm.

This event is supported in part by Poets & Writers.