This event highlighting modern Burmese poetry will include a special focus on works from Maw Shein Win's new poetry collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House, recently published by Omnidawn.

About the speakers:

• Maw Shein Win is a writer and editor based in the Bay Area. Her earlier full-length poetry collection Invisible Gifts: Poems was published by Manic D Press in 2018. Win was the first poet laureate of El Cerrito from 2016 to 2018. She was a Visiting Scholar in the Department of English at UC Berkeley in 2019 and a Lead Artist on the University of California Critical Refugee Studies Collective Project artographies: in other words/worlds.

• ko ko thett is a poet, translator and editor. Born in Yangon in 1972, he is the Burmese editor for the Poetry International website and co-editor and translator of Bones Will Crow: 15 Contemporary Burmese Poets, an anthology of Burmese poetry and the recipient of the 2012 English PEN Writers in Translation Programme Award. He is also the author of The Burden of Being Burmese (Zephyr, 2015), a book of poems.

• Qiao Dai is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of South & Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley who is conducting research on traditional Burmese folk tales and religious practices. She has an M.A. in Asian Studies from Cornell University.

• Moderator: Penny Edwards is Associate Professor of South & Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley. She is senior guest editor (with ko ko thett and Kenneth Wong) of a forthcoming volume of Mano’a: A Pacific Journal of International Writing, published by the University of Hawai’i Press, focused on Burma/Myanmar. From 2017-2019 she directed the Critical Refugee Studies Collective Project, artographies: in other words/worlds and the 2019 performance "No Place Like Home."

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