UPDATE: This event has been cancelled.

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Join us for a reading and conversation between Monica Sok and Kimarlee Nguyen, who will explore desire as a form of defiance. What does it mean to make room for desire within narratives of survival? How do dreams inhabit our characters and personas? Who is allowed the privilege of dreaming? These writers will discuss the possibilities of writing toward wholeness. Sok will read from her debut poetry collection, A Nail the Evening Hangs On, and Nguyen will read from her novel in progress.

KIMARLEE NGUYEN spends an inordinate amount of time trying to find new ways to make essay-writing fun for fourteen-year olds in her work as a full-time English teacher at The Brooklyn Latin School. The rest of her free time is devoted to writing her first novel. A recent graduate of Long Island University’s MFA program, Kimarlee’s fiction has appeared in PANK, Hyphen Magazine and The Adroit Journal, among others. She has been selected as a 2018-19 Emerging Writer Fellow by the Center for Fiction and has been awarded fellowships from VONA/Voices, The Fine Arts Work Center, The Key West Literary Seminar, the Anderson Center at Towerview and Tofte Lake Center.

MONICA SOK is a Cambodian American poet and the daughter of former refugees. She is the author of A Nail the Evening Hangs On (Copper Canyon Press, 2020). Her work has been recognized with a “Discovery” Prize from 92Y. She has received fellowships and residencies from Poetry Society of America, Hedgebrook, Elizabeth George Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Kundiman, Jerome Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Saltonstall Foundation, and others. Currently, Sok is a 2018-2020 Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and has taught poetry to Southeast Asian youths at Banteay Srei and the Center for Empowering Refugees and Immigrants in Oakland. She is originally from Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

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