Join me for the virtual launch of Tram Editions' second chapbook, Weren't We Natural Swimmers!
I’ll read selections from my new chapbook, and special guests Priscilla Wathington, Cynthia Hogue, and Ching-In Chen will read their poems too!
About Our Readers:
Aliah Lavonne Tigh is the author of Weren’t We Natural Swimmers, a 2022 chapbook with Tram Editions out now, and her poems have appeared in Guernica, The Texas Review, Matter Monthly, The Rupture, and others. Tigh has joined other writers for the Tin House Summer Workshop, read for Houston’s Poison Pen Reading Series and Hess Reading Series, contributed work for a Gulf Coast Journal and Texas Contemporary ekphrastic collaboration and was a grateful Recipient of Idyllwild Arts’ 2017 Bentley-Buckman Writing Fellowship. She holds poetry and philosophy degrees from the University of Houston and an MFA from Antioch Los Angeles. Tigh lives in Houston, Texas.
Ching-In Chen is the author of The Heart's Traffic: a novel in poems and recombinant (2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry winner) as well as chapbooks to make black paper sing and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Leslie Scalapino Finalist). Chen is co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities and currently a core member of the Massage Parlor Outreach Project. They have received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Can Serrat, Imagining America and Jack Straw Cultural Center. They currently teach at University of Washington Bothell in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and the MFA program in Creative Writing and Poetics.
Priscilla Wathington is a Palestinian American writer and editor. Her debut poetry chapbook, PAPER AND STICK (Tram Editions / 2021), scrutinizes Israel’s militarized attempts to constrict Palestinian bodies and breath. Her poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, Michigan Quarterly Review, Salamander, and The Normal School, among others. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and sits on the board of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI)
Cynthia Hogue’s most recent collections are Revenance, listed as one of the 2014 “Standout” books by the Academy of American Poets, and In June the Labyrinth (2017). Her tenth collection, instead, it is dark, will be out from Red Hen Press in 2023. Her third book-length translation (with Sylvain Gallais) is Nicole Brossard’s Distantly (Omnidawn 2022). Hogue’s forthcoming chapbook is entitled Contain (Tram Editions 2022). Among her honors are a Fulbright Fellowship to Iceland, two NEA Fellowships, and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets (2013). She lives in Tucson.