August news & events

Dear friends, it’s been a busy month, and I wanted to share some updates!

Upcoming events:

• On Friday, August 27th at 6pm PST, I’ll be reading with my friend Preeti at KSW Presents Preeti Vangani with Jenny Qi. The event is fully virtual. Click on the link to learn more and sign up to read with us!

Publications & features:

• Frontier Poetry’s Jose Hernandez Diaz featured my poem “What Grows in the Desert” in their roundup of “exceptional poetry from around the web.” This poem appears in my forthcoming collection Focal Point, and you can read the full poem at SWWIM here.
• As mentioned in a previous post, my poem “Postcards from the Living” was published in The Atlantic—a dream! This poem also appears in Focal Point.
• New work alert: “This is an instagram poem” will be in issue 52 of The Racket.

Reviews of Focal Point:

• Handwritten & Co., a literary magazine based in South Asia, kindly reviewed Focal Point and included two poems from the book, “Point At Which Parallel Waves Converge & From Which Diverge,” originally published in Tin House, and “Writing Elegies Like Robert Hass,” originally published in The Intima.
• Bookstagrammer @bookshelf.blooms wrote a really nice review of Focal Point here, as well as on Goodreads.

Other book news:

• Focal Point is once again the #1 New Release in Asian American Poetry on Amazon. Thanks to everyone for supporting!
• Earlier in the month, I received my physical books and made an unboxing video (and quite possibly my first video ever), which you can watch here.
• I’ve unveiled all of my blurbs, and you can read all of these kind and generous words on my social media or my book page. You can also navigate to my book page to find pre-order links & other information about Focal Point.
• I made a graphic (see below) on how to support authors, based on a post by Tin House friend and fellow debut poet Susan Nguyen, author of Dear Diaspora. Feel free to use this, but please credit both of us. Here is Susan’s original, prettier post!
• I’ve been doing the Sealey Challenge this year and reading one collection of poems each day in August. Follow along with my Instagram stories or on Twitter, & I’ll also probably post a roundup of all of the books I’ve read at the end of the month!