I believe that it is through living deeply and building with others, that transformative art is made.

I love to help create spaces that nourish and reflect the freedom and truths envisioned by queer artists and artists of color.

In my arts organizing, I center the ideas and practices of liberation, abolition, decolonialization, collectivism, people power, and anti-capitalism.

Photo by Eric Ananmalay

SELECT EVENTS I HAVE CO/ORGANIZED

2024

Trust the Tides, Visual Art Group Exhibition, July 20 - August 17, 2024
As part of the inaugural AVA Lab cohort at Kearny Street Workshop, co-organized by and featuring Houyee Chow-Jiménez, Michelle Lin, Kim Requesto, Malaya Tuyay, Ngân Vũ, and Jes Young. As diasporic artists and settlers on Turtle Island, how do we rebuild bridges to ancestry, lineage, and cultural traditions displaced by war and imperialism? Through altars, weavings, photographs, portals, and paintings, we invite you to “Trust the Tides” with us–whether the waters be the ebb and flow of our many griefs and healing, or the undeniable current of liberation. Join us in uplifting the stories that have been stolen or silenced, and engage with art as a ritual for collective care.

2023

Artist Mentorship Hub for Emerging Immigrant, Refugee, Diasporic Artists of Color, August 11 - 13, 2023
Through ARTogether, in collaboration with Sabina Kariat. The Artist Mentorship Hub is a 3-day program for 1st/2nd generation emerging immigrant and refugee artists in the Bay Area who desire to deepen their artistic practices. The program centers abundance, intentional relationships, collective power building, and peer connection while providing mentorship, guidance, and professional development led by local, BIPOC artists and art professionals established in the field. Participants reflected on their own journeys as artists thus far, identifying their goals and needs, and grounding their values and wishes. Each day included creative exercises, group workshops, and individual coaching sessions. The Mentorship Hub aims to bring the lived experiences and wisdom of immigrant, refugee, BIPOC, and queer artists to the forefront of “professional development,” understanding that identities are so inextricably woven into arts and cultural work that they can not even be separated from the beginning. The program strives to provide guiding tools and frameworks that are applicable to their careers as diasporic artists, curriculum and praxis that considers the barriers, wounds, and gaps that may otherwise be unaddressed in white dominant spaces.

2021

APAture 2021: Embrace, October 23 - November 14, 2021
Served as Festival Coordinator for Kearny Street Workshop’s annual multidisciplinary arts festival for emerging Asian Pacific American artists. As we navigate a global pandemic and keep each other safe, we're reimagining what intimacy and closeness means as artists and fellow community members. How do we come together now, in radical care? What do we hold close in our lives and in our art? What do we embrace as you step into your artistic power? 35 local Asian Pacific American artists explore these questions through visual and literary art, performance, music, and film.

Seeds Bursting Open in Fire: A Poetry & Justice Catalyst Event, October 6, 2021
Organized with poet Tamiko Beyer also feat. Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Gabrielle Civil, Jasmine Butler, Lisa Doi. An evening of poetry, collective writing, and dreaming to inspire and activate artists and organizers. Poets Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Gabrielle Civil, and Tamiko Beyer read from new works while community organizers Jasmine Butler (Power Shift Network) and Lisa Doi (Tsuru for Solidarity) present about abolition, racial, and climate justice work. Movement activities for healing and activation by Chanon Judson, Artistic Director of Urban Bush Women.

“Mother Tongue Apologize,” August 7, 2021
Through Kearny Street Workshop, feat. Preeti Vangani, Jenny Qi, Lucie Pereira, antmen pimental mendoza, Angela Kong. Celebrating Preeti Vangani’s debut collection of poetry, Mother Tongue Apologize, and Jenny Qi’s forthcoming debut, Focal Point. This was a reading exploring familial loss, grief, daughterhood, and the empowerment of women.

2020

“The Stories the Body Knows,” at Lit Crawl Global 2020, October 24, 2020
Curated with fellow Kundiman NorCal Regional Co-Chair Ploi Pirapokin. A reading featuring Shruti Swamy, Seema Yasmin, Lis P. Sipin-Gabon, and Muriel Leung as they share works navigating intergenerational trauma and inheritance, learning how to love, and knowing how to trust the body and feelings.

Monica Sok and Aria Aber as part of the United States of Asian American Festival, June 13, 2020
Through Kearny Street Workshop, feat. Monica Sok, Aria Aber, and Kohinoorgasm. Award-winning poets and children of refugees, their books explore the impact of inherited wars—Aber, through interrogating historical and personal implications of Afghan American relations, and Sok, through myth- and memory-making of Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge regime. As an Asian American community, many of us come together bearing the scars of violence, but our kinship ties are not based in this violence. Instead, they are based in love and recognition, in knowing the way our histories are informed by US imperialism and Cold War-era regimes. Our kinship is built on offering one another the lifelines we need to persist and thrive—because of this violence, despite this violence.

“The Cities in Which I Love You” as part of Baysia Festival, April 3, 2020
Through Kearny Street Workshop, feat. KIN, Colin Masashi Ehara, Janice Sapigao,  Audrey T. Williams, and Michelle “Mush” Lee. Celebrating the strength of our Bay Area Asian American communities, our love for our cities, and the ways in which we fight for and nourish each other.

Presenting Meng Jin and Mimi Lok, Feb 7, 2020
Through Kearny Street Workshop, feat. Meng Jin, Mimi Lok, Lia Dunn, C.E. Shue, Sheri Park, Grace Li, Rowena Singer, Melissa Hung, and Emily Yamauchi. Celebrating Meng Jon and Mimi Lok’s books, powerful stories about Asian women that bend time and place in their journeys to seek answers and connection in the aftermath of grief, displacement, and diaspora.

2019

“A History of Our Naming,” Nov 22, 2019
Through Kearny Street Workshop, feat. Michelle Peñaloza, Đỗ Nguyên Mai, Antmen Pimentel Mendoza, Dena Rod, Kara Kai Wang, Juliana Chang, Renee Ya, Alison Wu, and Lauren Ito. Celebrating new collections by Michelle Peñaloza and Đỗ Nguyên Mai that ask us to look at—and not away—from the histories, hauntings, and presences of colonialism, conquest, and imperialism. These poets find power in the work of gathering fragments and fractures, and in what emerges from this naming for their families, for their communities, and for themselves.

“Com/Promised Land,” at San Francisco Lit Crawl, October 19, 2019
Curated with fellow Kundiman NorCal Regional Co-Chair Ploi Pirapokin. Featuring Angie Sijun Liu, Meng Jin, Dan Lau, and Susanna Kwan reading works that examine and trouble the notions and systems of immigration, assimilation, and success—and offer new narratives and possibilities for thriving.

“Importance of Being Wilde at Heart,” Sep 27, 2019
Through Kearny Street Workshop, feat. Danny Thanh Nguyen, R. Zamora Linmark, Anthony Bongco, Andrew Yeung, Claire Calderón, and Gustavo Barahona-López. The official Bay Area book release of Linmark’s new novel, a tender and quirky story of seventeen-year-old Ken Z’s journey through first love and first heartbreak that grapples with issues of bullying, coming out, censorship, empire, and militarism. Additionally, we’ll be celebrating Danny Thanh Nguyen’s work exploring the parallels of survival between Southeast Asian American refugee communities and queer leather communities in a post-AIDS epidemic era. What are the many ways we come out, and come together, as queer Asian American and POC writers and artists? What is the place of queerness under empire?

“Monsters I Have Been,” July 26, 2019 
Through Kearny Street Workshop, feat. Kenji Liu, MT Vallarta, Sagaree Jain, Marianna Ilagan, Izzie Villanueva, and Alyssa Manansala. Exploring the many possibilities of our relationships to gender and gendering, and to reimagine ways of being in gender and being of gender, so that we can create space for ourselves in the world.

"Even Still" as part of the United States of Asian American Festival, May 24, 2019
Through Kearny Street Workshop, feat. Grace Shuyi Liew, Vidhu Aggarwal, Preeti Vangani, Ryan Ikeda, Lis P. Sipin-Gabon, and Khartik Sethuraman. A reading and conversation with Grace Shuyi Liew, author of the poetry collection Careen, and Vidhu Aggarwal, author of the poetry collections AVATARA and The Trouble with Humpadori, that summons, queers, resists, and disturbs the violence of colonialism and gendered violence.

"From the God-Shaped Hole”, March 22, 2019
Through Kearny Street Workshop, feat. Lee Herrick, R. O. Kwon, Minyoung Lee, Renee Ya, and Ravi Chandra. A reading and conversation with Lee Herrick, author of the poetry collection Scar and Flower, and R. O. Kwon, author of the novel The Incendiaries that examined  grief, loss, violence—the impact of trauma—and what we are capable of doing when trying to make sense of it.

2018

Duy Doan’s WE PLAY A GAME West Coast Book Tour, Dec 2, 6, & 8
Events in Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Fresno, California, feat. Duy Doan, Lee Herrick, Kazumi Chin, F. Douglas Brown, Kenji C. Liu, Jason Bayani, Dan Lau.

"A Climb That Begins With Falling," Nov 30, 2018
Through Kearny Street Workshop, feat. Duy Doan, Angie Sijun Lou, Michelle Phương Ting, Manami Diaz Tsuzuki, Christine No, Amy Lam, Jen Soong, and Taeyin ChoGlueck. Celebrating Duy Doan’s new book WE PLAY A GAME, winner of the 2017 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. This reading explored what it means to climb and to fall: to fall back to our lines that came before, to our mothers, to our histories that bear repeating. And to climb into to all those sites and events that inform who we are today, with an eye towards structures of migration, memory, gender, and language. 

"All This Wreckage, In Your Own Language,” Sep 28, 2018
Through Kearny Street Workshop, feat. Elaine Castillo, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Celeste Chan, Mae Summer, Marian Urquilla, and Veronica Montes. Celebrating Elaine Castillo, author of America Is Not the Heart, and Ingrid Rojas Contreras, author of Fruit of the Drunken Tree — giving language to the stories and wreckages of war and violence, colonialism and dictatorship, immigration and refuge, family, desperation, and the decisions one makes towards a kind of survival.

“Mourn You Better: Feelings from the Queer Taiwanese & Chinese Diaspora,” July 27, 2018
Through Kearny Street Workshop, feat. Kristin Chang, Chen Chen, Yujane Chen, and Muriel Leung reading poems that trace queer immigrant landscapes of longing, loss, histories, futures, and desire. 

"I'm Here to Do Everything But Fall In Love," May 18, 2018
Through Kearny Street Workshop, feat. Lisa D. Gray, Kirin Khan, Ploi Pirapokin, and Jasmine H. Wade, Black and Asian writers sharing works that explore love for their partners, lovers, communities, and themselves—in relationship to racism, intra-racism, colorism, and alienation. 

2017-16

Moving Toward Our Selves: Tai Chi & Writing Workshop, May 27, 2017
For the United States of Asian American Festival, at he San Francisco Public Library, with Kazumi Chin and Sifu Ahmad Moghadam of Shyun Style 8 Step Praying Mantis. Cultivating resilience through mindfulness through tai chi meditation and walking practices with creative writing. Participants learned ro listen closely to their voices and bodies through communal acts of radical self-care; wrote and moved toward them selves and each other, with each other, through collaborative art-making. Tai chi and writing as communal acts, placemaking acts. The workshop affirmed existences, identities, and ove for one another.

Maps, Craters and Throats: Disrupting Colonial Memory, April 29, 2017
Featured event at LitHop in Fresno with Vickie Vertiz, Kenji C. Liu, and Kazumi Chin. To maintain its power, the colonial order must continually justify its own existence, by remembering what it must, and forgetting what it must. It remembers: benevolence, charity, state aid. It forgets: genocide, displacement, exploitation. But resistance cannot simply remember what has been forgotten. This poetry reading of new works marks memory not as addendum, but interruption. Not perspective, but disruption. We create not just alternative narratives, but also fracturings, through language, of colonial justification as it persists in the government, family, identity, body, and poetry.

House of Godzilla, Rare Birds & Further Possibilities, March 10, 2017
An interactive workshop and reading in Chinatown, LA with Chen Chen, Kazumi Chin, and Shelley Wong that explores how we all might, through language, build a house that exceeds containment and disrupts binaries: dream/waking; beast/familiar; past/to come, and always with further possibilities.

House of Godzilla: Collaborative Film Performance, Spring 2017
Two live performances with Kazumi Chin at Kearny Street Workshop and Stanford University fusing poetry with film to explore how a house of language may be built to exceed containment, transcend borders, and disrupt binaries. We will shape, together, what it means to be in relation to intersectional identities and languages, and move toward a radical new imagining of home. Our house exists in its being built. It is not one we belong to, but one we work toward.

APAture Festivals “Unravel” and “Here”, Fall 2017 & 2016
Headed the Literary Arts subcommittee for two years to curate and organize Kearny Street Workshop’s annual multidisciplinary arts festival for emerging APA artists in the Bay Area, particularly the Literary Arts showcases. Festival featured writers Vanessa Hua, Jade Cho, Preeti Vangani, Celeste Chan, Alyssa Manansala, Christine No, Janice Sapigao, Keven Quach, Yujane Chen, Emily Yamauchi, Bel Poblador, Chang Woo Seo, Jazelle Jajeh, Laura Jew, Shivani Narang, Steve Fujimura, Susan Calvillo, and Z.M. Quynh.