Experimental Feminist Poetics Since 1974
Mihee Kim, winner of the QTBIPOC Contest, will read with Aja Couchois Duncan, Truong Tran and Jean Day at Small Press Traffic on December 3, 2021 at 7pm PST. The reading is Celebrating the release of two new books by Bay Area poets Aja Couchois Duncan (Vestigial, Litmus Press) and Truong Tran (Book of the Other, Kaya Press).
To attend the event in person at The Lab, RSVP with Small Press Traffic. The event will be live streamed and then archived at SPT's YouTube channel.
Mihee Kim's Nomenclature has been selected as the winner of Kelsey Street Press's inaugural QTBIPOC Book Contest, a free contest open to QTBIPOC-identified poets. Mihee's winning manuscript was chosen by juror Metta Sáma, author of Swing at your own risk (Kelsey Street Press, 2019), out of a submission pool of 120 manuscripts.
Sáma says of Nomenclature: "the line holds power in these poems; the impulse is the story; the stylistic experiment is about the shape of story, the complicity of language in building story through shape, through prose."
The contest provides publication along with a $1,000 cash award. Ching-In Chen, winner of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Best Transgender Poetry for recombinant (Kelsey Street Press, 2017), will serve as editor along with a Kelsey Street Press collective member.
Mihee Kim is a writer, visual artist, and cultural organizer. She works intuitively across disciplines and traditions, foraying between writing, multi-modal collage, painting, and craft forms. Her writing has been nominated for Best of the Net, a Pushcart Prize, and her manuscript Nomenclature was named a finalist for the Bergman Prize. She earned a BA from UC Berkeley and an MFA at California College of the Arts, where she was awarded the Leslie Scalapino Award. Mihee is also managing director of Kearny Street Workshop, a longstanding arts nonprofit for Asian Pacific Americans. She creates on Chochenyo Ohlone land, also known as beloved Oakland, California. See more of Mihee’s work here: https://www.MiheeKim.art/
Thank you to all who submitted to the prize, and congratulations to the finalists: jayy dodd, Jai Dulani, Vuyelwa Malulek, Ansley Moon, Maggie Rhee, and Ximena Keogh Serrano.
Photo credit: Neha Deshmukh @whatthewatergivesme
By Rena Rosenwasser Co-founder of Kelsey Street Press
My own connection to Etel, where to begin, perhaps the late eighties when I first met her and her partner Simone Fattal. The event was a Kelsey Street Press fundraiser, in those days we called them salons. They came to my house where Barbara Guest was to have a conversation with Kathleen Fraser.
Simone and Etel had already started The Post-Apollo Press in Sausalito where they resided.
When I met them at the Kelsey Street event, this glorious couple shone, albeit amongst a throng of Guest and Fraser fans. Within weeks Etel invited Barbara and myself over to her place to share a cake. I soon found that Etel and I shared not only a love of art, literature, and film but also patisserie.
When I think of Etel my impression is of a sage who offered us through writing and later art much to contemplate. She was a visionary who saw the brutality of the world up close, and took it to other dimensions with her volumes, Sitt Marie Rose (Post-Apollo Press, 1982), and The Arab Apocalypse (Post-Apollo Press, 2007).
Over the next twenty-five years the friendship between Simone and Etel and my spouse Penny and I grew. How we regaled each other over dinners at Sushi Ran and Chez Panisse! If not dining, how we measured the years with our convergences—events, mostly poetry, but also art and film. Two curious couples, coupled as all four of us were for a lifetime. Positioned as queer, outside the norms, but always on the side of art.
Etel and Simone eventually departed California for their residence on Rue Mme in Paris. They were living there when Etel offered Kelsey Street Press her manuscript, Premonition (2014). Written when she was well into her eighties, her voice shimmered, inviting us into her wise and paradoxical musings, opening with the observation, “There’s always a conductive thread through space for untenable positions.” Now, with the book in my hands, I feel aloft with Etel.
View Premonition by Etel Adnan