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AAPI Heritage Month Author Reading and Community Celebration with APANO
Literary Arts and APANO are so excited to invite four incredible writers to read from their work and celebrate community during AAPI Heritage Month. Light refreshments will be served, and community building is encouraged! Bring a friend, make a friend, and absorb some wonderful stories.
About AAPI Heritage Month
In the month of May we take time to reflect and celebrate the important role that Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders (AANHPIs) have played in our shared history. Explore Smithsonian events happening online and in-person and find resources, podcasts, and collection items to learn more about AANHPI contributions. – Smithsonian
About APANO
APANO unites Asians to build power, develop leaders, and advance equity through organizing, advocacy, community development and cultural work. We envision a just world where Asians and communities who share our aspirations and struggles have the power, resources, and voice to determine our own futures, and where we work in solidarity to drive political, social, economic, and cultural change.
Ching-In Chen
Ching-In Chen is a genderqueer Chinese American hybrid writer, community organizer and teacher. They are author of The Heart's Traffic 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 Award Finalist). Chen is also co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities and Here Is a Pen: an Anthology of West Coast Kundiman Poets. They have received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat, Imagining America and Jack Straw Cultural Center. www.chinginchen.com
Kalehua Kim
Kalehua Kim is a Native Hawaiian poet living in the Pacific Northwest. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Denver Quarterly, and ‘Ōiwi, A Native Hawaiian Journal. Her first poetry collection, Mele, is forthcoming from Trio House Press in July, 2025. You can find her online at kalehuakim.com or @kalekim on Bluesky.
Amy Lam
Pronouns: she/her
Amy Lam is a writer and editor based in Portland, Oregon. She is a Kundiman fellow and received an MFA from the University of Mississippi, where she was the John and Renee Grisham Fellow. She was formerly the deputy editor at diaCRITICS, exploring arts and culture of Vietnamese and Southeast Asian diaspora. She had been a contributing editor and cohost of Backtalk podcast at Bitch Media, and editorial lead at On She Goes sharing the world of women of color and travel. She has been awarded support from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Fine Arts Work Center, Napa Valley Writers’ Conference; artist residencies at Hedgebrook, Mineral Arts, Djerassi, and Loghaven; and was an alumna of the Tin House Summer Workshop. She has led presentations and spoken at Portland Book Festival, Literary Arts, Lit Crawl, and AWP. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Gay Mag, Indiana Review, and Pacifica Literary Review.
Ami Patel
Ami Patel (she/her) is a 2023/2024 IPRC re/source resident and a 2024 Oregon Literary Fellow in Poetry. Ami's prints and poetry were a part of the 2025 MAC Gallery exhibit "Shift Work." Her poems can be found online and in print, including Beloit Poetry Journal, Tinderbox, and the anthology We The Gathered Heat: Asian American Pacific Islander Poetry, Performance, and Spoken Word. You can find her at amipatelwrites.com.
