Writers Guild Spoken Word Series

Sponsored in part by the Indiana Arts Commission, Bloomington Arts Commission, and the Bloomington Urban Enterprise Association

ANNI LIU is a writer, editor, and translator with work featured in Ploughshares, Ecotone, the Georgia Review, Two Lines, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Indiana University and works at Graywolf Press. Winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Prize from Persea Books, her first book will be published in 2022.

DAVID MURA’s newest book is A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity & Narrative Craft in Writing. He has written four books of poetry: The Last Incantations, Angels for the Burning, The Colors of Desire (Carl Sandburg Award), and After We Lost Our Way (National Poetry Contest winner). His two memoirs are: Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and Oakland PEN Josephine Miles Book Award) and Where the Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality, and Identity. His novel, Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire, was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award, the John Gardner Fiction Prize and Virginia Commonwealth University Cabell First Novelist Award. He is finishing a book of essays on race and a book of essays on Asian American identity. Mura has taught at the VONA Writers’ Conference, the Stonecoast MFA program, the U. of Oregon, the U. of Minnesota, St. Olaf College, and Hamline University. He has worked as Director of Training for the Innocent Classroom, a program designed by writer and educator Alexs Pate to train K-12 teachers to improve their relationships with students of color. He helped start the Twin Cities community arts organization, The Asian American Renaissance, and served as its artistic director.

DANNY THANH NGUYEN (they/she/he equally) has published stories and personal essays in The Offing, The Journal, Gulf Coast, Foglifter, and elsewhere. They have been awarded fellowships and grants from Ragdale Foundation, Lambda Literary, Kundiman, and San Francisco Arts Commission. Her column on BDSM/kink culture appears in the international fetish social network platform Recon and is translated into five languages. Follow him on social media: @engrishlessons.

KYOKO KITAMURA is a vocal improviser, bandleader, and composer based in Brooklyn. She leads her ensemble Tidepool Fauna (featuring saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, bassist Ken Filiano and drummer Dayeon Seok), co-leads Geometry (with Taylor Ho Bynum, Joe Morris, Tomeka Reid), and is an active side person with recent appearances on albums by William Parker, Cory Smythe, and Russ Lossing, for which she has garnered stellar reviews. Kitamura is also known for her decade-long association with musician and composer Anthony Braxton and is featured on many of his releases including GTM (Syntax) 2017, the 12-hour recording of his vocal works performed by the Tri-Centric Vocal Ensemble which she directed and co-produced, as well as his operas Trillium E and Trillium J. Separate from her music career, Kitamura is also a media professional. She was a reporter for Fuji Television Japan and was their Paris news correspondent, did a stint as a Gulf War reporter in Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and also wrote for numerous magazines. Between 2010 and 2019, she was the Director of Communications for the Tri-Centric Foundation, Anthony Braxton’s nonprofit organization, and then the Executive Director of the same organization until April 2021. Kyoko studied piano at Juilliard Pre-College with Ms. Jane Carlson, and privately studied counterpoint and Schoenberg harmony with Mr. Paul Caputo.