The O.B. Hardison Poetry series, in partnership with co-sponsor, The Emily Dickinson Museum, hosts its annual celebration of Emily Dickinson with a reading by the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Lifetime Achievement Award winner Kimiko Hahn. Hahn is the author of ten collections of poetry, including The Ghost Forest: New & Selected Poems. From the political to the personal, and from science to the journals of Matsuo Bashō, the celebrated Haiku poet of Japan, Hahn brings a lyrical gaze to all these subjects and more. Poet and civil rights lawyer Sunu Chandy moderates the post-reading conversation with a book selling and signing to follow the reading.
Many books foster empathy. Some cross into advocacy and activism. What’s different about writing and promoting books of purpose? How can we steward our messages with accountability and integrity? Panelists, representing a range of disciplines and lived experiences, will detail the role advocacy plays in their written work and related events and describe how they strive to ensure that their books are helpful and sensitive to the communities and causes they’re writing about. With Co-Presenters: Jody Hobbs Hesler, Christine Maul Rice, and Jeffrey Dale, and moderator, Viet Dinh
In this poetry collection, Sunu P. Chandy includes stories about her experiences as a woman, civil rights attorney, parent, partner, daughter of South Asian immigrants, and member of the LGBTQ+ community. These poems cover themes ranging from immigration, social justice activism, friendship loss, fertility challenges, adoption, caregiving, and life during a pandemic. Sunu’s poems provide some resolve, some peace, some community, amidst the competing notions of how we are expected to be in the world, especially when facing a range of barriers. Sunu’s poems provide company for many who may be experiencing isolation through any one of these experiences and remind us that we are not, in fact, going it alone. Whether the experience is being disregarded as a woman of color attorney, being rejected for being queer, losing a most treasured friendship, doubting one’s romantic partner or any other form of heartbreak, Sunu’s poems highlight the human requirement of continually starting anew. These poems remind us that we can, and we will, collectively rebuild.
Sunu P. Chandy (she/her) is a social justice activist including through her work as a poet and a civil rights attorney. She’s the daughter of immigrants from Kerala, India, a queer woman of color, and lives in Washington, D.C. with her family. Her award-winning collection of poems, My Dear Comrades, was published by Regal House. Sunu’s creative work can also be found in Asian American Literary Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Poets on Adoption, Split this Rock’s online social justice database, The Quarry, and in anthologies including The Penguin Book of Indian Poets, The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood and This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation. Sunu is a civil rights attorney and currently a Senior Advisor with Democracy Forward. There she supports work across the teams including, fighting back against the attacks on equity and inclusion. Sunu started out as a union-side labor and employment lawyer in NYC, and has worked for many years as a civil rights attorney, including as a litigator with EEOC for 15 years. She has also served as General Counsel for the DC Office of Human Rights (OHR), and as Deputy Director for Civil Rights at the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Sunu was also the Legal Director of the National Women’s Law Center for six years until August 2023. Sunu earned her B.A. in Peace and Global Studies/Women’s Studies from Earlham College, her law degree from Northeastern University School of Law and her MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Queens College/The City University of New York in 2013. Sunu is on the board of the Transgender Law Center, and was included as one the Washington Blade’s Queer Women of Washington and one of Go Magazine’s 100 Women We Love. Sunu is delighted to celebrate her collection of poetry, My Dear Comrades, with you and with the book's fabulous cover artist, Ragni Agarwal.
The longer story of how this book came about is linked here. In addition to the many mentors and organizations listed in the story, gratitude goes out to Leila Chatti, for leading a “Praise in Hard Times” virtual poetry class in June 2020 through the Provincetown Fine Arts Center. Remarkably, six of the poems in this collection began as responses to prompts from these early-days-of-the-pandemic assignments.
Author, Poet, and Activist: Sunu Chandy - November 2, 2021
In this episode host Emily McGranachan and co-host Dakota Fine meet with Sunu Chandy and discuss her book of poetry My Dear Comrades. On the pod, Sunu reads three poems and gives careful thought to her work and life as a lawyer, mom, wife, daughter, and outspoken member of the LGBTQ+ community. We discuss: being the child of immigrants, fertility issues, adoption, misassumptions about identity, and being a parent and a caretaker.
“Sunu Chandy’s My Dear Comrades thrives in that charged space in which politics and personal story connect. Here, each experience pulls the weight of its complicated history; each observation is viewed through the lens of a social justice warrior, but also through a guide leading us toward enlightenment and empathy. Chandy’s poems burst with an empowering energy that’s unshakable, unstoppable.” - Rigoberto González, author of five poetry collections including The Book of Ruin
“In Sunu Chandy’s My Dear Comrades, she turns her exquisite attention toward everyday rituals of violence, indoctrination, and subjugation. Over and over, she interrogates some of our most-metabolized rituals, denying them the safety of invisibility, as when she writes: ‘Years later, during the middle of law school, I learned this rule by observation: We must stand when the judge enters the courtroom.’ And then later: ‘In that moment I learned much of what I needed to know about the law.’ At the heart of her refusal is a poetics and an ethics of discipline, tenderness, and attention that reminds me of the work of Martín Espada and Audre Lorde. My Dear Comrades is a stunningly lucid and deeply personal work about law and power, race and queerness. Love.” - Aracelis Girmay, author of the black maria and Kingdom Animalia
"At the foundation of My Dear Comrades is a belief in the strength of community, whether that is intimate family, a wider chosen community or a geographically determined ‘general public.’ Each kind of community deserves--requires--the same kind of care. The attentions these poems give is indeed intimate but their intention and embrace is wide and public. Sunu Chandy is a generous poet, wise and willful and fierce and kind." - Kazim Ali, author of several books including most recently, The Voice of Sheila Chandra and Northern Light
“Sunu Chandy’s debut collection My Dear Comrades is a love letter to the creation of community, queer family building, and fighting against injustice. In language that both challenges and consoles, Chandy investigates, as in the poem ‘Calculate,’ ‘[w]ords that can build us / up or tear us to shreds…’ This book looks closely at language, questioning who owns it, who silences it, and what silence protects. Chandy asks: how do we repair our broken world? And the poems answer, in a brilliant call for social justice, workers’ rights, new constructions of family and most of all, deep compassion.” - Nicole Cooley, author of Breach, Girl After Girl After Girl, and Of Marriage
“Sunu Chandy's poems are miniature stories: sensual flashes, immersive scenes in which whole lives are glimpsed and revealed. Flatbush, Jerusalem, Kingston, Kerala, and more: In close quarters and intimate spaces, the speaker of the poem sits on the floor or breaks bread while keenly observing how power moves through and within the people she encounters. Rituals of justice and resistance wend their way through moments of grief and care. The book is wide-ranging in its subjects, but ultimately it is family, given and chosen, that forms the tender, beating heart of this beautiful collection.” - Minal Hajratwala, author of Leaving India: My Family’s Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents and Bountiful Instructions for Enlightenment; Founder of Camp Unicorn
“From the love underpinning LGBQT adoption to the struggles of immigration, this lyrically inclusive and politically unifying debut collection makes the best and most beautiful argument toward belonging.” - Roger Sedarat, author of Ghazal Games and Haji as Puppet: an Orientalist Burlesque
“My Dear Comrades lives at the intersection of the personal and the political. Fearlessly, with candor and grace, these poems bear witness, shatter oppressive silences, and call injustice by its many names. At the same time, they acknowledge the complicated matrices that make us human—our relationships, desires, the gnarled pathways of the heart. Bracing and compassionate, fortifying and vulnerable, Chandy debuts here as a necessary voice that reminds us: ‘Remember integrity. / Remember what is at stake.’” - Lauren K. Alleyne, author of Difficult Fruit and Honeyfish
”My Dear Comrades is a collection of fierce hymns to guide us through those daily atrocities, that seem benign, yet haunt us. Chandy profoundly feels every blow of social injustice, and rather than rage, Chandy hurls sharp wit, pristine imagery, and a cinematic brilliance that takes you through her journey as an immigrant daughter, wife, mother & activist. Chandy shows us how taking in the hard truths in our urbane dailiness crafted with profound self-reflection and metaphor can result in the gorgeous act of rebuilding the human soul. As we navigate our identity in an unprecedented 21st-century global crisis, Chandy shows us that poetry can hold us up.” - Regie Cabico, Split This Rock co-Founder, Poet, Capturing Fire Publisher
“Sunu Chandy’s My Dear Comrades considers the multiple boundaries and borders that the poet crosses into justice: political, social, and the deeply interior. In sure language Chandy shows her own path towards her personal ethics as a mother, a queer daughter, an activated empath searching for a deep love that transforms as it creates community. I have been thirsty for a poetry that demonstrates fierce allyship and what it means for queers of color living in the United States. My Dear Comrades is a map into the heart’s country that abolished borders. Indeed, this collection proceeds from a damaged and flawed world and forges a complicated, abounding beauty.” - Rajiv Mohabir, author of Cutlish and Antiman: A Hybrid Memoir
”Sunu Chandy's poems are evocations of how we build bonds and resemblance, how we live in community, how we work towards justice. With courage and commitment, My Dear Comrades breaks open the details of life -- queer romance, city living, family gatherings, adoption processes, legal document review -- to investigate the possibilities and power of practices of repair, rebuilding, forgiveness, compassion, and justice. These poems are rituals of rearrangement: Chandy shows us how to build and rebuild relationships, cities, gender, labor, and our relationships to ourselves so that we can collectively offer a ‘footstep/towards something possible.’ My Dear Comrades is an invitation into community, into possibility, into the work of justice.” - Purvi Shah, author of Miracle Marks and Terrain Tracks
“To read Sunu Chandy’s My Dear Comrades is to participate in a revelation. Through details of chai and military tanks, peppermint soap and broken doorknobs, the poems in Chandy’s collection remind us that the smallest moments in life can hold our whole humanity. And isn’t this a form of justice, Chandy’s poems seem to say, to claim a connected way of being--queer, woman, of color, survivor, parent, spouse, advocate--fully human and vulnerable, awake to both the heartbreaks and the wonders of the world.” -Jen Soriano, author of Making the Tongue Dry and forthcoming Nervous: Essays - on embodied history and the neuroscience of healing - Amistad/HarperCollins 2023
“These poems are staggeringly crafted….perfect, raw and twisting unexpectedly to make something new come through, unselfconscious, gorgeously unadorned so the power of the language and scene shines cleanly through the words. They make me want to cry. When I tell people to read your work, it will be effortless.” - Sofia Ali-Khan, JD, author of A Good Country: My Life in Twelve Towns and the Devastating Battle for a White America (Random House 2022)
“The poems in Sunu Chandy’s My Dear Comrades sing, shine, shimmer, and slide into our consciousness. They are alive with the everyday and leap to make connections between our personal choices and the direction the world is moving. They remind us that justice is a daily responsibility. And the poems are also deeply personal—funny and heartbreaking in equal measure. Sunu’s poems share and praise their origins, discuss their process, and open up conversations within us. They delight, surprise, and complicate at every turn. My Dear Comrades should be required reading for anyone who cares about this world.” -Jeffrey Perkins, author of Kingdom
“Sunu Chandy’s My Dear Comrades makes me uncomfortable in the best of ways. She is generous with her personal stories – her path to becoming a parent and mothering, from fertility to adoption to pandemic parenting; her journey to becoming a lawyer, and her never-ending ability to navigate systems that were not built for her, for me, or for so many of us. I’m grateful for the reminder that there can be humor in some of life’s toughest moments and sadness in our greatest achievements. And I feel lucky to be one of the comrades on her journey.” - Fatima Goss Graves, President and CEO, National Women’s Law Center
“My Dear Comrades, a book of poems by Sunu Chandy, is beautifully written, bursting with emotion, heart wrenching, and thought-provoking. I remember feeling hit in the heart in the first few minutes after reading ‘Just Act Normal.’ I was hooked after that. I recommend checking this out if you love poetry with a purpose.” - Stacey Stevenson, Chief Executive Officer, Family Equality
“Make space in your life to accompany Sunu Chandy as she travels across country, culture, personal experience, and injustices from the merely irritating to the enraging. Feel with your hands the thickly woven tapestries of being: the colors, the heartbreak, the commitment, the joy, the vulnerability, the humanity, the awful harms we humans do each other. It’s all threaded together with love: Love of self, of others, of humanity, of justice. Everything, big, small, or in-between is suffused with meaning and the complexity it calls for and deserves. Chandy has a way of capturing our many and varied experiences, and she’s laid them down in verse so we can join her and feel our own lives more deeply.” - Lauren R. Taylor, director of Defend Yourself and author of a forthcoming book on empowerment self-defense.
“Sunu Chandy’s debut poetry collection, My Dear Comrades, is relentless in its ability to speak truth to power. Readers travel along this poetic journey with Chandy as she documents injustices, reflects on her past, and gives us a glimpse into her own struggles, fears and joys. Chandy’s poems are intimate and vulnerable, poems of protest and praise, poems that break us and bring us delight. She embraces the complicated and exquisite parts of herself and we are left better for it. The silences in Chandy’s poems often speak volumes. When the relative of a friend sexually harasses the narrator, Chandy uses sparse descriptions to frame a disturbing, yet familiar scene: ‘It was not dark. It was not night. I was not outside. I was not alone. I was not with strangers. There were women in the vicinity.’ In ‘Too Pretty,’ Chandy’s effective use of repetition captures the narrator’s fears for herself, a queer woman of color, along with her genuine concern for queer pre-teens during a homophobic incident on a NYC subway. She closes the poem with a heartfelt silent wish/prayer, ‘You all sitting there, laughing laughing/ sitting there on your sixth grade girlfriend’s lap/ so free and easy, laughing laughing,/ be safe my handsome girls, be safe my pretty boys.’ Many of her poems evoke the powerful political poetry of Margaret Walker and Pat Parker, such as ‘Shelter-In-Place.’ Here, Chandy defiantly affirms ‘I pledge allegiance to facing conflict head-on/and choosing our battles./ I pledge allegiance to the organizers,/ to the ones moving through the tears, to people sitting around /a table and writing our poems anyway.’ This political praise poem ignites the page; words become a mantra invoking the power of both organizers and poets. Ultimately, My Dear Comrades, uplifts and centers the compelling voice of Sunu Chandy, a queer woman of color, whose dedication to community, social justice activism and family center this stunning collection.” - J.P. Howard, author of SAY/MIRROR, bury your love poems here, Praise This Complicated Herstory: Legacy, Healing & Revolutionary Poems and co-editor of Sinister Wisdom’s Black Lesbians--We Are the Revolution!
- Author of A Good Country: My Life in Twelve Towns and the Devastating Battle for White America
Sunu Chandy - My Dear Comrades
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ED of the Nat LGBTQ Task Force
5015 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington DC
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Readings and discussion with Marjorie Hudson
(Regal House publishing mate)
Wednesday, March 29, 2023 at 7pm
4508 Walsh Street, Bethesda, MD 20815
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Saturday, April 1, 2023 from 4-6pm
Email subdriftboston@gmail.com to RSVP. All are welcome.
($5-10 suggested donation - Venmo @Alykhan-Mohamed)
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Monday, April 3, 2023 at 7pm
Trident Booksellers and Cafe
338 Newbury Street, Boston, MA 02115
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Tuesday, April 4, 2023 at 1pm
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Tuesday, April 4, 2023 from 5-6pm
451 Artisan Ave, Somerville, MA 02145
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The LGBTQIA+ group meets virtually the 2nd Saturday of every month from 4-6pm.
“The first time I sat with the IMCW LGBTQIA+ sangha, I felt understood and listened to in a way that I had been longing for. Sunu is that kind of poet. Hearing or reading her poems, I feel as though I am sitting next to a good friend who understands everything. If you identify as part of the LGBTQIA+ community, please join us on Zoom on Saturday for this very special edition of our monthly sangha.” - Em Morrison
7 North Loudoun Street, Winchester, VA 22601
All are welcome to the Arts Club of Washington’s FREE Poetry Writing Workshop. Sunu P. Chandy will lead a workshop that explores work by Asian American and Pacific Islander poets and uses these pieces as inspiration for our own writing. Sunu P. Chandy is a civil rights attorney and author of the collection of poems, My Dear Comrades. This workshop is part of the series by the Arts Club Poets-in-Residence. In 2023, the Arts Club of Washington proudly inaugurated its first group of Poets-in-Residence. Five LGBTQ+ poets from the Washington, DC region were selected for the honor, in a program supported by the DC Commission on the Arts. Over six months, from January through June, the group met to create a supportive community for one another and work together on issues of craft. Each writer also offered a free, public poetry workshop. The inaugural group of writers include: Kim Roberts, Sunu Chandy, Malik Thompson, Tanya Olson, and Dan Vera. Masks are required at this event. RSVP at the link here.
FEATURE PRESENTER AT VIRTUAL OPEN MIC
Join us to celebrate National Poetry Month with our monthly open mic with a featured reader, Sunu P. Chandy, poet and civil rights attorney. She will be reading from her recently released poetry collection, My Dear Comrades. If you would like to participate as a reader or listener, please send an email to info@thequeensbookshop.com.
The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Community Center
208 W 13th St, New York, NY 10011
NOTE: ASL Interpretation will be provided at this event
2017 I St. NW, Washington, DC 20006
Wine and cheese reception to follow the program.
Books will be available for purchase and signing.
We're excited to bring back virtual book club to celebrate two poetry collections: My Dear Comrades by Sunu Chandy '94 and Kingdom by Jeffrey Perkins '94. You're invited to a virtual poetry reading from both writers, moderated by former Professor of English Barb Caruso. Find out more information about the authors and publications below, order your books, and sign up to join us on May 4. SIGN-UP LINK
Atlas Social Club, 753 9th Avenue, New York, NY 10019
CO-SPONSORED BY ASIAN AMERICAN WRITERS WORKSHOP (AAWW)
Lower East Side, 116 Suffolk St, New York, NY 10002
At a private location in Brooklyn. RSVP to jp.howard@womenwritersbloom.com to RSVP in advance and/or to be added to a waitlist.
Women Writers in Bloom Poetry Salon is thrilled to host & celebrate our long time member, dear friend and fierce poet Sunu Chandy as we celebrate her debut collection MY DEAR COMRADES in downtown Brooklyn on Saturday afternoon, May 20th. There will be a writing workshop facilitated by Sunu, a featured reading, a Q & A with our feature poet and we will end with our multi-genre open mic. This is our first in-person potluck, writing workshop, feature reading, Q & A with our feature poet and open mic since February 2020. We are thrilled to celebrate Sunu P. Chandy and her new collection as she helps Bloom return to our workshop format.
Kramers Spring Poetry Reading, part of our seasonal poetry reading series, will feature three local writers: Sunu P. Chandy, Taylor Johnson, and Cindy Savett. Each will read for about 15 minutes from their own books. Dupont Circle is in NW Washington at the intersection of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire Avenues, and 19th and P Streets. Kramers is on Connecticut Ave, just north of Dupont Circle, between Dupont Circle & Q Street.
6917 Laurel Ave., Takoma Park, MD
Pre-registration requested at this link
The 23rd annual event features poetry and spoken word by Sunu P. Chandy, Danielle Evennou, Craig Laurance Gidey, Mark Osele, Kim Roberts, and Bernard Welt. Poets and authors will have books for sale at the event. Arrive early and enjoy dinner, dessert, coffee and libations at Takoma Bev Co. (Food and drink service will be available throughout the evening.)
Asian Arts Initiative | 1219 Vine St, Philadelphia, PA 19107
Pre-registration requested at this link.
Please join us for a reading and discussion with poets Sunu P. Chandy and Sham-e-Ali Nayeem in celebration of Sunu's new book of poems, My Dear Comrades. Asian Arts Initiative is a community-based arts center in Philadelphia that engages artists and everyday people to create art that explores the diverse experiences of Asian Americans, addresses our social context, and effects positive community change.
Pre-registration Requested at this link.
Glowing in the Bright, a summer reading to celebrate our community of authors Sarah Herrin, Amber Flame, Sunu Chandy, Arthur Kayzakian and Laura Joyce-Hubbard as they read from their new published works. Stay after the reading for Open Studio with Veteran and Artist, Shaun Smith. Bring anything you want to work on, in any medium, and create art with our community. Community Building Art Works (CBAW) is a charitable organization that builds healthy and connected communities where veterans and civilians share creative expression, mutual understanding, and support through workshops led by professional artists. Seema Reza is the chair of CBAW and facilitates a multi-hospital arts program that encourages use of the arts as a tool for narration, self-care, and socialization for those struggling with emotional and physical injuries.
Featuring Sunu Chandy, Kim Roberts, Holly Mason Badra, and Malik Thompson
Ellanor C. Lawrence Park, 5040 Walney Road, Chantilly, VA
June is Pride Month, celebrated each year to honor the 1969 Stonewall Uprising in New York City, which launched the queer liberation movement in the United States. Featuring some of the region’s most prominent LGBTQ+ poets, this reading lifts up a variety of voices and experiences to honor the rich legacy and contributions of poets and poetry in the queer community.
POEMS ABOUT QUEERNESS, RACE, LAW AND SURVIVORS
LISTEN ON 89.3 FM AND ONLINE AT WPFWF.ORG
Aishah Shahidah Simmons, Creator, | NO! The Rape Documentary | #LoveWITHAccountability® Project
Twitter, Instagram & Facebook, @Afrolez | YouTube, AfroLez® Channel
RECORDING FROM EVENT AVAILABLE HERE AT THIS LINK
Charis welcomes Sunu P. Chandy in conversation with Rev. Winnie Varghese for a discussion of My Dear Comrades. The Rev. Winnie Varghese is the 23rd rector of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in downtown Atlanta. She co-hosts the (G)race podcast with The Rev. Azariah France-Williams.
This event is free and open to all people, especially to those who have no income or low income right now, but we encourage and appreciate a solidarity donation in support of the work of Charis Circle, our programming non-profit. Charis Circle's mission is to foster sustainable feminist communities, work for social justice, and encourage the expression of diverse and marginalized voices. https://donatenow.networkforgood.org/CharisCircle?code=chariscirclepage
Please contact us at info@chariscircle.org or 404-524-0304 if you would like ASL interpretation at this event. If you would like to watch the event with live AI captions, you may do so by watching it in Google Chrome and enabling captions. If you have other accessibility needs or if you are someone who has skills in making digital events more accessible please don't hesitate to reach out to info@chariscircle.org. We are actively learning the best practices for this technology and we welcome your feedback.
By attending our virtual event you agree to our Code of Conduct: Our event seeks to provide a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, religion (or lack thereof), class, or technology choices. We do not tolerate harassment in any form. Sexual language and imagery are not appropriate. Anyone violating these rules will be expelled from this event and all future events at the discretion of the organizers. Please report all harassment to info@chariscircle.org immediately.
Vice President of Economic Justice, National Partnership of Women and Families
500 8th St. SE, Washington, DC 20003
PRE-REGISTRATION REQUESTED AT THIS LINK
With Tanya Olson, Kim Roberts, Malik Thompson, and Dan Vera
Arts Club, 2017 I St. NW I Washington, DC 20006
Pre-registration requested at this link.
In 2023, the Arts Club of Washington proudly inaugurated its first group of Poets-in-Residence. Five LGBTQ+ poets from the Washington, DC region were selected for the honor, in a program supported by the DC Commission on the Arts. From January through June, the group met to create a supportive community for one another and work together on their craft. Each writer also offered a free, public poetry workshop. The inaugural group of writers were Kim Roberts, Sunu Chandy, Malik Thompson, Tanya Olson, and Dan Vera. This is the culminating reading for these five inaugural 2023 LGBTQ+ Poets-in-Residence at the Arts Club of Washington
3128 Greenmount Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21201
2021 14th St NW, Washington, District of Columbia, 20009
apocrifa imagines a love that sits comfortably at the crossroads of commitment and freedom. The developing intimacy between a lover and their beloved is propelled by a compendium of words for love, romance, sex, relationships, and affection that do not lend to direct translation in English. Serving as both titles and markers of the progression of time, these poetically defined words highlight the growing tension of one who claims "i cannot love you enough/to unlove the wide world" and yet is inextricably drawn to the offer of "a place of sustenance, rest, and my delight in your very bones." Heavily inspired by the metaphors and structures of Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon), from the Apocryphal books of the Bible, the characters speak to each other with contrapuntal call-and-response while letting us into their private thoughts through epistles, sestinas, odes, and other poetic forms.
Praise for Amber Flame’s apocrifa from Jacqueline Woodson: “AN ELEGANT, LOVING, AND LOVELY JOURNEY. AGAIN AND AGAIN, APOCRIFA LIFTS US UP, DROPS US, THEN LIFTS US AGAIN. FINALLY SETTING US DOWN EXACTLY WHERE WE NEED TO BE.” — JACQUELINE WOODSON, 2020 MACARTHUR FELLOW, NATIONAL AMBASSADOR FOR YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE 2018-2019, ASTRID LINDGREN MEMORIAL AWARD LAUREATE 2018
5233 N. Clark St. Chicago, IL 60640
RSVP requested and masks required: By pre-registering, you are verifying that you are fully vaccinated and will wear a mask throughout the entirety of the event.
a queer woman-owned and run bookstore/ flower shop located inside Birdsall & Co.
Join us for a conversation with poet, activist, and civil rights attorney Sunu Chandy about her new poetry collection, My Dear Comrades. She will be in conversation with award-winning local author and educator Mathangi Subramanian and Sarah Herrin of Beyond The Veil Press. We will have a reading, moderated conversation and Q&A, and book signing. This event is free, but please RSVP here.
Thank you to KhushDC for the kind invitation to visit the group’s book club.
All are welcome and the RSVP link is here.
Join us for a special writing workshop with poet, Sunu P. Chandy, to benefit Community Building Art Works programs for veterans, service members, military families, and health care workers. This workshop is free for Veterans, Service Members, and Healthcare Workers. All ticket sales benefit CBAW's programs.
Through our partnership with Bookshop, we're pleased to announce a special added value for those who register for this workshop: A coupon code for a 10% discount on your purchase of My Dear Comrades by Sunu P. Chandy. This coupon will be issued to registrants via email.
Please RSVP at the Facebook Invite Page
PHOEBE WANG is a first-generation Chinese-Canadian writer and educator from Ottawa, the unceded traditional territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin. Her first collection of poetry, Admission Requirements (McClelland and Stewart, 2017) was nominated for the Trillium Book Award. Her second collection of poetry, Waking Occupations, was published in 2022. She serves as a mentor in the MA in the University of Toronto MA in Creative Writing program and works as a Writing and Learning Consultant at OCAD University. She is currently at work on a collection of essays on sailing and identity, titled Relative to Wind.
RSVP LINK HERE / Video Poems - Hard Hat Reading
108 Cherry Street, Seattle, WA 98104
1714 NE Broadway St, Portland, OR 97232
6040 N Figueroa St, Los Angeles, CA 90042
2349 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, CA
How does a girl from a tiny Bangladeshi island end up reading Tagore, Marx and de Beauvoir, and becoming a feminist activist? How does she navigate different cultures and religions, and patriarchal society? Daughter of the Agunmukha is the riveting personal history of Noorjahan Bose, born in 1938 in present-day Bangladesh to a Muslim farming family, near the mouth of the ferocious River Agunmukha--Fire Mouth River.
Noorjahan Bose is a feminist writer, social worker and activist, living between the US and Bangladesh, and the founder of two US-based organisations to empower South Asian women: Ashiyanaa (formerly ASHA) and Samhati. Daughter of the Agunmukha won the Bangla Academy Literary Award for Autobiography and the Ananya Literature Award. Bose will be in conversation with Sunu Chandy and Krittika Ghosh.
843 Upshur Street NW, Washington, DC 20011
Loyalty is so very excited to welcome Sunu Chandy and our very own Malik Thompson for an IN-PERSON event celebrating My Dear Comrades! Join us at Loyalty's Petworth store at 7 PM ET on Thursday, November 2nd for a discussion and audience Q&A, followed by a meet + greet & book signing! This event is free to attend but RSVPs are required—please use the link above. Please email events@loyaltybookstores.com with any questions. Face masks are required for all attendees in the event space. Please note Loyalty has a zero tolerance policy for harassment or intimidation of any kind during virtual or in-person events.
Location: HI-BALLZ, a queer owned vegan cafe, at 4901 Canal St., New Orleans.
You are invited to our joint book celebration focused on poetry, stories, and community building. Featuring poetry from Sunu P. Chandy (My Dear Comrades) and stories by Virginia Bartlett (Elements of Moral Experience in Clinical Ethics Training and Practice: Sharing Stories with Strangers).
Virginia L. Bartlett, Ph.D. (She/her), is the Assistant Director of the Center for Healthcare Ethics and Assistant Professor in Biomedical Sciences at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, California. She serves as a clinical ethics consultant, provides ethics education across the medical center and community, serves on institutional, local, and national boards and task forces, and researches the practices and contexts of clinical ethics consultation. Virginia lives in Baton Rouge with her partner and their blended family. Elements of Moral Experience in Clinical Ethics Training and Practice: Sharing Stories with Strangers, was recently published by Routledge as a genre-spanning memoir of encountering ethical and moral issues with patients, families, and care providers in hospital settings.
Excited to see folks at AWP 2024. Check out information below re my two off-site readings, my two AWP sessions, and my one book signing. Thank you.
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 2024, around 8-8:30pm*, OFF-SITE POETRY
Wednesday Night Poetry, Hosted by Kai Coggin
Stern Theater, Charlotte Street Foundation, 3333 Wyoming St., Kansas City, MO 64111 (Note: *I should be on between 8-8:30pm. The event is from 6:30-10:30 with 75 poets, three minutes each. Stay as long as you like, and enjoy a range of poets.)
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2024, 2-3pm, BOOK SIGNING
BOOK SIGNING WITH UNICORN AUTHORS, #T3139 near Bookfair stage
I'll be signing books on Thursday from 2-3pm at the Unicorn Authors Club table, #T3139 (next to the Bookfair stage). Please stop by and say hi!
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2024 AT 5-6pm, OFF-SITE READING
SOCIAL JUSTICE STORYTELLING
WITH JEN SORIANO, SOFIA ALI-KHAN AND JENNIFER LUNDEN
BADSEED Farmers' Market, 1909 McGee St, Kansas City, MO 64108
With books available to purchase from Wise Blood Bookstore
CREATING COMMUNITY RESIDENCIES TO CELEBRATE QUEER WRITERS
(Kim Roberts, Sunu Chandy, Tanya Olson, Malik Thompson, Dan Vera)
Room 2502A, Kansas City Convention Center, Level 2
QUEER PARENTHOOD AND FAMILY MAKING: A READING
(Nomi Stone, JP Howard, Sunu Chandy, Keetje Kuipers, Blas Falconer)
Room 3501 EF, Kansas City Convention Center, Level 3
7014-A Westmoreland Ave. Takoma Park, MD 20912
The Green Way Reading Series is a monthly literary event based in Takoma Park, MD curated by Elizabeth Bryant and Takoma Park’s Poet Laureate Taylor Johnson. The series centers emerging and established poets and artists in interdisciplinary, intergenerational and cross-regional dialogues. We want these programs to encourage growing participation and local engagement in the evolving landscape of contemporary poetry.
Fargo Nissim Tbakhi is a Palestinian performance artist. Find more at fargotbakhi.com
Kenny Carroll is a writer from DC. He was the 2017 DC Youth Poet Laureate, and in 2019 received the Thomas Lux Scholarship from Sarah Lawrence. His work has been featured in Split This Rock’s The Quarry, EcoTheo Review, Lamplack, and Poetry London among others. He is a Watering Hole, Brooklyn Poets, and Obsidian fellow, and was selected by Roger Reeves as a 2023 Cave Canem Starshine and Clay fellow. You can find him online @Kennyc113.
172 E. Davis Street, Culpeper, VA 22701
3032 Minnehaha Ave, Minneapolis, MN 55406
Readings and discussion, with book signings to follow.
28 W Main St, Bozeman, MT 59715
Join Country Bookshelf in welcoming visiting poet Sunu P. Chandy alongside KD Chavez, Jasmine James, and Hazel Gonzalez McCord on March 27th at 6pm. Following a reading from Sunu’s book, My Dear Comrades, she will be in discussion with three of Bozeman’s own activists around poetry, activism, and the lovely space where the two meet.
Note: *** Recording of the event available here*** (Sunu’s poems at minutes 17-31)
QC Art Center, Rosenthal Library 612
Can also join via Zoom: http://tinyurl.com/5d4v4738
Healing Community: Poetry as a Force for Collective Transformation & Wellness – Purvi Shah, MA, Sunu P. Chandy, MFA, Poet and Civil Rights Attorney, Vidhu Aggarwal, Ph.D.
Poetry can make bearable the daily traumas of living, as well as give grounding to navigate profound crises. Because of social oppressions and marginalization, poetry is particularly crucial for furthering voice, belonging, justice, and healing for communities of color and LGBTQ+ communities. As poets from these identities, the presenters engage art to heal themselves and their communities while fostering collective wellness and transformation. The presenters will share strategies for how to engage poetry to build community, document struggles, and enable futurist world-building to move toward collective well-being. Through sharing poetry, providing concrete examples of how to further community wellness and transformation, and leading a generative poetry session, this session will enable participants to name and trust their experiences, challenge microaggressions and structural inequity, gain wellness strategies, and stay hopeful to continue to be forces for healing and justice. Together we further an art that moves us toward liberation.
Join us for a Poetry Month event with visiting poet and civil rights attorney, Sunu P. Chandy, author of My Dear Comrades for a reading and discussion with Dr. Jacob Chacko, the Executive Director of the Center for Diversity & Inclusion and Director of Dialogue Across Difference at Washington University. We are delighted to start the event with readings by two excellent local poets, Elizabeth Hoover and Niki Herd.
686 Fulton Street Brooklyn, NY 11217
The Women of Color Writers' Workshop, created 25 years ago, addresses the underrepresentation of WOCs in the literary world. Their motto is “Telling Our Stories—Preserving Our Legacy.” WOC Writers provides safe and supportive spaces where women participants engage in creative writing, readings, performances, specialized poetry classes, writing retreats, and publishing opportunities. WOC Writers’ highly anticipated anthology Boundaries & Borders demonstrates the creativity, strength, versatility, and resilience of women across the globe. The Anthology presents works of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, essays and prose written by members of the Women of Color Writers’ Community. The writers will discuss their work, along with a reading and book signing. Wine reception to follow.
4508 Walsh St, Bethesda MD 20815
Poet Amanda Shaw’s book launch celebration of her debut collection, It Will Have Been So Beautiful (Lily Poetry Review Books), with Sebastian Merrill, followed by a tribute to Sandra Beasley, featuring poets Rekha Mehra, Sunu P. Chandy, and Susan Okie.
235 CARROLL ST NW, WASHINGTON, D.C. 20012
Carina Room / 2468 Champlain Street NW, Washington DC
Bohrer Park, 506 S. Frederick Avenue, Gaithersburg, MD 20877
(NOTE: SUGGESTIONS RE PARKING AND SHUTTLE OPTIONS)
11805 Coastal Highway unit C, Ocean City, Maryland 21842
2913 W Cary St.,Richmond, VA 23222
Second Wind CrossFit, 5509 14th St NW, Washington, DC 20011
(5 min walk from the bookstore)
Building at Lawrence Wetlands Preserve
301 S Mill St, Chestertown, MD 21620
Related August 15, 2024 RADIO Interview on KPFA APEX Express
In 2003, South Asian Sisters created Yoni ki Baat, a stage performance in Berkeley, California, written and performed by South Asian and South Asian American women. Inspired by Eve Ensler’s groundbreaking work The Vagina Monologues, YKB gave Desi women the space to share stories and speak candidly about our bodies, our sexualities, our relationships, and our experiences. This book includes a sampling of pieces from the Bay Area productions, and commemorates the 21st anniversary of Yoni ki Baat.
Speakers:
Ivan Espinoza-Madrigal (Moderator) (Lawyers for Civil Rights)
Alvin Carter (Brown Rudnick)
Sunu Chandy (Democracy Forward)
Busayo Olupona (Busayo NYC)
Melissa Rivero (Lawyers for Civil Rights)
This panel will explore how to leverage legal expertise to help shape culture. Attorneys will explore how their legal background has helped to shape creative endeavors. The panel will feature attorneys who are publishing novels, designing fashion, and advising entrepreneurs in the creative and cultural economy. This panel will explore best legal practices, common pitfalls for those launching their own business, and share paths to success for attorneys looking to explore creative endeavors within their own legal practice and beyond.
1390 E Hyde Park Blvd (entrance on Dorchester)
(Please note: The $50 ticket covers the buffet dinner and space rental)
1124 Parsons Ave, Columbus, OH 43206
Poets Regie Cabico, Reg Ledesma, Pacyinz Lyfoung, Sunu Chandy, and Ishanee Chanda will share commissioned poems and attendees will then have opportunity to explore and express themes of Asian and Pacific Islander identity in breakout sessions facilitated by the poets.
Come by the Regal House table at the Brooklyn Book Festival during the Literary Marketplace on Sunday, September 29th. Signed copies of My Dear Comrades and other fine books from my publishing mates will be available for purchase.
Unicorn alum, poet, and civil rights attorney Sunu P. Chandy will share insights gained the hard way after a year of organizing successful events around the country following the publication of her first collection, My Dear Comrades (Regal House, 2023). Sunu will be in conversation with Unicorn Authors Club Co-director Raychelle Heath, and all participants will receive a handout with practical takeaways and resources. No recording, to preserve the candid nature of the chat. Some of the proceeds will help to fund Unicorn program scholarships.
The 56th season of the O.B. Hardison Poetry Series opens with Claudia Rankine (Citizen, An American Lyric) and Yesenia Montilla (Muse Found in a Colonized Body) reading from work that explores whether “we, the people” have truly established justice for all. Acclaimed poets Claudia Rankine and Yesenia Montilla will kick off our Whose Democracy? season with a reading that explores themes of justice. Following the reading will be a conversation moderated by poet and civil rights attorney Sunu Chandy and a book signing, with the opportunity to meet the poets.
Tickets to virtual access are pay what you will, starting at $10.
201 East Capitol Street, SE Washington, DC 20003
On the EC Campus and open to reunion attendees. Led with Jeffrey Perkins.
In every era, tyranny depends on the triumph of dogmas which cause us to disparage or forget truths we deeply know. In the digital era, one of these dogmas is the idea that knowledge is nothing more than information, and that thinking is therefore nothing more than the fast and accurate processing of information. This is an idea that asks us to forget our embodiment, to forget our connectedness to one another, and to forget our own experiences of confusion and creation. There is no better way to resist this coerced forgetting than through art. We will open our conference with a session about the practice of poetry—reading it, writing it, and sharing it—as a practice of resistance. Sunu Chandy, a poet and lifelong social justice activist, and Michael Colonnese, a poet, teacher and winner of the Privacy Center’s first poetry contest, will share reflections from their life and work, and will lead session participants in a short creative writing exercise.
Publication of The Mid-Atlantic Review 2024 was made possible by individual donors to Day Eight and support from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and Mayor Muriel Bowser's Office of AAPI Affairs. This event will include reading by 25 contributor poets, and copies of the magazine are available for purchase in advance. Learn more about the publication and contributors, and get your tickets here.