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Timothy Yu and Susan Landers

Timothy Yu is associate professor of English and Asian American Studies and director of the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of the poetry collection 100 Chinese Silences (Les Figues Press), the Editor’s Selection in the 2014 NOS Book Contest. He is also the author ofRace and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry since 1965 (Stanford University Press), which won the Book Award in Literary Studies from the Association for Asian American Studies. He is the editor of the collection Nests and Strangers: On Asian American Women Poets (Kelsey Street Press), and he also serves as an editor of the journal Contemporary Literature. His poetry publications include two chapbooks, 15 Chinese Silences(Tinfish Press) and Journey to the West (Barrow Street), winner of the Vincent Chin Memorial Chapbook Prize from Kundiman. His poems have also appeared in Poetry, Cordite, Mantis, SHAMPOO,Lantern Review, and Kartika Review. His essays and reviews have appeared in Jacket, The Poetry Project Newsletter, The Volta, Meanjin, and on CNN.com. His current research project, Diasporic Poetics, examines the emergence of “Asian” identities in the U.S., Canada, and Australia, and explores how poets of Asian descent navigate these identities through poetic form. The poetry of writers such as Myung Mi Kim, Fred Wah, and Ouyang Yu often reflects movement across national borders, but also develops unexpected aesthetic connections that register local and global connections of race, ethnicity, and politics. He earned his AB from Harvard University and his Ph.D. in English from Stanford University, and has previously taught at the University of Toronto.

Susan Landers‘ latest book, FRANKLINSTEIN, tells the story of one Philadelphia neighborhood wrestling with the legacies of colonialism, racism, and capitalism. She is also the author of 248 MGS., A PANIC PICNIC and COVERS, both published by O Books. Her chapbooks include 15: A Poetic Engagement with the Chicago Manual of Style and What I Was Tweeting While You Were On Facebook. She was the founding editor of the journal Pom2 and has an MFA from George Mason University. She lives in Brooklyn.