Now that it is all over, we’d like to get your feedback. Please take a couple minutes to download this evaluation form and answer the questions.

When you’re done, email the completed form back to Bao Phi.

*Also* if you are willing, and want to give us positive quotes separate from the anonymous eval, please do so and email it directly to bphi@loft.org. We will be working on reports for granters, and any positive quotes you can provide for us would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

https://www.loft.org/summit-registration

Online registration ends Sunday, July 31, so get it while it’s good.

If you are observing Ramadan and/or are bringing a child to Summit and are interested in child care, please let us know.

p.s. Summit is on Angry Asian Man!

http://blog.angryasianman.com/2011/07/apia-spoken-word-and-poetry-summit.html

Also, the Saturday Community Showcase is now FULL. There are still spots open in Friday’s Showcase.

Workshop titles with facilitators are included. A special announcement that the bookmaking workshop during the second session on Friday with Anh-Hoa Nguyen is limited capacity with room only for 15 participants. If you would like to pre-register a spot, please email apiasummit2011@gmail.com. There is a $10 materials fee, but you get to take home your very own book!

For this year’s Summit, we are hoping to coordinate a library of APIA materials to be made available in a reading room for attendees to peruse during their chill time. It would be fantastic if you could contribute! Please bring an extra copy of your chap/book/zine to share with others in our reading room library. They can be fresh or classic.

We are also hoping to possibly extend the reading library beyond this year’s Summit, and perhaps have it travel and grow over the years. Please email apiasummit2011@gmail.com if you have any comments/questions/concerns. Spread the word to amongst your homies!

xoxo
linda librarian

The organizers of the 2011 APIA Spoken Word Poetry Summit made it a priority to create an inter-generational dialogue.  Part of the strategy was to invite four first generation guests, who have had many years of impacting APIA performance poetry and community activism.  We have posted extensive bios and a special message from three of our first generation guests: Joe Kadi, David Mura, and Brenda Wong Aoki.  Here is the last but certainly not the least.

Born in Fresno, California, in 1938, Inada is a third-generation Japanese American. His father was a dentist and his mother a teacher, and his maternal grandparents founded the Fresno Fish Market in 1912. In 1942, shortly after the United States entered World War II, Inada and his family were sent to internment camps with his parents and grandparents—first to the Fresno County Fairgrounds Assembly Center; then to a camp in Jerome, Arkansas, in the Mississippi Delta; and, finally, to Amache Camp in the Colorado desert.

In 1971, Inada’s Before the War: Poems as They Happened was the first volume of poetry by an Asian American published by a major publishing house. By then, Inada had earned a master of Fine Arts at the University of Oregon and had been teaching at Southern Oregon College (now Southern Oregon University) for five years. He is the author of two other collections of poetry: Legends from Camp (1992), which won the American Book Award, and Drawing the Line (1997), which won an Oregon Book Award.

In addition to these individual publications, Inada has written critical introductions to a number of works, such as John Okada’s No-No Boy.

He is also a contributing editor for the Northwest Review and was the narrator for PBS specials on “Children of the Camps” and “Conscience and the Constitution.” In 2004 he was one of only 185 artists, scholars and scientists chosen from a nationwide pool of 3,200 applicants to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is currently serving as the Steinbeck chair for the National Steinbeck Center, a forum established to promote a community-wide celebration of literature in the tradition of John Steinbeck.

Inada has been recognized by the President of the United States, appearing at the White House in “A Salute to Poetry and American Poets.” Inada served as Oregon’s Poet Laureate from 2006 to 2010.

In 1997, he was awarded a Creative Arts Grant from the Civil Liberties Public Education Fund and his work has been the subject of a documentary titled “What It Means to Be Free: A Video about Poetry and Japanese-American Internment” and an award-winning animated film of “Legends from Camp” made in collaboration with his son, artist Miles Inada.

Lawson’s special message to the Summit:  “I look forward to the expedition that will scale Mt. Minneapolis to the very Summit.  But who will plant which flag?  And where to go from there?”

Three time NEA Theater Fellow, Brenda Wong Aoki writes and performs monodramas. Her intense lyrical song/dance/dramas are drawn from her grandfather’s memories of San Francisco during the Great Earthquake, Kabuki legends and her own personal life experience. Aoki’s multidisciplinary performances weave together Japanese Noh, Kyogen Theater, Commedia Dell’arte, movement and voice. She has performed in such venues as the Kennedy Center, New Victory Theater on Broadway, Hong Kong Performing Arts Center, the Adelaide International Festival in Australia, the Esplanade in Singapore, the Graz Festival Austria and the International House in Tokyo.

Brenda’s plays have been produced world-wide: Mermaid, a work for symphony, was commissioned by Maestro Kent Nagano, the award-winning Queen’s Garden was published by Routledge Press and produced at the San Diego Repertory Theatre, Uncle Gunjiro’s Girlfriend was the American representative to the Adelaide International Festival, Australia, Random Acts was produced by the Dallas Theater Center, Kuan-Yin: Our Lady of Compassion was commissioned by the Hong Kong International Festival and performed at the Esplanade in Singapore, and Obake: Tales of Spirits Past and Present was presented at the Kennedy Center and on Broadway at the New Victory Theater. Her CD recordings of The Queen’s Garden and Tales of the Pacific Rim were awarded Indie Awards for Best Spoken Word. Her book/CD Mermaid Meat was released in Tokyo 2008 and her most recent recording Legend of Morning, was released in 2009. She is currently developing a pageant play with world musicians and dancers about the lost continent of MU to premiere in 2012.

Brenda has deep roots in San Francisco. Her paternal grandfather was a founder of Japantown in the 1890’s, and her maternal grandmother was vice president of the first Chinatown garment union in the 1920’s. She is a member of the Dramatist Guild, ASCAP and the Western Arts Alliance. Brenda is a trustee of the Museum of Performance and Design in San Francisco and is an active member of the National Recording Academy. A founding member of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University, Aoki continues to teach and perform internationally.

Her message to the Summit:

“I am honored to be considered a “first generation” API writer and look forward to the energy and passion of all the young writers at this summit.”

Why is the Summit important to me?

Sounds like a simple question, right?

…for myself, it isn’t.

I attended my first Summit in Chicago in 2003, my second in New York in 2007, and helped organize the last one here in the Bay Area in 2009. For the past eight years, thinking about the Summit has always felt like a tidal wave swelling inside of me.

Why?

Because for so many reasons, the Summit has reminded me of how strong I not only can be, but indeed am.

My 21st birthday on a stage in a Chicago theatre in front of 200 people…I’ve replayed that night in my mind over and over and over again, trying to keep hold of every single detail so that when I feel like nothing, I can remember that I am worth a whole lot more.

I will never forget how nervous I was, dry heaving as the poet before me wrapped up their performance. I will never forget the rousing rendition of “Happy Birthday” sung to me by everyone in the audience when Kelly called me on stage. I will never forget thinking to myself”These people have no idea” as I stood there and smiled. I will never forget hearing those in the front rows cry along with me as my hands shook and voice trembled, eyes glued to my paper. I will never forget the old friends I came with and the new friends I made crawling on stage after to hold me and gather around me backstage to put me back together when I had utterly and honestly fell apart. I will never forget concentric circles on stage after, everyone healing with me as we sang together: “Ikalat muna, pass it around.”

For myself, that is what the Summit is about: passing “it” around. “It” being this identity of community and responsibility for one another – more so than creating, practicing, and perfecting our craft of poetry and spoken word (really, they’re just vehicles, another way for us to be human) – the Summit is truly about building and growing with and for each other, from the ground up – heads high, eyes skyward, raw, and revealing – because in the words of June Jordan: We are the ones we have been waiting for.

The fact that no one gets paid to organize the Summit, the fact that we are not a 501(c)3, the fact that every two years a group of people dedicate two years of their lives to ensure the Summit happens again for those anxious to return, but more importantly for those who desire to be introduced… This selflessness, solidarity, connection, and interconnection; this tidal wave of emotion that I am sure I am not the only one who feels – this is why the Summit is important to me.

The Summit is recognition – love and history made manifest. The Summit is resistance against the blunt truth that in this world – not only for human necessity, but politically, socially, culturally, and economically in pursuit of real deal revolution-making – we are nothing if we are without each other. For myself, most importantly, the Summit is a reminder and dedication to the fact that though individually we are indeed strong, in each others arms we are even stronger.

Kristen Sajonas, 2009 Summit organizer, sometimes-poet, all-the-time community organizer, wannabe kultural worker.

Flashback to 2005. Hurricane Katrina hits the Gulf Coast with such insistence homes and communities are swallowed by the floods. A small group of friends, fresh from the Boston APIA Spoken Word and Poetry Summit, organize an event called RELIEF: A Benefit for APIA Survivors of Hurricane Katrina. The night becomes an incredible line-up of writers, singer/songwriters, and other performers donating their time and packing about 500 people into the ImaginAsian theater. Soon, artists/former Summit participants from the Los Angeles and the Bay Area throw fundraisers, too. Together, we raise something like six or seven thousand dollars in donations for Southeast Asian communities in Mississippi and Louisiana.

The same group of friends who organized the NYC Katrina Benefit begin organizing a monthly open mic. This gradually evolves into the SULU Series, first at Galapagos (when it was still in Williamsburg), then at the Bowery Poetry Club in the Lower East Side. The total 50+ SULU Series shows between 2005 and 2010 created a lively and dynamic platform for up-and-coming APIA artists of various disciplines to face the loving kindness of an ultimate audience of thousands. While the NYC SULU Series is no longer, the DC SULU series was born in 2010 out of the same need: good folks believed in the importance of an APIA arts performance venue. (AndI also like to think that the DC-based 2009 Bay Area Summit attendees had a little something to do with it, too…)

I tell you this shortened story in this way because an APIA performing arts venue in two cities is the direct result of the inspiration, empowerment, and general magic generated by Summits past. The SULU Series is just one response by a group of spoken word artists and poets in a specific region, at a specific time. But without the Summit community, we wouldn’t have been able to respond to Hurricane Katrina with such timeliness. And a good hundred APIA artists might have never met a crowd as wonderful as a SULU Series audience on a Sunday night at the Bowery. What Summit created was essential for the growth of NYC, its audience, and every artist who blessed that stage.

So, dear reader, I ask you these questions: how do you use your art/writing/discipline to propel the needs of your community? How can you help develop the trajectory of APIA arts in your area? How does your work engage your community?

The Summit remains a place where our ideas grow the legs to run, the arms to hold up a beautiful people, and the eyes to see our own work as significant contributions to the evolution of APIA art. For this space and for you, I am, and always will be, grateful.

Hanalei Ramos is a writer, cultural worker, and community organizer. She was also a lead coordinator/organizer for the 2007 APIA Spoken Word & Poetry Summit in New York City.

See you soon.