Join PEN America, Second Home, and the PEN America Emerging Voices community for a reading and celebration of new and recent books by former fellows including KB Brookins (Freedom House), Pete Hsu (If I Were An Ocean, I’d Carry You Home), Nancy Lynée Woo (I’d Rather Be Lightening), and Noel Alumit (Music Heard in Hi-Fi).
Participants
KB Brookins is a Black, queer, and trans writer, cultural worker, and artist from Texas. They authored How to Identify Yourself with a Wound (Kallisto Gaia Press 2022), a chapbook that won the Saguaro Poetry Prize and an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book in Literature; Freedom House (Deep Vellum 2023), a poetry collection recommended by Vogue and Autostraddle among others; and Pretty (Alfred A. Knopf 2024), their forthcoming memoir. KB’s writing is published in Poets.org, Teen Vogue, Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. They are a 2023 National Endowment of the Arts fellow. Follow them online at @earthtokb.
Pete Hsu is the author of the short story collection If I Were The Ocean, I’d Carry You Home and the experimental chapbook, There Is A Man. His work has also been featured in The Margins, Faultline, F(r)iction, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. He was a 2017 PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellow as well as the 2017 PEN in the Community Writer in Residence. Beginning in Fall 2023, he will be teaching in the UCLA Extension Writers Program.
Nancy Lynée Woo is a poet, educator, and community organizer. Her first full-length poetry collection is I’d Rather Be Lightning (GASHER Press, 2023). She has received fellowships from Artists at Work, PEN America, Arts Council for Long Beach, and Idyllwild Writers Week. Nancy is the author of two chapbooks, Bearing the Juice of It All (Finishing Line Press, 2016) and Rampant (Sadie Girl Press, 2014). She has published poems in numerous journals and anthologies, including Tupelo Quarterly, The Shore, Radar Poetry, and Stirring. Nancy has an MFA in creative writing from Antioch University, Los Angeles, and a BA in sociology from UC Santa Cruz. Find her cavorting around Long Beach/Tongva, California, and online at @fancifulnance on social.
Noel Alumit is a multidisciplinary artist who wrote the novels Talking to the Moon and Letters to Montgomery Clift. He won the Stonewall Book Award from the American Library Association and the James Duggins Mid-Career Prize. He was named one of Out Magazine’s “Out 100” and was a California State Commissioner on Asian and Pacific Islander American Affairs. Noel has a BFA in Drama and a Master of Divinity in Buddhist Chaplaincy. He is currently an Associate Editor at Lion’s Roar Magazine.
Partners
This program is presented in partnership with Second Home Hollywood with book sales courtesy of Flintridge Books.
