Reading by author, Irene Suico Soriano

Wednesday, February 14, 2018
3:30 PM - 5:00 PM
Powell Library Rotunda
UCLA Campus
Los Angeles, CA 90095

In this cinematic collection of poetry, Irene Suico Soriano unravels threads of silence and oppression. Primates from an Archipelago traces lineages on geographic and personal islands where memories and dreams are synonymous. Balanced with official documentation such as passports, birth and death certificates, and membership cards, the poems also speak the languages of uncertainties and multiple truths. The collection travels from homeland exile and loss in the Philippines, to the author’s origin story in Zamboanga, on to sites where experience and education have shaped her world view, and finally to Los Angeles, the city of settlement and fractured pasts. Mythical and intimate, Primates from an Archipelago illustrates the sad beauty that lies in the gaps.

Irene Suico Soriano is an immigrant Filipina American poet, independent literary curator and Shelter/Animal Rights advocate providing resources to aid the rescue of geriatric and terminally ill dogs and cats that enter LA’s city and county shelter system. Her poems have appeared in, among others Philippines Free Press, Los Angeles Times, Solidarity Journal, LA Enkanto: In Our Blood CD Flippin':Filipinos on America (AAWW), Babaylan: An Anthology of Filipina and Filipina American Writers (AuntLute) and Short Fuse: The Global Anthology of New Fusion Poetry (Rattapallax Press). She received the PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellowship in 2001 and has been a proud staff member of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center for 23+ years.

Introduction by T.K. Le

T.K. Le’s fiction and poetry imagine a future in which patriarchy dies and people of color deserve and proliferate joy. She has shared her work on KPCC’s Take Two and on stage for ALOUD-Los Angeles and Tuesday Night Project. Her essay, “Part of Memory is Forgetting,” appears in the W.W. Norton anthology, Inheriting the War. She is an alum of the VONA/Voices summer writing workshop and the UCLA Asian American Studies MA program.

Books will be available for purchase and signing.

Presented in collaboration with UC Irvine Asian American Studies Department’s The Afterlives of Martial Law.

Nguyet Tong
(310) 206-9163
cseas@international.ucla.edu

Sponsor(s): UCLA International Institute, Asian American Studies Center, Asian American Studies Department , Comparative Literature, UCLA Undergraduate Education Office of Instructional Development, UCLA Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, UCLA Institute of American Cultures, UCLA Community Programs Office/Writing Program, and UCLA Library