Tonight poets Mai-Linh Hong and Maw Shein Win read from their collections, followed by a conversation focused on Continental Drift, Hong’s recent debut. Continental Drift charts landscapes of refugee migration through lyric and visual poems, while Win’s Percussing the Thinking Jar braids together the pleasures, pains, and anxieties of living in an aging body. Both collections experiment with language and form as they infuse vulnerable bodily experiences with wonder and curiosity.

 Mai-Linh Hong is a Vietnamese American poet and literary scholar writing from the afterlife of refugee migration. Her debut poetry collection, Continental Drift (Trio House, 2026), won the 2025 Trio Award. Poems appear or are forthcoming in journals such as Waxwing, Ploughshares, and Copper Nickel. She also publishes scholarly essays on Asian American and refugee literature. An associate professor of literature at the University of California, Merced, she is coauthor and coeditor of The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice (UC Press, 2021). Follow her work @continentaldrift_poems on Instagram or at mai-linhhong.com. 

  Maw Shein Win's most recent full-length poetry collection is Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn, 2024) which was shortlisted for the 2025 Northern California Book Award in Poetry. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA, the recipient of the 2026 AWP George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature, the 2025 Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime Achievement Award, and the 2025 Nomadic/SF Foundation Literary Award for Non-fiction. She teaches or has taught in the MFA Programs at the University of San Francisco, Dominican University, and Saint Mary’s College of California. mawsheinwin.com