Please join us for a very special evening of poetry on Saturday, February 22 at 7pm with Blas Falconer, Lee Herrick & Maw Shein Win. Hosted by Preeti Vangani. There will be books, snacks, bevs & free broadsides.
Blas Falconer is the author of four poetry collections, including Rara Avis (Four Way Books, 2024) and Forgive the Body This Failure (Four Way Books, 2018). He is also the coeditor of two anthologies: The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity (The University of Arizona Press), with Lorraine M. López, and Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets (Southern Illinois University Press), with Beth Martinelli and Helena Mesa. Falconer is the recipient of a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers. He teaches in the MFA program at San Diego State University and is the Editor in Chief at Poetry International Online.
Lee Herrick is the California Poet Laureate. He is the author of In Praise of Late Wonder: New and Selected Poems and three other books of poems. He co-edited The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit and Afterlives: An AGNI Portfolio of Asian Adoptee Diaspora Writing. His writing appears in Here: Poems for the Planet, with an introduction by the Dalai Lama; Indivisible: Poems of Social Justice, with an introduction by Common; and Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, among others. Born in Daejeon, Korea and adopted to the United States at ten months, he lives and teaches in Fresno, California.
Preeti Vangani is the author of two poetry collections: Mother Tongue Apologize (2019), and Fifty Mothers, forthcoming in February 2026. Her work has been published in AGNI, The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner among other places. Her debut short story won the 2021 Pen/Dau Emerging Writers Prize. A grant recipient from San Francisco Arts Commission and YBCA, she uses her fellowships to facilitate poetry workshops rooted in writing grief through joy. She has an MFA in Writing from University of San Francisco and teaches in the program.
Maw Shein Win's latest full-length poetry collection is Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn, 2024). Her previous full-length collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn, 2020) was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for the PEN America Open Book Award, and shortlisted for the Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. Her work has recently been published in The American Poetry Review, The Margins, The Bangalore Review, and other literary journals. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA. Along with Dawn Angelicca Barcelona and Mary Volmer, she is a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse, a literary community. mawsheinwin.com