Hieu Minh Nguyen and Angel Nafis: Week of Sept. 13, 2020

Thursday, Sept. 17, 7 p.m.: Live from Prairie Lights

Join poets (and pals) Hieu Minh Nguyen and Angel Nafis for a week of special events featuring conversations about the craft of poetry, literary friendships, queerness, the art of mentorship, and working and surviving in a time of social upheaval. To register for the event go to Prairie Lights Live.

Tuesday, Sept. 15, 7:30 p.m.: Writers@Grinnell WebEx roundtable for students, staff, and faculty.

This event is an informal conversation open only to members of the Grinnell College community. Details (link) to come via email.

Hieu and Angel will also be doing events with the Stonewall Resource Center, the Black Womxn’s Interest Group, and Asian-American student groups while on our virtual campus.

Hieu Minh Nguyen

Hieu Minh Nguyen is the author of This Way to the Sugar (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014) and Not Here (Coffee House Press, 2018). Winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, both of his collections of poetry were also finalists for a Minnesota Book Award and a Lambda Literary Award. In 2019 Hieu was awarded the Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. He is also 2018 Ruth Lily and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow, 2018 McKnight Writing Fellow, a Kundiman Fellow, a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, the recipient of the Minnesota Emerging Writers’ Grant, and an Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. He is a poetry editor for Muzzle Magazine. He lives in Oakland and is a graduate from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Angel Nafis

Angel Nafis is the author of BlackGirl Mansion (Red Beard Press/ New School Poetics, 2012). She earned her BA at Hunter College and is an MFA candidate in poetry at Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared in The BreakBeat Poets Anthology, The Rumpus, Poetry Magazine, Buzzfeed Reader and elsewhere. Nafis is a Cave Canem fellow, the recipient of a Millay Colony residency, an Urban Word NYC mentor, and the founder and curator of the Greenlight Bookstore Poetry Salon. In 2011 she represented NYC at both the Women of the World Poetry Slam and the National Poetry Slam. She is half of the ODES FOR YOU TOUR with poet, musician and visual artist Shira Erlichman and with poet Morgan Parker, she runs The Other Black Girl Collective, an internationally touring Black Feminist poetry duo. Facilitating writing workshops and reading poems globally, she lives in Brooklyn. In 2016, Nafis was a recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and in 2017 she was awarded a Creative Writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.