Let Me Write Myself Here: Asian Poets in the Midwest
Join the Wisconsin Poetry Festival for a poetry reading and discussion by three debut Asian American writers with ties to the Midwest.
How does one write the self through migration and diaspora? “Let me write myself here,” a line from Saba Keramati’s debut full length collection, Self-Mythology, titles an event that creates a space for connection for poets all writing about alienation, exile, inheritance, and loss across vastly different contexts. For Keramati, Meg Kim, and Mandy Moe Pwint Tu, The Midwest marks a place of rootedness. Across these three books, each speaker finds the act of writing poetry to be one of devotion, grief, creation, and resistance as they seek language’s role in their own lives and in the inextricability of the personal and political.
Keramati’s debut poetry collection Self-Mythology chronicles the speaker’s parents’ immigration stories, as well as her own coming-of-age in a landscape that is unwelcoming to her identities.
Meg Kim’s Invisible Cartographies, a debut chapbook, is a mapmaking of Kim’s familial landscapes through language, exploring Oregon, Korea, and the Midwest through the complexities of diaspora.
Fablemaker by Mandy Moe Pwint Tu draws on the speculative, following the speaker as she contends with her father’s untimely death, Myanmar’s political crisis, and her de facto exile to the United States.
Saba Keramati
Saba Keramati is a Chinese-Iranian writer from California. She is the author of Self-Mythology, selected by Patricia Smith for the Miller Williams Poetry Series. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Lit Hub, Kenyon Review, Yale Review, The Margins, and other publications. She currently lives in Dearborn, Michigan.
Meg Kim
Meg Kim is a writer from Southern Oregon and the author of the chapbook Invisible Cartographies, winner of the 2023 New Delta Review Chapbook Contest. Her poems have appeared in Nimrod, Gulf Coast, and TriQuarterly, among others. A recipient of a creative writing grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, they hold an MFA from the University of Wisconsin—Madison and currently call Chicago home.
Mandy Moe Pwint Tu
Mandy Moe Pwint Tu is a pile of ginkgo leaves in a trench coat and the author of Fablemaker (Gaudy Boy, 2025). Her work has appeared in Poetry, Beloit Poetry Journal, Porter House Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. She has published three poetry chapbooks: Monsoon Daughter (Thirty West Publishing House, 2022); Unsprung (Newfound, 2023); and Burma Girl (Gold Line Press, 2026). She received her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was the Hoffman-Halls Emerging Artist Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.