Join the East Side Freedom Library for a reading and conversation with Anni Liu and her award-winning collection of poetry Border Vista from Persea Books. For this virtual event, she will be in conversation with writers Sagirah Shahid and Sophia Kim.

Register here to join this event on Zoom. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with a link to join.

Of Border Vista, poet and essayist Ross Gay says “(W)e are witness to a wandering through all kinds of borders… I have scarcely in my life encountered more rapt and rapturous looking–or maybe I mean more enchanted looking, or maybe I mean enchanted listening–’stunned milkweed’ and ‘glossy teardrop seeds’ and so much more.” 

Border Vista intimately narrates the experience of being undocumented, or precariously documented, in America. In poems that consider migration as an ongoing process rather than a finite event, Anni Liu writes exquisitely and on fear (useful and paranoid) and agency, loneliness, and the way the violence of the carceral state shapes our most intimate relationships to each other and to the land.

Liu will be in conversation with poet, education and performance artist Sagirah Shahid and  fiction writer Sophia Epony Kim.

Anni Liu was born in Xī’ān in the year of the goat. She is the author of Border Vista, which won the 2021 Lexi Rudnitsky Prize from Persea Books, and her work is featured in Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, Ecotone, Two Lines, and elsewhere. She received an inaugural Undocupoets Fellowship and a Djanikian Scholarship from the Adroit Journal. She is currently working on a second book, translating the poetry of Dù Yá (度涯), and editing fiction and nonfiction at Graywolf Press.

A graduate of Macalester College, Sophia Epony Kim is an actor and writer. A founding member of the Asian American theater company Theater Mu, she has acted in theater and television in the United States and Korea. She was a Hertog Fellow in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Hunter College (CUNY) and a participant in Sewanee Writers’ Conference. The recipient of multiple grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board, she is currently working on her first novel about Koreans in the diaspora.

Sagirah Shahid is an African American Muslim poet, arts educator, and performing artist from Minneapolis, MN. She is a recipient of awards, fellowship, and residencies  from the Loft Literary Center, Minnesota Center for Book Arts, Twin Cities Media Alliance,  Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art and Muslim Advocates,  Strive Publishing,  Wisdom Ways, Nicollet Lanterns, and 826 MSP. In 2021 Sagirah was co-curator of the City of Saint Paul’s Sidewalk Poetry project and is a writer-in-residence with the Write Like Us program. When she isn’t creating art, Sagirah celebrates her life as an auntie, usually working part-time at some job so that she can explore poetry with the student-writers of Unrestricted Interest, a writing program and consultancy dedicated to supporting  neurodivergent learners  through creative writing. Sagirah’s children’s activity book Get Involved in a Book Club!  is available at Capstone press.

Order your copy of Border Vista from SubText Books HERE!