Cynthia Oka and Jane Wong
SOUTH ORANGE, NJ — Watershed Literary Events, the spoken-word series sponsored by the Department of Cultural Affairs in South Orange, will host its first reading of the year on Sunday, March 13, at 2 p.m. on Zoom. The event is free and open to the public, and can be accessed at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85329267522.
March is also Women’s History Month and, for the first time in three years, Watershed will be featuring two outstanding women poets, Cynthia Dewi Oka and Jane Wong.
U.S. poet laureate Joy Harjo describes Oka’s work in her book “Salvage? as that of a modern “visionary, a word prophet.” Born in Bali, Indonesia, Oka immigrated to Vancouver, Canada, at the age of 10. Her work is informed by the complexities of her heritage and immigrant experiences; her 15 years organizing for gender, racial, economic and migrant justice; and her life as a young, single mother. A visual artist, performer, fiction and essay writer, as well as poet, Oka’s most recent collection of poems is “Fire Is Not a Country,” 2021; she is also the author of “Nomad of Salt and Hard Water,” 2016. Oka lives in Collingswood.
Wong, a poet and artist, has dedicated her latest poetry collection, “How to Not Be Afraid of Everything,” 2021, to her grandparents and to those lost in the Great Leap Forward. Her own mother survived the Great Famine in China during the 1960s. Wong is a self-described restaurant baby, having grown up in a Chinese American restaurant at the Jersey Shore. In much of her work, she reclaims “ghosts” of her past that invoke hunger, gluttony and food waste. An associate professor of creative writing at Western Washington University, Wong is also the author of the collection “Overpour,” 2016. Her debut memoir, “Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City,” is forthcoming from Tin House in 2023.
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