Introduction to Asian American Poetry

Who This Is For

Anyone with an interest in Asian American poetry!

Course Description

On the one hand, Asian American poetry in the twenty-first century is enjoying an increasing amount of community building and visibility. There are new publication venues, such as the Asian American Literary Review and Lantern Review, both established in 2010. The important arts organizations Kundiman (founded in 2004) and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop (founded in 1991) continue to extend their programming: the former established an annual book publication prize in 2009 and the latter launched the online magazines, The Margins and Open City, in 2012. Since 2023, the Asian American Literary Archive has been working on "preserving, creating, and animating Asian American literary history." The new century has also witnessed the first academic monographs on Asian American poetry and such groundbreaking scholarship has done much to historicize and interpret a rich body of work. Nevertheless, there is still more work to be done. Even if contemporary Asian American poetry has increased in richness, diversity, and magnitude over the past few decades, it continues to be understudied. This course hopes to rectify this fact by examining recent and contemporary Asian American poetry in books, anthologies, and literary journals.

What Enrollment Includes

• 6 course sessions conducted live on Zoom
• Course materials on the enrolled course site
• Access to session recordings for up to 1 month after the course ends
• Access to the Asian American Literary Archive community

Schedule Adjustments

Instructor(s)

• Michael Leong

  Michael Leong is a poet, critic, editor, and educator. His most recent books are Dear Vase Already Shattered Against the Fragile Floor (Black Square Editions, 2025) and Contested Records: The Turn to Documents in Contemporary North American Poetry (University of Iowa Press, 2020). He is Robert P. Hubbard Assistant Professor of Poetry at Kenyon College. He co-edits Journal of Modern Literature.