Claire Hong: Lunch Poems

LUNCH POEMS READING: 12:10 – 1 pm
Morrison Library (located in Doe Library), UC Berkeley

CRAFT TALK & CONVERSATION: 4 – 5:15 pm
Hearst Field Annex D23 (ARC)

Presented by the Arts Research Center & the English Department with support from Engaging the Senses Foundation, Dr. and Mrs. Tom Colby, the UC Berkeley Library, The Morrison Library Fund, and the dean’s office of the College of Letters and Science.

This event is part of UC Berkeley’s A Year on Angel Island project.

About UPEND: The book loosely navigates the archived immigration trial of Hong On, a biracial Alaska Native-Chinese man, in 1912 on Angel Island, CA during the Chinese Exclusion Act. Hong On was born in San Francisco, CA in 1895 and was orphaned shortly after. The concepts of U.S. government-designated recreational spaces, genocide, and intergenerational trauma are examined by Hong On’s granddaughter, the author, who sees imperialistic residue in product, place, and color naming. At the core of this book is the speaker’s Alaska Native great grandmother who is named “Unknown: Indian” on Hong On’s birth certificate.

“UPEND is a call to action, a living archive, a mirror of our shared public and private HIStories, a conjuration of ancestral lineages, the unknowns and the unearthed, a summoning the hypocrisy of codification and a continuous glimpse of the violence and residue that ripples throughout geographies, family lineages and into our present day. Upend is a riveting poetic journey of scholarship, retrieval and speaking truth to power.” -Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle

CLAIRE HONG is the author of Upend (Noemi Press), which was longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award. She received a Stegner Fellowship in Poetry from Stanford University (2019-2021) and has creative writing degrees from the University of Arizona (MFA) and Pratt Institute (BFA). She was born in San Francisco, CA and currently lives in Tucson, AZ where she works to distribute traditional, arid adapted seeds.

Dedicated to traditional foodways, land stewardship, and multigenerational community work, she has held positions at City Slicker Farms (Oakland, CA), Radical Family Farms (Sebastopol, CA), Las Milpitas Community Farm (Tucson, AZ), the US Forest Service (Carson National Forest, NM), and Southwest Youth Services (Albuquerque, NM). 

She has done editorial work for Honey Literary, Pleiades, Contra Viento, DIAGRAM, the Sonora Review, and Litmus Press. 

If you require accommodations to participate in the Lunch Poems event, please contact coordinator Noah Warren, poems-library@berkeley.edu or 401-632-8032, with as much advance notice as possible, at least 7-10 days before the event. The Lunch Poems series, founded by Professor Robert Hass, is under the direction of Professor Geoffrey G. O’Brien.
 
If you require accommodations to participate in the Public Craft Talk & Conversation, please contact ARC Associate Director Laurie Macfee, lmacfee@berkeley.edu. This event is part of ARC’s Poetry & the Senses program and their year-long focus on indigeneity and reclamation.