An Evening of Poetry with Sally Wen Mao and Debora Kuan

Barrett Bookstore is delighted to welcome poets Sally Wen Mao and Debora Kuan for an evening celebration their beautiful new collections of poetry. Light bites and drinks will be served. Doors open at 6PM, conversation begins at 6:30PM.

ABOUT SALLY WEN MAO

Sally Wen Mao is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection The Kingdom of Surfaces (Graywolf Press, 2023), and the debut fiction collection Ninetails (Penguin Books). She is also the author of two previous poetry collections, Oculus (Graywolf Press, 2019), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books, 2014). The recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, she was recently a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library and a Shearing Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute.

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ABOUT DEBORA KUAN

Debora Kuan is the author of three poetry collections, Lunch Portraits (Brooklyn Arts Press), XING (Saturnalia Books), and the forthcoming Women on the Moon (The Word Works). She has been awarded a U.S. Fulbright creative writing fellowship (Taiwan), University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop Graduate Merit Fellowship, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference work-study scholarship, multiple Pushcart Prize nominations, the NELLE Three Sisters Award, and residencies at Yaddo, Macdowell, and the Santa Fe Art Institute. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, The New Republic, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Boston Review, The Baffler, Fence, The Iowa Review, ZYZZYVA, and other publications, and her art criticism has appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Modern Painters, Paper Monument, and other magazines. She was included in the Brooklyn Poets Anthology, and her poem “Magic Lesson” was anthologized, along with poems by Richard Blanco, Eavan Boland, Billy Collins, Li Young-lee, Natasha Trethaway, and others, in Bedford Freeman Worth’s Advanced Language and Literature, 2nd edition.

Debora has served as a poetry juror for the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts and worked on the editorial masthead of Poetry magazine. She has also been a guest speaker at Hofstra University, Ithaca College, SUNY Potsdam, the Stony Brook Southampton MFA program, and Quinnipiac University. She has taught at the University of Iowa, The College of New Jersey, and the New York Institute of Technology, as well as through Brooklyn Poets and the 92Y.

Debora has also written about mental health and the mind-body connection for the National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine, editing and curating therapeutic practitioner courses on trauma, worthiness, and vulnerability taught by Bessel van der Kolk, Stephen Porges, and Ruth Lanius, among others.

A former fellow at the CUNY Writers’ Institute in Fiction and Nonfiction Writing, she received an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a BA in English literature from Princeton University. As of October 2020, she is the poet laureate of Wallingford, Connecticut, where she lives with her husband and children, and works remotely for the MIT Press as copywriting manager.

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