The Woodberry Poetry Room is honored to present a reading by Brandon Shimoda (author of The Afterlife Is Letting Go, 2024) and Mai Der Vang (author of Primordial, 2025).

Of Vang’s poetry, Carolyn Forché writes that the poems are marked by “deep attention, prismatic intelligence, and fearless truth.” Of Shimoda’s work, Anne Boyer praises his “complex lyric-historical landscape of borders, dreams, shrines and underworlds.”

Please join us for what promises to be an electrifying season finale event.

In-Person Attendance: Edison-Newman Room, Houghton Library 
Free and open to the public.  Doors open at 5:45pm.
 
Online Attendance: Livestreaming available via our YouTube Channel. 

BRANDON SHIMODA is the author of several books, most recently The Afterlife Is Letting Go, on the memory/forgetting of Japanese American incarceration (City Lights, 2024), which received the Colorado Book Award for Creative Nonfiction; and Hydra Medusa, poetry and prose from the US-Mexico borderlands (Nightboat, 2023). He is the co-editor, with Brynn Saito, of  The Gate of Memory: Poems by Descendants of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration (Haymarket Books, 2025), and, with Thom Donovan, To look at the sea is to become what one is: An Etel Adnan Reader (Nightboat, 2014). 

MAI DER VANG is the author of Primordial (Graywolf Press, 2025), Yellow Rain (Graywolf Press, 2021), and Afterland (Graywolf Press, 2017). Her honors include the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, an American Book Award, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the First Book Award from the Academy of American Poets, among others. The recipient of a Guggenheim and Lannan Literary Fellowship, she teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Fresno State and recently served as the Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University.