Events
W. Todd Kaneko and Kia Penso
Kalamazoo Book Arts Center Gallery
Gallery reception with the artists John McKaig and Caroline Allen, Saturday, April 22, 6:00-7:00 pm
Reading by W. Todd Kaneko and Kia Penso, April 22, 7:00-8:30 pm
This reading will be streamed through zoom:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84262532809?pwd=QmNNY0FLZWJuQ0pjZXVMcVJjVTF1UT09
Meeting ID: 842 6253 2809
Passcode: 644877
This reading will celebrate the publication of letterpress printed editions of two new books, Afterlife, a long poem by W. Todd Kaneko with images by John McKaig; and The Ghosts, two short stories by Kia Penso with illustrations by Caroline Allen.
Photo credit: Tyler Steimle
W. Todd Kaneko is a Kundiman Fellow and Associate Professor at Grand Valley State University. His newest book, This Is How the Bone Sings (Black Lawrence Press 2020), is about Minidoka, the concentration camp built in Idaho for Japanese Americans during World War II. It draws from myth and folk tale to talk about the legacy of trauma across multiple generations in America. He is also the author of The Dead Wrestler Elegies, 2nd Edition (New Michigan Press 2023), a collection of elegies and illustrations that cover themes of loss, love, regret, and redemption, mining the history of professional wrestling to examine complex relationships between fathers and sons. He is co-author with Amorak Huey of Poetry: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury Academic 2018) and Slash / Slash, winner of the 2020 Diode Editions Chapbook Contest. His work has appeared in Poetry, Blackbird, Best Small Fictions, and many other places. Kaneko will supply the poetry manuscript for a limited-edition book.
Kia Penso is a compulsive reader and writer. She grew up in Jamaica, where the landscape was nothing like the places in most of the books, but she loved it and the books anyway.
At the University of California at Santa Barbara‘s College of Creative Studies (CCS), she learned to see the study of literature and the arts as an unending lifetime pursuit without which she probably never would be happy no matter what else she might be doing. After completing a PhD in English, she taught literature and writing at CCS and at Grinnell College. She then left academic life, working as a journalist, technical writer and editor while pursuing her own creative work.
Her current project is a collection of short stories and essays that, “range in topics among Greek myth, English novels and poetry, Jean Rhys, African American gospel music, calypso, and my own personal Caribbean history, which is in some ways very typical of the newness and strangeness of the history that I examine in these literary works.” In her introduction to the Berkshire Classics re-issue of Marvin Mudrick's On Culture and Literature, Penso wrote: "Only the imagination can teach the imagination, that's all, and it only teaches imagination that is seeking that kind of teacher, perhaps without even knowing it." Penso’s book of short stories, The Ghosts, has been produced as a limited-edition letterpress book by the Kalamazoo Book Arts Center, with images by Caroline Allen, funded by an Arts Projects grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Penso lives in Washington, DC, where she supports her writing and art habits by editing and writing for large multilateral international institutions in the public sector. She also edits books for individual authors. She is married to the political humor writer Roy Edroso.
Gallery Hours
Monday - Friday10 a.m. - 5 p.m.
or by appointment
The KBAC is committed to inclusion of all members of the community regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, gender identity and expression, age, or ability.
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KBAC’s educational and artistic programming is made possible through the generosity of these organizations, other private funders, and people like you.
