QUARTERLY POETRY EDITOR - 2016 Q4 - Brynn Saito

BRYNN SAITO is the author of two books of poetry, Power Made Us Swoon (2016) and The Palace of Contemplating Departure (2013), winner of the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award from Red Hen Press and finalist for the Northern California Book Award. She also co-authored, with Traci Brimhall, Bright Power, Dark Peace, a chapbook of poetry from Diode Editions. 

Brynn was born and raised in Fresno, CA to a Korean American mother and a Japanese American father. Her poetry has been anthologized by Helen Vendler and Ishmael Reed; it has also appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among other journals. She is the recipient of a Kundiman Asian American Poetry Fellowship, a grant from the California State Library’s Civil Liberties program, a Poets 11 award from the San Francisco Public Library, and Key West Literary Seminar’s Scotti Merrill Memorial Award.

Currently, Brynn lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she is an adjunct faculty member in the MFA program at the University of San Francisco and the BA program at California Institute of Integral Studies. She also co-directs, alongside Nikiko Masumoto, the Yonsei Memory Project, based in Fresno and the Bay Area, and co-founded the Center for Spiritual Life in Palo Alto, CA. In Spring, 2018, Brynn will be a Visiting Writer in Saint Mary's College's MFA program in Moraga, CA.

Previously, Brynn was the Kundiman Writer-in-Residence in the MFA program at Sierra Nevada College. She has also taught for Left Margin Lit in Berkeley and Kearny Street Workshop's Interdisciplinary Writers Lab for Bay Area writers of color. Brynn holds degrees from Sarah Lawrence College (MFA, creative writing), New York University(MA, religious studies), and UC Berkeley (BA, philosophy).

"Like any good american"

"Leaving footprints on waterfalls" and "Fifth infestation"

December 27, 2016

Alan Chazaro's "Leaving Footprints on Waterfalls" and Iris A. Law's "Fifth Infestation" round out December's coffee poems. Alan was a studnet of mine in University of San Francisco's MFA program and Iris and I met through Kundiman, a wonderful nonprofit dedicated to supporting Asian American writers. 

Poet, Alan Chazaro

Poets, Iris. A. Law and Mia Ayumi Malhotra

"Family Farm" and "one kind of beauty"

December 22, 2016

I met the poet, Peter Mishler, at Bread Loaf, a writers conference, a few years back; his beautiful poem, "Family Farm," appears both in Drunken Boat and in December's coffee roasts. Peter's book of poetry is out from Sarabande books in the spring of 2018. Robin Ekiss, whose "One Kind of Beauty" was printed in mid-December coffee bags, is a fellow local Bay Area poet. Listen to Robin read from her wonderful collection, The Mansion of Happiness, below.