Looking forward to celebrating two amazing authors and their new books—How to Not Be Afraid of Everything by Jane Wong, a Kundiman fellow, and Cutlish by Rajiv Mohabir, winner of the 2015 Kundiman Prize! Join us for what’s going to be a fabulous book party featuring White Whale favorites Diana Khoi Nguyen and S. Brook Corfman. They’ll be joining us from their favorite diners (thanks to the power of virtual backgrounds).

Head to this event’s page on our website to order these writers’ books! Check out our website, where you can search our whole inventory or order any books we don’t have in stock, and don’t miss our lists of recommended and best-selling titles.

This event will be hosted on Zoom. You'll receive the link to the Zoom meeting the day of the event via email. Free registration/ticket sales will end at 6:30pm ET on 11/3. Please email events@whitewhalebookstore.com if you miss this cut-off and need a ticket. For questions, check out our FAQ for events here.

Praise for these books:

“Jane Wong makes a family's immigrant legacy visceral in piercing, deft language that can't be dodged or forgotten once read. Formally diverse and inventive, taut lines serve us images and insights that aren't easily digested about the brutal blessings that come with split inheritances from the homeland and ‘the frontier.’ These hardy poems faithfully recount and recover no matter how taxing this may be. What a searing paean to the living and the ghosts that both haunt and make anything possible! The title? Wong knows. She knows.” —Kamilah Aisha Moon

“Rajiv Mohabir’s Cutlish uses history to interrogate the word ‘home’ and all that it might mean to those who thrive in spite of homophobia, stereotype, and xenophobia. These poems are grounded in definite time and space in a voice that refuses to be silenced, ‘They are vexed you survive; that you / rise up from the pavement...’ But what I love most is to read a poet as disciplined and committed as Mohabir as he transforms and reinvents himself in tone, in subject, and in line: ‘Let’s get one thing queer—I’m no Sabu-like sidekick, / I’m the main drag. Ram Ram in a sari; salaam // on the street. I don’t speak Hindu, Paki, or Indian, / can’t control minds, have no psychic powers.’” —Jericho Brown

About the writers:

Jane Wong is the author of How to Not Be Afraid of Everything (Alice James, 2021) and Overpour (Action Books, 2016). Her poems and essays can be found in places such as Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019, Best American Poetry 2015, American Poetry Review, POETRY, AGNI, Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney's, and Ecotone. A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships and residencies from Harvard's Woodberry Poetry Room, the U.S. Fulbright Program, Artist Trust, the Fine Arts Work Center, Bread Loaf, Hedgebrook, Willapa Bay, the Jentel Foundation, Mineral School, and others. Her first solo art show, "After Preparing the Altar, the Ghosts Feast Feverishly" was exhibited at the Frye Art Museum in 2019. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Western Washington University.

Rajiv Mohabir, an immigrant to the United States, is the author of The Cowherd’s Son (Tupelo Press 2017, winner of the 2015 Kundiman Prize; Eric Hoffer Honorable Mention 2018) and The Taxidermist’s Cut (Four Way Books 2016, winner of the Four Way Books Intro to Poetry Prize, Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry in 2017), and translator of I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (1916) (Kaya Press 2019) which received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant Award and received the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. His memoir Antiman (Restless Books 2021) received the Restless Books’ New Immigrant Writing Prize. He received his PhD in English from the University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa and his MFA in Poetry from Queens College, CUNY. Currently he is an Assistant Professor of poetry in the MFA program at Emerson College. He lives in the Boston area.

S. Brook Corfman is the author of the poetry collections My Daily Actions, or The Meteorites, chosen by Cathy Park Hong for the Fordham POL Prize, and Luxury, Blue Lace, chosen by Richard Siken for the Autumn House Rising Writer Prize and called an "extraordinary debut" by Publishers Weekly. Thay are also the author of several chapbooks including Frames (Belladonna* Books). Born and raised in Chicago, they now live in a turret in Pittsburgh where they are completing a dissertation on the forms of knowledge in trans and genderqueer writing.

A poet and multimedia artist, Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Ghost Of (Omnidawn 2018) and recipient of a 2021 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition to winning the 92Y "Discovery" / Boston Review Poetry Contest, 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Colorado Book Award, she was also a finalist for the National Book Award and L.A. Times Book Prize. A Kundiman fellow, she is core faculty in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.