
ABOUT THE BOOK

BABE is about owning the room. It’s about physical touch. It’s about dancing (actually, grinding) on a heart-shaped bed and starring as the leading lady of the film (no matter how risqué it gets). At the core of this collection, the Chinese American speaker questions the conventions around her, dating back to her origin story as a Hong Kongnese child who would get up to stretch in the middle of Cantonese class. As an adult, she questions her fate since the family fortune teller screwed her over with a lazy fortune, yet got her brother’s completely spot-on. She triple sonnets her way through confrontations of queerphobia in her family, the trauma from a past relationship with a significantly older man, and the constant male gaze. She pays homage to the first girls who ever loved her in this analysis of sexuality, queerness, popular culture, and resilience. She’s baby forever.

BABE
LAUNCH READING
LINEUP
RITA MOOKERJEE
Rita Mookerjee is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Women's and Gender Studies Program at Iowa State University. Her research interests include postcolonial women's literature, food studies, and queer theory. She holds a PhD in Literature from Florida State University. In 2019-2020, she was a Fulbright Fellow to Jamaica.
Her critical work has been featured in the Routledge Companion of Literature and Food, the Bloomsbury Handbook to Literary and Cultural Theory, and the Bloomsbury Handbook of Twenty-First Century Feminist Theory. Her poetry is featured in Juked, Aaduna, New Orleans Review, Sinister Wisdom, and the Baltimore Review. She is the author of the chapbook Becoming the Bronze Idol (Bone & Ink Press, 2019). Currently, Rita is the Assistant Poetry Editor of Split Lip Magazine and a poetry staff reader for [PANK]. She is the Poetry Editor and Sex, Kink, and the Erotic Editor for Honey Literary.
NABILA LOVELACE
Nabila Lovelace is a first-generation Queens born poet; her people hail from Trinidad and Nigeria. Sons of Achilles, her debut book of poems, is out now through YesYes Books. You can currently find her kicking it in Tuscaloosa.
JOSHUA NGUYEN
Joshua Nguyen is the author of Come Clean (University of Wisconsin Press), winner of the 2021 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry and the chapbook, American Lục Bát for My Mother (Bull City Press). He is a queer Vietnamese-American writer, a collegiate national poetry slam champion (CUPSI), and a native Houstonian. He has received fellowships from Kundiman, Tin House, Sundress Academy For The Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. He has been published in The Offing, Wildness,The Texas Review, Auburn Avenue, and elsewhere. He has also been featured on both the "VS" podcast and "The Slowdown". He is a bubble tea connoisseur and loves a good pun. He is a PhD student at The University of Mississippi, where he also received his MFA.
JANE WONG
Jane Wong is the author of How to Not Be Afraid of Everything (Alice James, 2021) and Overpour (Action Books, 2016). Her debut memoir, Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City is forthcoming from Tin House in 2023. 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. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Western Washington University.
I.S. JONES
I. S. Jones is a queer American Nigerian poet and music journalist. She is a Graduate Fellow with The Watering Hole and holds fellowships from Callaloo, BOAAT Writer’s Retreat, and Brooklyn Poets. I. S. hosts a month-long workshop every April called The Singing Bullet. I.S. coedited The Young African Poets Anthology: The Fire That Is Dreamed Of (Agbowó, 2020) and served as the inaugural nonfiction guest editor for Lolwe. She is a Book Editor with Indolent Books, Editor at 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, freelances for Complex, Earmilk, NBC News THINK, and elsewhere. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Guernica, Frontier Poetry, Washington Square Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Hobart Pulp, The Rumpus, The Offing, Shade Literary Arts, Blood Orange Review, Honey Literary, and elsewhere. Her work was chosen by Khadijah Queen as a finalist for the 2020 Sublingua Prize for Poetry. She is an MFA candidate in Poetry at UW–Madison where she was the recipient of Kemper K. Knapp University Fellowship & Hoffman-Halls Emerging Artist Fellowship. Alongside Sofia Fey and Belinda Munyeza, she is one-third of The Luminaries, a poetry workshop that provides free education and programming to the public. Her chapbook Spells Of My Name (Newfound, 2021) is available now. She splits her time between Southern California and New York.
KENDRA DECOLO
Kendra DeColo is the author of I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers from the World (BOA Editions, 2021), My Dinner with Ron Jeremy (Third Man Books, 2016) and Thieves in the Afterlife (Saturnalia Books, 2014), selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the 2013 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. She is a recipient of a 2019 Poetry Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and has received awards and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Millay Colony, Split this Rock, and the Tennessee Arts Commission. Her poems and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, Tin House Magazine, Waxwing, Los Angeles Review, Bitch Magazine, VIDA, and elsewhere. She teaches at the Hugo House and she lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
ZEESHAN KHAN PATHAN
Zeeshan Khan Pathan attended Washington University in Saint Louis as a Kenneth E. Hudson Scholar where he studied poetry with Mary Jo Bang, Carl Phillips, and Fatemeh Keshavarz. He speaks several languages and translates from Urdu, Turkish, & Persian. At Columbia University, he received a fellowship to study poetry at the graduate level and he completed his M.F.A. under Lucie Brock-Broido. Zeeshan is interested in world literature and literary theory, the poetry of the Middle East and India, and he also writes short fiction. His poetry has been featured in Tarpaulin Sky Press Magazine and poems are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, in an anthology of contemporary American Muslim writings by Red Hen Press, and in other journals.
RICKY RAY
Ricky Ray is a disabled poet who lives with his wife and his old brown dog in the old green hills of the Hudson Valley. He is the author of Fealty (Diode Editions, 2019), Quiet, Grit, Glory (Broken Sleep Books, 2020) and The Sound of the Earth Singing to Herself (Fly on the Wall Press, 2020), which was longlisted for the Laurel Prize. He was educated at Columbia University and the Bennington Writing Seminars, and his awards include the Cormac McCarthy Prize, the Ron McFarland Poetry Prize, a Zoeglossia fellowship and a Liam Rector fellowship. His work appears widely in periodicals and anthologies, including The American Scholar, The Moth, Waxwing, Salamander, et al.
ROSEBUD BEN-ONI
Born to a Mexican mother and Jewish father, Rosebud Ben-Oni is the winner of 2019 Alice James Award for If This Is the Age We End Discovery (March 2021), which received a Starred Review in Booklist, and the author of turn around, BRXGHT XYXS (Get Fresh Books, 2019). Her chapbook 20 Atomic Sonnets, which appears online in Black Warrior Review (2020), is part of a larger future project called The Atomic Sonnets, which she began in 2019, in honor of the Periodic Table’s 150th Birthday.
She is a recipient of a 2021 City Arts Corps grant, a 2021 Queens Arts Fund grant from the Queens Council for the Arts, a 2014 NYFA Fellowship in Poetry and a 2013 CantoMundo Fellow. Her work appears in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Poetry Society of America (PSA), The Poetry Review (UK), Poetry Daily, Tin House, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, Electric Literature, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Ecotone, The Missouri Review, The Journal, Hunger Mountain, The Adroit Journal, The Southeast Review, Poetry Northwest, Arts & Letters, North American Review, among others.
In 2017, her poem "Poet Wrestling with Angels in the Dark" was commissioned by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in NYC, and published by The Kenyon Review Online. Her poem “Dancing with Kiko on the Moon” was recently featured in Tracy K. Smith’s The Slowdown. She has an essay forthcoming in Halimah Marcus’s new anthology HORSE GIRLS (Harper Perennial, 2021) alongside Carmen Maria Machado, Adrienne Celt, T Kira Madden, Maggie Shipstead and others. She’s part of the QUEENSBOUND project, and took part in The Onassis Foundation’s ENTER exhibition. She lives in New York City, where she teaches poetry workshops at Catapult, The Speakeasy Project and UCLA Writers’ Program online; she also writes weekly for The Kenyon Review blog.
ALAN CHAZARO
Alan Chazaro is the author of This Is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album (Black Lawrence Press, 2019) and Piñata Theory (Black Lawrence Press, 2020). He is a graduate of June Jordan’s Poetry for the People program at UC Berkeley, a former Lawrence Ferlinghetti Fellow at the University of San Francisco, and co-founding editor of HeadFake, an online NBA zine. He chirps about Mexican memes, the Golden State Warriors, and Bay Area rap on Twitter @alan_chazaro
JUSTIN GREENE
Justin Greene is a small press editor at Entropy, where he has organized the Where to Submit list for the past 3.5 years. He is the co-founder and editor in chief of Ki, an editor of Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, and a member of the editorial board for Anthropology and Humanism. His writing has appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, The Southeast Review, and elsewhere. He is pursuing a PhD in anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.
AMORAK HUEY
Amorak Huey is author of four books of poems including Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress Publications, 2021). Co-author with W. Todd Kaneko of the textbook Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2018) and the chapbook Slash/Slash (Diode, 2021), Huey teaches writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. His previous books are Boom Box (Sundress, 2019), Seducing the Asparagus Queen (Cloudbank, 2018), and Ha Ha Ha Thump (Sundress, 2015), as well as two chapbooks.
STEPHANIE NIU
Stephanie Niu is the author of She Has Dreamt Again of Water, winner of the 2021 Diode Chapbook Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Georgia Review, Southeast Review, Poets Readings the News, and Storm Cellar, as well as scientific collaborations including the 11th Annual St.Louis River Summit. She lives in New York City. Find her on Twitter as @niusteph.
ANTONY FANGARY
Antony Fangary is a Coptic-American Poet, Educator, and Artist living in San Francisco. His poetry has appeared in The Oakland Review, New American Writing, Interim, The Sycamore Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. His paintings have been featured in Art Shows around San Francisco and Los Angeles.
His chapbook, HARAM, was published by Etched Press in 2019. Antony was Honorable Mention of the Ina Coolbrith Poetry Prize, Finalist for the 2019 Wabash Poetry Prize, and Runner-up for the 2020 Test Site Poetry Series Book Prize.
His work has received support from the San Francisco Arts Commission, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, California Arts Council, and the Center for Cultural Innovation.
Antony holds a Masters of Fine Arts from San Francisco State University.
AVNI VYAS
Avni Vyas is the author of Little God (Burrow Press 2021) and co-author of Candy In Our Brains (CutBank 2014). She serves as the essay editor for Honey Literary and poetry editor at The Offending Adam. Her work has been published in journals such as Meridian, Grist, Conjunctions, Third Coast, Juked, and others. She teaches in the Writing Program at New College of Florida. You can visit her on Instagram (@singstooloud) and Twitter (@AvniDangerfield).
JESSICA Q. STARK
Jessica Q. Stark is a poet and educator living in Jacksonville, Florida. Her first full-length poetry collection, Savage Pageant, was published by Birds, LLC in March 2020 and was named one of the "Best Poetry Books of 2020" in the Boston Globe and in Hyperallergic. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks, including INNANET (forthcoming 2021, The Offending Adam). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Pleiades, The Southeast Review, Poetry Daily, Verse, Carolina Quarterly, wildness, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Hobart Pulp, Tupelo Quarterly, Glass Poetry Journal, and others. She serves as a Poetry Editor for AGNI and the Comics Editor for Honey Literary. She teaches writing at the University of North Florida.
TANEUM BAMBRICK
Taneum Bambrick is the author of Intimacies, Received (Copper Canyon Press 2022) and Vantage, which was selected by Sharon Olds for the 2019 American Poetry Review/Honickman first book award (APR 2019). Her chapbook, Reservoir, was selected by Ocean Vuong for the 2017 Yemassee Chapbook Prize. A graduate of the University of Arizona’s MFA program, she is the winner of an Academy of American Poets University Prize, an Environmental Writing Fellowship from the Vermont Studio Arts Center, and the 2018 BOOTH Nonfiction Contest. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in The Nation, The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, PEN, Narrative, The Missouri Review, 32 Poems, West Branch, and elsewhere. She has received scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. A 2020 Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she currently teaches creative writing online for Central Washington University, and the Book Reviews Editor for Pleiades Magazine.
DOROTHY CHAN
Dorothy Chan (she/they) is the author of most recently, BABE, a book forthcoming with Diode Editions this Winter 2021, in addition to Revenge of the Asian Woman (Diode Editions, 2019), Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold (Spork Press, 2018), and Chinatown Sonnets (New Delta Review, 2017). They were a 2020 and 2014 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship finalist, a 2020 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry for Revenge of the Asian Woman, and a 2019 recipient of the Philip Freund Prize in Creative Writing from Cornell University. Their work has appeared in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. Chan is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, Editor Emeritus of Hobart, Book Reviews Co-Editor of Pleiades, and Co-Founder and Editor in Chief of Honey Literary Inc., a 501(c)(3) literary arts organization. Visit their website at dorothypoetry.com
Chan received a PhD from Florida State University in 2019, an MFA from Arizona State University in 2015, and a BA from Cornell University in 2012.