The Fifth Annual 2003 Hawai`i Fall Festival of Writers--"Visions of (Dis)location: Native, Immigrant, Settler"

About the Guest Writers

This year's Fall Celebration features Martin Espada, Joy Harjo, Haunani-Kay Trask, and Kathleen Tyau, invited guests, who will take part in the Evening Reading as well as participate in the afternoon Discussion Panels with Tammy Hailiopua Baker, Lee Cataluna, and Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, three playwrights, who, with fellow playwright Alani Apio, are celebrating the launch of their publication He Leo Hou, A New Voice, a collection by Bamboo Ridge Press.

Martin Espada -- Called "the Latin poet of his generation", Martin Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1957. His seventh collection, Alabanza: New and Selected Poems (1982-2002) was recently published by Norton. Marge Piercy writes: "With these new and selected poems, you can grasp how powerful a poet Martin Espada is--his range, his compassion, his astonishing images, his sense of history, his knowledge of the lives on the underbelly of cities, his bright anger, his tenderness, his humor." Sandra Cisneros says: "Martin Espada is the Pablo Neruda of North American authors." An earlier collection of Espada's work, Imagine the Angels of Bread (Norton), won an American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Another volume, Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover's Hands (Curbstone), won the Paterson Poetry Prize and the PEN/Revson Fellowship. His poems have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Harper's, The Nation, and The Best American Poetry. A book of essays, called Zapata's Disciple, was published by South End Press and received an Independent Publisher Book Award. Much of his writing arises from his Puerto Rican heritage and his work experiences, ranging from bouncer to tenant lawyer. He is also the editor of Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination from Curbstone Press. Espada is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where he teaches creative writing, Latino poetry, and the work of Pablo Neruda.

Joy Harjo -- Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1951. Her books of poetry include How We Became Human; New and Selected Poems (W.W.Norton, 2002); and A Map to the New World: Poems (2000); The Woman Who Fell From the Sky (1994) which received the Oklahoma Book Arts Award; In Mad Love and War (1990) which received the American Book Award and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award; Secrets from the Center of the World (1989); She Had Some Horses (1983); and What Moon Drove Me to This? (1979). She also performs her poetry and plays saxophone with her band Poetic Justice. Her many honors include The American Indian Distinguished Achievment in the Arts Award, the Josephine Miles Poetry Award, the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, and fellowships from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Witter Bynner Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.Harjo is a full professor at UCLA in American Indian Studies and English. She lives in Honolulu, Hawaii, and is currently serving as Distinguished Visiting Writer for Fall 2003 at the University of Hawaii in Manoa, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses.

Haunani-Kay Trask --Haunani-Kay Trask has been a leader in the Native Hawaiian community for twenty years. She has authored four books, including From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai'i, widely considered a masterpiece of contemporary resistance writing. Trask is a major Hawaiian poet, combining the traiditional lyric Hawaiian voice within thepolitical realm. She has published two major collections of poetry, Light in the Crevice Never Seen, and her latest, Night is a Sharkskin Drum. Trask was a writer-in-residence at the Institure of American Indian Arts in 1996 and has read and performed at more than a dozen writers festivals throughout the United States, Canada and New Zealand. She was co-producer and scriptwriter of the award-winning documentary, Act of War: The Overthrow of the Hawaiian Nation (1993). Trask is Professor of Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa.

Kathleen Tyau -- Kathleen Tyau is the author of two novels set in Hawaii: A Little Too Much Is Enough (1995) an Makai (1991), both published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award and finalist for the Oregon Book Award and the Barnes and Noble Best New Writers Award, Tyau is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Oregon Arts Commission, Literary Arts, Inc. and Fishtrap. Her stories and essays have been published in numerous literary reviews, including Bamboo Ridge Journal, Story, ZYZZYVA, Glimmer Train, Boulevard, and in anthologies in the U.S. and abroad, such as Growing Up Local, Intersecting Circles, The Stories that Shape Us, and The Writer's Journal. Tyau has lectured and read widely, at Pacific University, Lewis and Clark College, the Northwest Writing Institute, Fishtrap, Northwest Academy, Mountain Writers Center, and other public and private institutions and writers workshops. She judged the Kiriyama Pacific Rim prize for two years and currently serves on the Fishtrap Advisory Board.