MFA Writing Program Visiting Artist Series: No Need to Perish: Tenacity & Indie Publishing: Two Dollar Radio, Kaya Press, Poets & Writers and Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency

CalArts, Butler Building 4

CRITICAL STUDIES: This evening's panel is dedicated to the can-do spirit of independent publishing, from the perspectives of four experienced and dedicated professionals in the field who also have had a direct impact on the public presence of CalArts MFA Writing Program alums. Cheryl Klein of Poets & Writers, Eric Obenauf of Two Dollar Radio, Patricia Wakida of Kaya Press and Elise Capron of Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency will present their roles, responsibilities, objectives and experiences within the world of literature, as well as engage in discussion about publication prospects, preparedness and procedures for the emerging writers, editors, publishers, agents and arts administrators among you.

Cheryl Klein directs the California office of Poets & Writers, Inc., where she has worked since graduating from CalArts in 2002. She is the author of Lilac Mines (Manic D Press) and The Commuters, which won City Works Press’ Ben Reitman Award. She recently received a grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation to complete a novel about wayward circus performers. Her fiction has appeared in The Normal School, Other, and several anthologies.

Poets & Writers, Inc., is the primary source of information, support, and guidance for creative writers. Founded in 1970, it is the nation's largest nonprofit literary organization serving poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers. Our national office is located in New York City. Our California branch office is based in Los Angeles.

Eric Obenauf is the publisher and editor in chief of Two Dollar Radio. His writing on the publishing industry has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, and other places. He was spotlighted by the industry trade magazine Publishers Weekly as one of 50 up-and-coming individuals working in publishing under the age of 40.

Two Dollar Radio is a family-run book publishing outfit based in Columbus, Ohio, whose titles have been honored by the National Book Foundation, chosen as Editors' Choice selections by the New York Times Book Review, and made year-end best-of lists at O: The Oprah Magazine, Time Out New York, NPR, and The Believer. The Seattle Stranger envisioned them leading a “dream industry” out of the wreckage of corporate publishing.

Patricia Wakida is a writer, artist and cultural worker currently based in Los Angeles, CA, after twenty-five years in Oakland, CA. She was born in San Diego, California and raised between Honolulu, Hawaii and Fresno, California. She is the editor of two publications on the Japanese American experience, Only What We Could Carry: The Japanese American Internment Experience, and Unfinished Message: the collected works of Toshio Mori, and served as project coordinator for dozens of other publications on California history.
 
She has worked as a literary and community historian in the state of California for the past fifteen years, most recently as Associate Curator of History at the Japanese American National Museum. She has extensive experience working in literary communities, including nearly a decade with cultural institution Heyday Books, the Oakland Museum of California, the National Japanese American Historical Society, California Council for the Humanities, California State Library, the California Historical Society and the Alliance for California Traditional Artists. She has served on various non-profit boards including Mills College Alumnae Association, Poets & Writers California, San Francisco Center for the Book, Kaya Press, California Studies Association and Heyday Institute.
 
Patricia has worked as an apprentice papermaker in Gifu, Japan and as an apprentice letterpress printer and hand bookbinder in California; she maintains her own linoleum block and letterpress business under the Wasabi Press imprint.

Kaya Press has been publishing cutting-edge Asian diasporic writers for more than 15 years. Kaya and its authors have won numerous awards, including the Gregory Kolovakas Prize for Outstanding New Literary Press, the American Book Award, the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award, the PEN Beyond Margins Open Book Prize, the Asian American Writers' Workshop Award, and the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Prize.

Kaya was the name of a tribal confederation of six Korean city-states that existed from the middle of the first until the sixth century CE. Although the Kaya kingdom was an iron-age culture, it is remembered as a utopia of learning, music, and the arts due to its trade and communication with China, Japan, and India.

The word “Kaya” has meaning in many major languages. In Japanese it is “summer night” or a type of yew tree that withstands harsh environmental conditions. In Malay, “kaya” means “rich,” in Indonesian, “prosperous,” and in Tagalog “to be able.” In Sanskrit, “kaya” means “body,” and in Turkish it means “rock.” In Zulu, “kaya” means “home.”
                                                                                       

Elise Capron is an agent at the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency, which was established nearly 30 years ago and is known for guiding the careers of many best-selling fiction and non-fiction authors, including Amy Tan, Lisa See, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chitra Divakaruni, Eric Foner, Chalmers Johnson, and many more. Elise is most interested in serious character-driven literary fiction, well-written narrative nonfiction, and short story collections.

A graduate of Emerson College, Elise holds a BFA in Writing, Literature and Publishing, and served on the editorial staff of the Emerson Review during her time there. She interned at Harcourt and the Dijkstra Agency before joining the agency full-time in late 2003.

Elise is interested in fiction that has unforgettable writing, a terrific narrative voice/tone, and memorable characters. She loves novels with an unusual or eccentric edge, and is drawn to stories she has never heard before. On the nonfiction front, Elise is looking for many of these same qualities: fascinating true stories told in a compelling way. She aims to work with writers who are getting their work published regularly in magazines and who have a realistic sense of the market and their audience. Some of Elise's recent and soon-to-be-published books include Tiphanie Yanique's How to Escape from a Leper Colony (Graywolf) and The Land of Love and Drowning (Riverhead), Maureen McHugh’s After the Apocalypse which was picked as one of the “Top Ten Best Books of 2011” by Publishers Weekly (Small Beer Press), Courtney Brkic’s The Sun in Another Sky (Little Brown), Rikki Ducornet's Netsuke (Coffee House), Jonathon Keats' Virtual Words (Oxford) and The Book Of The Unknown (Random House), Jack Shuler's Blood and Bone (University of South Carolina) and The Noose: A History (Public Affairs).