Samina Ali, Maw Shein Win, Christine Hyung-Oak Lee and Michelle Marie Robles Wallace will read at August 15th's Reading & Meeting. The authors and emcee Audrey Ferber all have intimate experiences of memory loss, either their own or caring for someone with memory loss and will be reading poetry or memoir on the theme of memory.
Christine Hyung-Oak Lee is a writer and the author of a memoir published by Ecco / Harper Collins, Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember, which was featured in Self Magazine, Time, The New York Times, and NPR’s Weekend Edition with Scott Simon. Her short stories and essays have appeared in ZYZZYVA, BuzzFeed, Guernica, and The New York Times.
Maw Shein Win's latest full-length poetry collection is Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn, 2024). Her previous full-length collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn, 2020) was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for the PEN America 2021 Open Book Award, and shortlisted for the Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. Her work has recently been published in JMWW, The American Poetry Review, The Margins, The Bangalore Review, and other journals, and she has work forthcoming in Alta Journal and Maintenant. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA, and is the 2025 Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime Achievement Awardee. Win's previous collections include Invisible Gifts and two chapbooks, Score and Bone and Ruins of a glittering palace. She teaches poetry in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco and in the Low Residency MFA Program at Dominican University. mawsheinwin.com
Samina Ali is an award-winning author, influential activist for Muslim women’s rights, popular public speaker, and curator of the groundbreaking global exhibition Muslima: Muslim Women’s Art & Voices.
Michelle Marie Robles Wallace explores healing and borders through fiction, memoir and visual arts. She has an MFA, is a recipient of two San Francisco Individual Artist Grants, a Janavi Held grant and has published fiction in Sun Song, From Sac, Somos en escrito and short memoir in Alpinist, Narratively, and Catapult, among others.
Audrey Ferber's essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, LILITH Magazine, INTIMA: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, First Person Personal, New World Writing, Best Women’s Travel Writing and elsewhere. She is at work on a memoir in essays about marriage and care-giving.