51�ԹϺ���

“Our Dangerous Horizons: A Symposium on Writing Race and Place” invites the public to consider themes of grief and vitality alongside Asian and Pacific Islander poets and writers. Moderated by Muriel Leung (Black Mountain Institute 117° Fellow) and Mark Padoongpatt (51�ԹϺ���’s Neon Pacific Initiative), this event will include discussion of racial climate disaster, the militarized destruction of land, waters, and people, and writing into multiple world endings. Ultimately, this event is an effort to envision a new and empowered future for all of us. Featured speakers include Nicola Andrews (Overseas Experience), JM Huck (We Write Las Vegas), Sheila Navarro (We Write Las Vegas), and Lehua Taitano (Inside Me an Island).

Featured Speakers:

Nicola Andrews (ia/she/they) is a poet, librarian, and educator currently living on Ohlone territory. She is originally from Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa; and is a member of the Ngāti Paoa iwi of Māori and Pākehā whakapapa. She works as the Open Education Librarian for the University of San Francisco, where her research includes Indigenous information literacy, Māori Data Sovereignty, and how historical trauma impacts Indigenous library workers. 

JM Huck is an MFA candidate at 51�ԹϺ��� and current staff member of Interim Poetics. Her poetry has been nominated for “Best of the Net,” and in 2024 the literary arts group she co-founded, We Write Las Vegas, joined the Nevada Arts Council Teaching Artists Roster. Huck volunteers as regional chair of the Kundiman Mountain West chapter. 

Sheila Navarro is a writer and educator currently living in Las Vegas, Nevada. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College and has received fellowships from VONA, Community of Writers, and Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in SF Culture Trip, Mercury News, Maganda Magazine, The Womanist, and Writer’s Bloc. She is the co-founder of We Write Las Vegas, a literary arts organization that focuses on uplifting emerging Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) writers in Las Vegas and beyond. She is currently working on a collection of short stories and a children’s book on the Filipino diaspora. She can be found in many local Filipino restaurants, taste testing halo-halo.

Lehua M. Taitano is a queer CHamoru writer and interdisciplinary artist from Yigu, Guåhan (Guam) and co-founder of the art collective Art 25: Art in the Twenty-fifth Century. Her poetry, essays, and Pushcart Prize-nominated fiction have been published internationally and includes two books of poetry—Inside Me an Island and A Bell Made of Stones—and many chapbooks of short fiction, poetry, and visual art, including Sonoma, Capacity, and appalachiapacific, which won the Merriam-Frontier Award for short fiction. She has served as poetry faculty for the Kundiman Writers’ Retreat and as a Curatorial Council member for Yerba Buena Center for the Art's Triennial exhibition of contemporary art. She is the current Program and Community Manager at Kearny Street Workshop, where she coordinates APAture, an annual festival of Pacific Islander and Asian American art. Taitano's work investigates modern indigeneity, decolonization, and cultural identity in the context of diaspora.

Moderators:

Muriel Leung is the author of the novel How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnamable Disaster (W.W. Norton & Company) and several poetry collections that include Imagine Us, The Swarm (Nightboat Books), Bone Confetti (Noemi Press), and Images Seen to Images Felt (Antenna) in collaboration with artist Kristine Thompson. Her work has been featured in PBS Newshour, NPR, The New York Times, The Guardian, among others. She is on the Board of Directors for Apogee Journal. She was the Andrew W. Mellon Humanities in a Digital World Fellow at the PhD in Creative Writing and Literature program at the University of Southern California. Currently, she is based in Los Angeles where she teaches at the MFA in Creative Writing program at California Institute of the Arts.

Mark Padoongpatt (he/him) is associate professor of Asian American Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He received his doctoral degree in American studies & ethnicity at the University of Southern California in 2011. He researches and writes on the histories of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the 20th-century United States, with a focus on empire, migration, race, and urban and suburban cultures. His book, Flavors of Empire: Food and the Making of Thai America (University of California Press, 2017), explores how and why Thai food shaped the contours of Thai American community and identity since World War II. He’s currently writing a book and developing a podcast series on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in Las Vegas titled "Neon Pacific," which explores histories of race, space, and placemaking in Vegas.