Cynthia Dewi Oka

Building Our Canon: Queer Writers Tracing Literary Ancestries, Saturday, May 6 at 12:30pm, Mt. View Mausoleum

Originally from Bali, Indonesia, Cynthia Dewi Oka is the author of four books of poems, most recently A Tinderbox in Three Acts (BOA Editions, 2022) and Fire Is Not a Country (Northwestern University Press, 2021). A recipient of the Amy Clampitt Residency, Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize, and the Leeway Transformation Award, her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Oprah Daily, POETRY, Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, Hyperallergic, and elsewhere. An alumnus of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, she has taught creative writing at Bryn Mawr College, New Mexico State University, Blue Stoop, and Voices of Our Nations (VONA). She currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of Adi Magazine and faculty in The Writers’ Program at UCLA Extension. She lives in Los Angeles. www.cynthiadewioka.com.

Books That Make a Difference: Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, The Mute’s Soliloquy by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, The Famished Road by Ben Okri, A Dying Colonialism by Frantz Fanon.