Join us for Watershed's first reading of 2022! Featuring poets Cynthia Dewi Oka and Jane Wong, the event is free and accessible through this Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85329267522

Cynthia Dewi Oka’s recent poetry collections include Fire Is Not a Country (2021) and Nomad of Salt and Hard Water (2016). Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, The Rumpus, PANK, Guernica, and elsewhere. Born in Bali, Indonesia, Oka immigrated to Vancouver at the age of 10. Her work is informed by the complexities of her heritage; her fifteen years organizing for gender, racial, economic and migrant justice; and her life as a young single mother. She has taught creative writing at Bryn Mawr College and New Mexico State University and makes her home in Collingswood, NJ.

Jane Wong dedicates her latest poetry collection, How to Not Be Afraid of Everything (2021), to her grandparents and to those lost in the Great Leap Forward. Her mother survived the Great Famine in China during the 1960s. Wong grew up in a Chinese American restaurant at the Jersey Shore. Much of her work reclaims “ghosts” of her past that invoke hunger, gluttony, and food waste. Wong’s poetry can be found in Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019, Best American Poetry 2015, American Poetry Review, Poetry, AGNI, The Kenyon Review, and others. An Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Western Washington University, she is also the author of the collection Overpour (2016).