Cynthia Dewi Oka is the author of Fire Is Not a Country, forthcoming in fall 2021 from Northwestern University Press (NUP), Salvage: Poems (NUP, 2017) and Nomad of Salt and Hard Water (Thread Makes Blanket, 2016). The recipient of the Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize and the Leeway Transformation Award, her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, POETRY, Academy of American Poets, The Rumpus, Hyperallergic, PANK, Guernica, and elsewhere. She has taught creative writing at Bryn Mawr College and is a 2021-2022 Amy Clampitt Resident. She is the creator of Sanctuary: A Migrant Poetry Workshop for immigrant poets based in Philadelphia, and is originally from Bali, Indonesia. 

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a queer Black Feminist writer and an aspirational cousin to all life.  Alexis is the author of Spill, M Archive, Dub and Undrowned and the co-editor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines.  Her next book is The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde: Biography as Ceremony.  She is the co-founder of Mobile Homecoming Trust, a living library amplifying generations of Black LGBTQ in Durham, North Carolina and the creative writing editor of Feminist Studies.

Cynthia Dewi Oka and Alexis Pauline Gumbs in Conversation