Please join us for an event with visiting poet, Sunu P. Chandy, alongside featured local presenters including poet, Mandy Shunnarah, artist, Sa'dia Rehman, and advocate, Suparna Bhaskaran. They will each share work and then be in conversation including about art and activism. All are welcome.
Time: 8pm
Place: Two Dollar Radio Headquarters in Columbus, OH
Date: Wednesday, August 28th
Suparna Bhaskaran is an author, educator, and scholar. A queer immigrant from the Third World who makes homes between the US Midwest and the global South. Suparna is a founding member of OPAWL: Building AAPI Feminist Leadership. OPAWL is a grassroots member-led community that organizes for social and economic justice and elevates the voices, visibility, and progressive leadership of Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander (AAPI) women and nonbinary people in Ohio. She has taught in the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality programs at Antioch College, Agnes Scott College and The Ohio State University. She is the Director for Research Partnerships at the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy at The New School. Her publications include, Made In India: Decolonizations, Queer Sexualities, Trans/national Projects; Pinklining: How Wall Street’s Predatory Products Pillage Women's Wealth, Opportunities, & Futures; and the Color of Wealth in Chicago.
Mandy Shunnarah (they/them) is an Alabama-born, Appalachian and Palestinian-American writer who now calls Columbus, Ohio, home. Their essays, poetry, and short stories have been published in The New York Times, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, and others. Their first book, Midwest Shreds: Skating Through America’s Heartland, was published in July 2024 by Belt Publishing. Read more at mandyshunnarah.com.
Sa’dia Rehman (all pronouns) is a multidisciplinary artist and educator focusing on race, empire, and labor. Their work explores structures of the family, the nation, the border. Rehman questions how we live within these systems and how they impact who we are, the desire to rearrange, and take them apart. Rehman has exhibited work at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Fabric Workshop & Museum, Queens Museum, Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, and Pakistan National Council of the Arts. Rehman received the Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson Fellowship and the Meredith Morabito and Henrietta Mantooth Fellowship. Rehman was awarded residencies at the ArtLab at Harvard University, Film/Video Studio at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Art Omi, Abrons Art Center, Asian American Arts Alliance, Edward Albee Foundation. Their work was featured in Aperture, Bomb, The Brooklyn Rail, The New York Times, Harpers, The Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, Colonize This! Young Women of Color On Today’s Feminism, Breakthru Radio and HyperAllergic.
Sunu P. Chandy (she/her) is a social justice activist as a poet and a civil rights attorney. She is the daughter of immigrants from Kerala, India, and lives in Washington, DC with her family. Sunu’s award-winning collection of poems, My Dear Comrades, was published by Regal House. Sunu’s work can be found in anthologies including The Penguin Book of Indian Poets and The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood. Sunu serves on the board of the Transgender Law Center, and has been named as one of the Queer Women of Washington. Sunu is currently a Senior Advisor with Democracy Forward supporting work across the teams including, fighting back against the attacks on racial equity and inclusion, and working alongside partner organizations to help build a nation that does right by all of us.