Cambodian Author and Opera Librettist Releases Memoir.

Groundbreaking memoir by Cambodian author Sokunthary Svay. An unconventional collection of essays and photographs, PUT IT ON RECORD: A MEMOIR-ARCHIVE explores the past present and future of Cambodian literature.

Sokunthary Svay's PUT IT ON RECORD surveys a wide breadth of form and expression. The collection speaks to the multiplicities of selves that each of us embodies, yet it is also a window into one artist's deeply personal experience. It is suffused with echoes of the longing and struggle that resonate through the Cambodian diaspora.--VADDEY RATNER, New York Times bestselling author of In the Shadow of the Banyan and Music of the Ghosts

Not your typical memoir, PUT IT ON RECORD is a journey meandering stories of shared ordeal of womanhood and uprooted tales told in a captivating and well written verses and poetry. It is impossible to put the books down as Svay's uncanny ability to bring us into her world, more than just the immigrant experience but a shared humanity of being and existing. We are changed after reading her book either by connecting through her vulnerability or simply by having a glimpse into the Cambodian American world.--LinDa Saphan, PhD. Anthropologist, author of Faded Reels, Associate Producer of Don't Think I've Forgotten and Fulbright Scholar

In this collection of essays and musings, artist Sokunthary Svay offers vignettes of a life lived attuned to the ways the body leads us toward truths stored within our corpuscles. We are more than past traumas that bend our bodies toward survival impulses, as Svay posits in powerful prose; our bodies have the intellect and capacity for self-healing, and the chosen outlet for Svay is through song. We are all so lucky to hear the music of her heart. --Putsata Reang, author of Ma & Me (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Literary Nonfiction. Essay. Asian & Asian American Studies.

Poetry collection by Sokunthary Svay, Khmer writer and musician from the Bronx, New York. She and her family were refugees from Cambodia who survived the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime.

Sokunthary Svay's Apsara in New York is truly like no other poetry collection I've read. Transnational and pan-ethnic in scope, the book begins in a refugee camp in Thailand, settles in the Bronx and, driven by memory and desire, returns to the Cambodian cities of Phnom Penh, Battambang, and Takeo. The poet is both fierce and tender, street-smart and thoughtful, maternal and filial, political and haunted. With No Others, Svay emerges as a powerful new voice in Cambodian-American poetry.

Bunkong Tuon, author of Gruel and associate professor of English, Union College

Poetry collection by Quenton Baker. Baker is a poet and educator from Seattle. His current focus is the fact of blackness in American society. His work has appeared in Vinyl, Apogee, Poetry Northwest, The James Franco Review, Cura and in the anthologies Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters and It Was Written: Poetry Inspired by Hip-Hop. Baker has an MFA in Poetry from the University of Southern Maine and is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee. He is a 2015-2016 Made at Hugo House fellow and the recipient of the 2016 James W. Ray Venture Project Award. He is also the author of the chapbook Diglossic in the Second America from Punch Press. This Glittering Republic is his first full-length collection.

Poetry collection by Everett Hoagland, winner of the 2023 American Book Award. The collection spans 50 years of the poet's work. Everett Hoagland was born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but has lived in New Bedford since 1973 where he was that city's first Poet Laureate, 1994-1998. He was a full-time educator for four decades and is Professor Emeritus at the nearby University of Massachusetts Dartmouth in North Dartmouth, Massachusetts where during his 30-year career there he created and sustained four different African American literature classes in addition to his poetry writing workshops.

The passion of Everett Hoagland's social and historical consciousness match the skill of his lyrical command and the brilliance of his imagination. -- Clarence Major

Everett Hoagland's ... is ... substantial poetry ... I commend the essential bravery of Hoagland's work, which connects the intimate and personal to the vastness of a historic and global outrage ... This is self-knowledge on an epic scale. All of us, regardless of our origins, would do well to come to grips with the long shadows of our own histories. -- Patrick Murfin

(Hoagland's) poetry is as much for the ear as for the eye, as much for the stage as for the page ... While tones, diction, geography and subject vary, there is in (his) language the ring of the Beats, Black Mountain music, consciousness streaming, and rhyming in rapper style, the breath of the spoken poem, a speech that reveals a vast compassion. -- Walter Hess, AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW

Poetry collection by devorah major, San Francisco's third Poet Laureate.

Poet's Statement:

The state of California was named after Queen Califia. It is said that Africans came across sea currents to arrive in South America and then moved east and west through Mexico and around the gulf settling in the south, mixing blood and dance, color and culture with the people of the corn. Cortez's crew of six hundred held two hundred Africans who worked its sails, cleaned its decks and sometimes served as interpreters. Because of this, Cortez thought that Africans populated this part of the world too. He named this land California, the isle of Queen Califia.

But where did he get the name? It is believed by some that the legend of Califia was initially formed by seafaring Kalifuna Mandinka who arrived in the new world before Columbus. African Moors who traded and sailed with their Mandinka brethren brought the tale of Calfia to Spain where, around 1510, (pulp) novelist Garcia Rodr guez de Montalvo in Las Sergas de Esplandian (The Adventures of Esplandian) refashioned the tale of a compassionate, fearless, and beautiful African Amazon queen living on a steep, rocky-cliff, gold-rich island. With Queen Califia were fierce and able female subjects, hundreds of griffins, wild beasts harnessed in gold, and occasional visiting (or captured) men. Some also assert that California once held a vast inland lake, and appeared to be an island for hundreds of years, and that during this time it was explored by a few of these early Kalifuna Mandika voyagers, and that it is, in fact, the actual land of the Califia myth.--devorah major

Bill Tashlin, gunslinger, had travelled hundreds of miles to solve the mystery of his father's death, and find Golden Dollar - saloon girl and murderess. Bill's father had found more gold than he had ever dreamed of, only to be attacked by Apaches. His partner Sherman was the only survivor, and the gold had vanished. Golden Dollar held the key to one of the biggest secrets ever buried out there in the cruel desert and as he stood by the grave on Tombstone's Boothill, Bill knew the fight had just begun.