Exhibition Opening with Khaty Xiong

Join poet Khaty Xiong to celebrate the opening of On Visiting the Franklin Park Conservatory & Botanical Gardens: An Interactive Poetry Installation. Xiong will read from her work and guests will anonymously share their own messages to lost loved ones in a public reading. Co-hosted with the Smithsonian’s Asian Pacific American Center. Refreshments will be served.

“On Visiting the Franklin Park Conservatory & Botanical Gardens” by Khaty Xiong is an interactive exhibit that presents a visualization of Xiong’s poem about visiting a garden to find the ghost of her recently deceased mother. Guests are invited to send messages to lost loved ones by sharing original poems on paper templates of plants, animals and insects. The title poem appeared in the July/August 2017 Asian American Poets issue of Poetry magazine.

Paper templates designed by Nathan Kawanishi

Custom display by Edra Soto

A collaboration between the Poetry Foundation, the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center (APAC) and visitors to the exhibit.