Franny Choi's "Homebody" and Natalie Shapero's "Late Sign of Hunger"

In conjunction with the exhibition My Barbarian, Universal Declaration of Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in the Creative Impulse, Gallery 400 and the Poetry Foundation co-present a poetry reading by Franny Choi and Natalie Shapero.

Franny Choi presents “Homebody” about the queer female body/the immigrant Asian body/the body trying to remember how it got here/the body trying to speak to its father about the war on terror/the body trying to listen to Lil Wayne/the body trying to find its way home. Choi is a Korean American writer, performer, and teaching artist. She is the author of Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody, 2014). A recipient of the Frederick Bock Prize, she has been a finalist at multiple national poetry slams. Her work has appeared in Poetry, PANK, and The Rumpus. She is a VONA Fellow, a Project VOICE teaching artist, and a member of the Dark Noise Collective. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

Natalie Shapero presents “Late Sign of Hunger.” The title of this project is taken from a how-to book on infant care (“crying is a late sign of hunger”). The main themes of the poems are lineage, the indelibility of memory—both larger historical memory and individual memory—and, with respect to power structures that disfavor women, the question of resistance, or resignation? It also has some jokes. Shapero is the author of the poetry collection No Object, and her writing has appeared in the Believer, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Progressive, and elsewhere. The recipient of a Kenyon Review Fellowship, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and a GLCA New Writers Award, she lives in Columbus, Ohio and works as associate editor of The Kenyon Review.