Summi Kaipa

Poet, editor, and clinical psychologist Summi Kaipa was born in Detroit and raised in Arkansas. She earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is the author of three chapbooks: The Epics (1999), One: I Beg You, Be Still (2003), and The Language Parable (2006). The editor of Interlope from 1998 to 2003, Kaipa published innovative poetry and prose by Asian American writers. She also edited, with Neelanjana Banerjee and Pireeni Sundaralingam, the anthology Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry (2010). Kaipa described the poems in the anthology as “about what it means for these authors to be American: to grapple with the American dream, to grow up with [Billie] Holliday, to exist in the multicultural community of America, and to be targets of ethnic stereotyping and violence, especially after Sept. 11.”
 
Kaipa has served on the board of the Alliance of Emerging Creative Artists and New Langton Arts. She lives in Berkeley, California.