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February 4, 2022|4:00pm - 5:45pm EST

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Location: Virtual Event

Sponsor: Harvard University Asia Center

Co-sponsors: Aruna Global South, Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute

Born and raised in Yangon, Myanmar, Chu May Paing is a first-gen immigrant currently pursuing her PhD in cultural and linguistic anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is also the founder and director of Aruna Global South, a non-profit that serves to highlight and amplify experimental scholarship from scholars of marginalized backgrounds with interests in Asia and its diasporas. Her academic writings have appeared in The New Ethnographer, American Ethnologist, Society for Linguistic Anthropology among others. When Chu is not doing research on signs, symbols, and images in Burmese political communication, she writes under the pen name of Ma Chinthe (Miss Lion). Her creative writing in Burmese has appeared in Aruna Global South blog and is forthcoming in Jakarta Biennial.

Edna Du (Ei Htet) is a reader, writer, and community supporter. She was born and raised in Yangon, Myanmar before moving to the United States. They are currently located on the traditional and unceded territory of the Tongva people (Los Angeles). She holds a B.A. in Politics from Willamette University, with a focus on international human rights and children in armed conflict. They also write under the pen name Away and has appeared on the Aruna Global South blog. Their commitments include transnational justice, mutual aid, and community building.

Me Me Khant (Penname: PamarNi) is a Burmese poet from Yangon, Myanmar. She began her poetry journey by writing political poems in local media outlets, criticizing the military-controlled education system (particularly the National Education Law) and crackdown of the journalists. She has then transitioned to composing a wide array of topics from love to banishment, and she especially enjoys writing about her home city. She is currently a Knight Hennessy Scholar at Stanford University, pursuing a Master's in International Policy. View Me Me speak on her relationship to poetry in Myanmar .

Mandy Moe Pwint Tu is a writer and a poet from Yangon, Myanmar. Her work has appeared in Longleaf Review, Tint Journal, perhappened mag, and elsewhere. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of the South and is an MFA candidate at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She is also a Thomas J. Watson Fellow. At 21, she co-founded the Yangon Literary Magazine, providing a platform for young and emerging Burmese writers to showcase their work. During her undergraduate years at Sewanee, she was involved in a number of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, serving as the president of the Organization for Cross-Cultural Understanding (OCCU) for two years and as the Order of the Gown president in her senior year. Her debut poetry chapbook, Monsoon Daughter, is forthcoming from Thirty West Publishing House in May 2022.

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