Arts + Literature Laboratory welcomes poet Mandy Moe Pwint Tu to celebrate a Madison book launch for her poety collection, Fablemaker, on Tuesday, September 9, 2025, 7:00pm. Joining Mandy will be poets Sadia Hassan and Aurora Shimshack.
Winner of the 2024 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize, Fablemaker was written during the 2021 Spring Revolution in Myanmar, and it weaves a troubled family history with the national reckoning.
Mandy Moe Pwint Tu is a writer and a poet from Yangon, Myanmar. Her work has appeared in Longleaf Review, West Trestle Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She is pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Monsoon Daughter (Thirty West Publishing House, 2022) and Unsprung (Newfound, 2022). Find her on Twitter @mandrigall.
Sadia Hassan is the author of Enumeration (Akashic Books, 2020), part of the New-Generation African Poets chapbook set. Hassan has received fellowships from Hedgebrook, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Mesa Refuge. You can find more of her work in Longreads, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and the American Academy of Poets Poem-A-day. She is a former Jay C. and Ruth Halls fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.
Aurora Shimshak grew up in several rural communities and small cities in Wisconsin. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets 2023, Copper Nickel, and Poetry Northwest, among others. She currently resides in her home state’s capital where she studies rhetoric and composition, teaches writing, and appreciates badger statuary.
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