Arts + Literature Laboratory welcomes the 2025 Wisconsin Book Festival for four poetry events on Saturday, October 25, 2025. You can find a complete schedule of events for the entire Festival at the Wisconsin Book Festival website.
Poets Saba Keramati, Meg Kim, and Mandy Moe Pwint Tu will present the second program of the day at 4:30pm.
How does one write the self through migration and diaspora? “Let me write myself here,” a line from Saba Keramati’s debut full length collection, Self-Mythology, titles an event that creates a space for connection for poets all writing about alienation, exile, inheritance, and loss across vastly different contexts. For Keramati, Meg Kim, and Mandy Moe Pwint Tu, The Midwest marks a place of rootedness. Across these three books, each speaker finds the act of writing poetry to be one of devotion, grief, creation, and resistance as they seek language’s role in their own lives and in the inextricability of the personal and political.
Keramati’s debut poetry collection Self-Mythology chronicles the speaker’s parents’ immigration stories, as well as her own coming-of-age in a landscape that is unwelcoming to her identities.
Meg Kim’s Invisible Cartographies, a debut chapbook, is a mapmaking of Kim’s familial landscapes through language, exploring Oregon, Korea, and the Midwest through the complexities of diaspora.
Fablemaker by Mandy Moe Pwint Tu draws on the speculative, following the speaker as she contends with her father’s untimely death, Myanmar’s political crisis, and her de facto exile to the United States.
