“If You Ask Me About New York” & “What It’s Like to be a Hmong Girl,” by Manila Hang (Guest Reader!)

Near the beginning of the semester, I tell my students:  You want to “write for yourself”?  Great: buy a nice notebook, write when you feel like it, and read it in your own room.  It’s worth spending time working on your poems together, though,  if we can — together — make something more out of them than you already do by yourself.  Something more thoughtful, more honest, more musical, more artful.  Something more.

At the end of the semester I remind them:  Now’s the time.  You’ve got poems that are ready for an audience.  It’s time to bust out of your room, and our classroom, too, and let those poems fly at an audience.  And yes, whether you’re face to face with a crowd or recording your voice for the scattered, perpetual audience online, that takes courage.

So here are Erika Schultze and Manila Hang reading for you some of the most more work they’ve done this fall. Erika in an earlier post.  And Manila, right here.  Give ’em a round of applause in the comments!

Really nice job, Manila.  Thank you!