In this inaugural reading of the new season of Our Work and Why We Do It, three writers take on the familiar and ignored landscapes of history and narrative, finding formal and lyric ways to attend to the ways language both intervenes in making identity and new stories possible, or becomes strange in the effort to articulate against the assumed power of those structures.

Leslie Marie Aguilar originally hails from the heartland of Texas. She received her MFA from Indiana University, where she served as the Poetry Editor of Indiana Review. Her work has been supported by the National Society of Arts and Letters and the Fine Arts Work Center. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Callaloo, Hobart, Ninth Letter, Rattle, Sonora Review, and Washington Square Review among others. She is the author of Mesquite Manual (New Delta Review, 2015), and currently works as the Editorial Assistant for Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, at Smith College.

Anna Maria Hong is the author of the novella H & G (Sidebrow Books), winner of the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Clarissa Dalloway Prize, and Age of Glass, winner of Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Poetry Competition and the Poetry Society of America’s 2019 Norma Farber First Book Award. Her second poetry collection, Fablesque, won Tupelo Press’s Berkshire Prize and is forthcoming in June 2020. A former Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, she has published work in The Nation, The Iowa Review, Ecotone, jubilat, New Delta Review, Poetry Northwest, The Best American Poetry, and many other publications.

Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint is the author of the lyric novel, The End of Peril, the End of Enmity, the End of Strife, a Haven (Noemi Press, 2018), which won an Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. Her second book, a family history project, won the 2018 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2021. She is the recipient of a Fulbright grant to Spain, residencies at Hedgebook and Millay Colony, and fellowships from Tin House and Summer Literary Seminars. She holds a Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Denver and an M.F.A. in prose from the University of Notre Dame. She is currently a visiting writer at Amherst College, where she teaches fiction writing and literature.

Our Work and Why We Do It is the Forbes Library’s Writer in Residence reading series. This series is interested in exploring the ways in which the written word may create and sustain social worlds through inquiry, practice, experimentation, story and lyric. The dynamic of the public library, open and variegated in its uses, is the ideal space for these questions, as it can so directly reflect the desires of a community that contributes to it's thriving, operating as an archive of those needs. Regardless of genre, this series believes in the potential for deliberation that writing may produce, a space within the information saturated world we share where we might consider possibilities and deeper questions just beyond what we know.
The series features writers of prose, poetry, nonfiction, and memoir, and beneath these broad categories, constellations of subgenres and forms. The series is motivated by an interest in understanding how writing relates to work, to a sense of a collective project that seeks to respond to the political and social forms that produce it. Against dithering, the series hopes to affirm the role of creative written work as a measure of response to the exigencies that shape our world.

Curated and moderated by Forbes writer in residence Art Middleton, the series meets in the Coolidge Museum.