Meet July’s Woman. Warrior. Writer. Lisa Kwong!

A native of Radford, Virginia, Lisa Kwong is AppalAsian, a member of the Affrilachian Poets, and the author of Becoming AppalAsian(Glass Lyre Press). Her poems have appeared in Best New Poets, A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, Anthology of Appalachian Writers, and other publications. She teaches at Indiana University and Ivy Tech Community College in Bloomington, Indiana.

To preview Kwong’s poems, check out these links:

http://www.stilljournal.net/lisa-kwong-poetry.php

http://www.stilljournal.net/lisa-kwong-poetry2021.php

How did you come to author your life?

I belong to many different communities; I also don’t belong anywhere sometimes. I’ve been the daughter of laborers in a room of professors’ and doctors’ kids or the “fat” one in a group of petite Asian women. I know the pain of being unseen, unheard, and misunderstood.

Through writing, I want to honor my family, to make sense of being an Asian from Appalachia, to celebrate, to mourn, to heal. I hope that my work can inspire others to be proud of who they are and where they come from. Writing gave me a voice when I didn’t have one. I hope it can help others to speak up for themselves, too.