Future Myths: Blood and Chosen Kin

Event date:
Sunday, May 31
Event time:
12:45pm-1:45pm
Booksales:
Nomadic Bookshop, right by the stage
Access:
FREE

In Future Myths: Blood and Chosen Kin three poets explore the shifting terrain of kinship: the families we inherit, the ones we lose, and the ones we build along the way. If blood once defined belonging, these writers ask what else might hold us together as we imagine the futures still forming.

Pretti Vanghni writes with a mythic sensibility, weaving ancestry, cultural memory, and spiritual imagination into poems that feel both ancient and newly born. Achy Obejas brings her luminous clarity to the intertwined questions of exile, language, and queer belonging, reminding us that chosen kinship has long been a survival practice. Ally Ang’s work moves through intimacy and rupture, tracing how care and solidarity can grow in the spaces where traditional structures fall away.

Together, these poets reimagine kinship as something living and unfinished. Blood may tell one story. Chosen family tells another, one written in acts of care, resistance, and possibility.

Moderators:

Dan Alter

Dan Alter’s poems, reviews and translations have been published in journals including Field, Fourteen Hills, and Zyzzyva; his first collection My Little Book of Exiles won the 2022 Cowan Poetry Prize. A volume of translations Take a Breath, You’re Getting Excited, from the Hebrew of Yakir Ben-Moshe, was published by Ben Yehuda Press in September 2024, and Hills Full of Holes, a second collection of poems, by Fernwood Press in March 2025. He lives with his wife and daughter in Berkeley. He works at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at UC Berkeley.

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