Cynthia Dewi Oka
Cynthia Dewi Oka is a poet, community organizer, and author of Nomad of Salt and Hard Water (Thread Makes Blanket, 2016). A Pushcart Prize Nominee, her poems have appeared online and in print, including in Guernica, Black Renaissance Noire, Painted Bride Quarterly, Dusie, The Wide Shore, The Collapsar, Apogee, Kweli, As Us Journal, Obsidian, and Terrain.org. She is also a contributor to the anthologies Read Women (Locked Horn Press, 2014), Dismantle (Thread Makes Blanket, 2014), and Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Frontlines (PM Press, 2016). Cynthia has been awarded the Fifth Wednesday Journal Editor’s Prize in Poetry, scholarships from the Voices of Our Nations (VONA) Writing Workshop and Vermont Studio Center, and the Art and Change Grant from Leeway Foundation. An immigrant from Bali, Indonesia, she is now based in south Jersey and works as a staff member of the national alliance Grassroots Global Justice. Her second poetry collection is forthcoming in 2017 from Northwestern University Press.
Nomad of Salt and Hard Water
Awarded Grants
2017
Leeway Transformation Award (LTA)
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Overview
A poet and immigrant from Indonesia, Cynthia Dewi Oka interrogates the way power operates in intimate and public life at the intersections of race, gender, class and nation, with specific attention to constructions of body, memory, and violence. She is the author of two books of poems: Salvage: Poems (Northwestern University Press, 2017) and Nomad of Salt and Hard Water (Thread Makes Blanket, 2016). Her poetics is informed by her work as an organizer with immigrants and communities of color, and her organizing extends from the empathetic and transformative capacities of poetry, where through language, disappeared and disparate worlds can co-exist. Recently, she created Sanctuary: A Migrant Poetry Workshop for immigrant poets in Philadelphia in partnership with Asian Arts Initiative with the support of a 2016 Leeway Foundation Art and Change Grant. She is the proud mom of a young musician, a Community Organizer with the New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia, and has served as a Poetry Mentor for The Blueshift Journal's Speakeasy Project, an online workshop series for emerging poets from marginalized communities. A three-time Pushcart Prize Nominee, she has received the Fifth Wednesday Journal Editor's Prize in Poetry, and scholarships from Voices of Our Nations and the Vermont Studio Center.
2016
Art and Change Grant (ACG)
Related grantees
Overview
Cynthia Dewi Oka designed and facilitated Sanctuary: A Migrant Poetry Workshop for immigrant poets in Philadelphia. The workshop series exposed participants to poetic traditions arising from contexts of displacement and communities of color, equipped them with foundational and critical elements of the craft, and fostered a mutually supportive, collaborative community of poets. Graduates of the workshop series, the Sanctuary Poets, have continued to organize, create, and perform together.
