Chapbook Opportunity for Asian American Poets

[reposted from Nick Carbo's blog]:

The Vincent Chin Memorial Chapbook Prize

Deadline: June 30, 2006
Judge: John Yau
Prize: $500, Barrow Street publication, & Full Scholarship to Kundiman Retreat 2007
Fee: $15, payable to The New York Foundation for the Arts
Guidelines: www.kundiman.org
Eligibility: Asian American poets who have not published more than one book of forty-eight pages or more.

Backstory: On June 19, 1982, in Detroit, Vincent Chin was beaten to death with a baseball bat by a man and his stepson. The two laid-off autoworkers mistook Chin for Japanese — an Asian group they blamed for the ailing U.S. auto industry. The assailants never served jail time, and later federal civil-rights courts acquitted them entirely of the crime. For many today, this is a rarely remembered footnote in American history. However, the tragedy of Vincent Chin marked an important change in how Asian Americans viewed themselves. It was the first time, according to APA advocates and academics, that people who traced their ancestry to different countries in Asia and the Pacific Islands crossed ethnic and socioeconomic lines to fight [politically] as a united group of Asian Pacific Americans. They were Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Filipino; they were waiters, lawyers, and grandmothers who were moved to action by what happened to Vincent Chin. For the first time, Asian Americans banded together against the discrimination and racism directed toward the APA community. Decades later, the need for Asian Americans to unite as a population and to project a voice into the cultural mainstream is as urgent as ever. In honor of Vincent Chin and this watershed moment in Asian American history, Kundiman and Barrow Street are sponsoring The Vincent Chin Memorial Chapbook Prize. This annual prize is an opportunity for both Kundiman and Barrow Street to support and spotlight the talent of an emerging Asian American poet, a new voice in the landscape of Asian American expression and power.