Resistance and Reclamation
IN LATE 2016, adoptee poet and Kundiman fellow Leah Silvieus initiated a research project about the ways in which emerging adoptee poets contend with identity, loss, culture, and family in their work. She sent a query through the Kundiman network, looking for Asian American adoptees who would be interested in participating, and the three of us—Tiana Nobile, Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, and Ansley Moon—eagerly responded.
To be in community with not only fellow transracial, transnational, Asian American adoptees, but also poets was incredibly meaningful. We quickly realized that navigating the world as transracial, transnational adoptees and sharing a deep affinity with language in turn made our relationships with one another particularly affirming. This initial meeting led to us forming an adoptee book club. Marci had just read Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere (Penguin Press, 2017) and wanted to talk about the book’s adoption narrative. From there we read more books written by both adoptees and non-adoptees, all featuring prominent adoptee characters. We began to notice recurring tropes that reflected problematic understandings of the adoptee experience, including the white savior and the insistence on reunification as a solution to all problems. In reading, processing, and critiquing in conversation together, we have been able to develop a unique analysis of these narratives, grounded in our own adoptee experience. It is an analysis and perspective that we think is too often excluded from mainstream literary discourse.
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello is the author of Hour of the Ox (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), which won the Donald Hall Prize, and co-translator of The World’s Lightest Motorcycle (Zephyr Press, 2021) by Korean poet Yi Won. She has received fellowships from Kundiman, the Knight Foundation, and the American Literary Translators Association. Her work has appeared in Kenyon Review Online, Orion, the New York Times, and elsewhere. She serves as a program coordinator for the Miami Book Fair. Her website is marcicalabretta.com.
Ansley Moon is the author of the poetry collection How to Bury the Dead (Black Coffee Press, 2011). Moon is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Kundiman, and the Mae Fellowship and is currently working on a second poetry collection, Register the Missing, which has been a finalist for the Pleiades Press Editors Prize and the Slope Editions Book Prize. Moon’s website is ansleymoon.com.
Tiana Nobile is the author of (Hub City Press, 2021). She is a Korean American adoptee, Kundiman fellow, and recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. Nobile was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and Kundiman Poetry Prize, and her writing has appeared in , the , , and , and elsewhere. She lives in Bulbancha, also known as New.
