Originally from Bali, Indonesia, Cynthia Dewi Oka is the author of A Tinderbox in Three Acts (2022), a Blessing the Boats Selection chosen by Aracelis Girmay for BOA Editions; Fire Is Not a Country (2021) and Salvage (2017) from Northwestern University Press, and Nomad of Salt and Hard Water (2016) from Thread Makes Blanket Press. A recipient of the Amy Clampitt Residency, Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize, and the Leeway Transformation Award, her poetry and essays have been featured in The Atlantic, POETRY, Oprah Daily, Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, Hyperallergic, Guernica, The Rumpus, PANK, and elsewhere.
An alumnus of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, she has taught creative writing at The Writers' Program at UCLA Extension, Bryn Mawr College, New Mexico State University, Blue Stoop, Voices of Our Nations (VONA), and the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival. For fifteen years, Cynthia worked as an organizer, trainer, and fundraiser in social movements for gender, racial, economic, and migrant justice. Based in Los Angeles, she is currently working on film projects and a collection of short stories. Cynthia writes to be free.
POETRY: “Redacted from a Know-Your-Rights Training Agenda,” Poem-a-day
POETRY: “First Poem After Parting,” The Atlantic
POETRY: “Elegy with a White Shirt,” The Kenyon Review
POETRY: “That’s What She Said",” The Rumpus
POETRY: “The Year of the Show,” Poetry Society of America
ESSAY: “How Bruce Lee combined martial arts with the blaxploitation genre,” The Undefeated
Authoritarianism, militarism, and censorship
“Res Domestica,” UWRF Speakers at Home 2020
A workshop about transforming obsessions into quests; and questions into revelations. With critical attention to power, we will explore what it means to engage subjects beyond our immediate, lived experience through research, imagination, and formal experimentation. This workshop is open to all genres, and may be especially useful for writers who are working with/through suppressed histories and/or intergenerational traumas.
A workshop about the craft of poetry that engages with contexts of post- and ongoing colonialism, imperialism, genocide, and oppression as they shape the material conditions of writing and our practices as readers. This workshop is intended to center the perspectives of writers who identify as people from the Global South and will explore, among other things, how we might use craft to transform estrangement into a source of play, connection, and liberation.