Author Event: Poetry Month Extravaganza

Join us for a Poetry Month event with a reading by visiting poet and civil rights attorney, Sunu P. Chandy, author of My Dear Comrades, who will be in discussion with Dr. Jacob Chacko, the Executive Director of the Center for Diversity & Inclusion and Director of Dialogue Across Difference at Washington University.

We are delighted to start the event with readings by two excellent local poets, Elizabeth Hoover and Niki Herd.

Elizabeth Hoover (she/her) is the author of the archive is all in present tense, winner of the 2021 Barrow Street Book Prize. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in the North American Review, the Kenyon Review, and StoryQuarterly. She is an assistant professor at Webster University, where she teaches such classes as LGBTQ+ Literature, Genderqueer Frankenstein, and Archival Poetics.

Niki Herd is the author of the poetry collection The Language of Shedding Skin and the chapbook don’t you weep, and she co-edited Laura Hershey: On the Life & Work of an American Master with Meg Day. Herd’s poetry, essays, and criticism appear in Gulf Coast, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, New England Review, Poetry Daily, Academy of American Poets (Poem-a-Day), Salon, and This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets, among other journals and anthologies. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, Ucross, Bread Loaf, the Newberry Library, and Cave Canem. Herd earned her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston. She currently lives in St. Louis where she is the Visiting Writer in Residence in Poetry at Washington University. Her second full-length poetry collection, The Stuff of Hollywood, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press.

Sunu P. Chandy (she/her) is a social justice activist including through her work as a poet and a civil rights attorney. She’s the daughter of immigrants from Kerala, India, a queer woman of color, and lives in Washington, D.C. with her family. Her award-winning collection of poems, My Dear Comrades, was published by Regal House in 2023. Sunu’s creative work can also be found in publications including Asian American Literary Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Poets on Adoption, Split this Rock’s online social justice database, The Quarry, and in anthologies including The Penguin Book of Indian Poets, The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood and This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation. Sunu is currently a Senior Advisor with Democracy Forward supporting work to fight back against the attacks on racial equity and inclusion. Sunu earned her B.A. in Peace and Global Studies/Women’s Studies from Earlham College, her law degree from Northeastern University School of Law and following that, her MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Queens College/The City University of New York in 2013. Sunu is on the board of the Transgender Law Center, and was included as one the Queer Women of Washington and one of Go Magazine’s 100 Women We Love. Sunu is delighted to celebrate her first collection of poetry, My Dear Comrades, with all of you and with the book’s fabulous cover artist, Ragni Agarwal.

Dr. Jacob Chacko (he/him/his) serves as the Inaugural Executive Director of the Center for Diversity & Inclusion and Director of Dialogue Across Difference at Washington University in Saint Louis. His prior student affairs experience includes serving as the Director for the Asian American Cultural Center at Rutgers University New Brunswick, inaugural Associate Director of Diversity and Inclusion for the Santos Manuel Student Union at California State University, San Bernardino, interim coordinator for the Titan Dreamers Resource Center, and inaugural coordinator for the Asian Pacific American Resource Center at California State University, Fullerton. He holds a PhD in Education Policy, Organization & Leadership with a focus on Global Studies in Education from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, an M.S. in Teaching & Learning from Illinois State University, and a B.A. in Secondary Education & Spanish from Northeastern Illinois University. After undergraduate studies, he lived in South Korea for several years teaching English and traveling South/Southeast Asia. Jacob speaks Malayalam, English, Spanish, and a bit of Korean. Jacob was born in Kerala, India and raised in Skokie, Illinois; he is a 1.5 generation Queer Indian American. He is also a member of Alpha Psi Lambda, ΑΨΛ, a Latino interest fraternity. During his doctoral studies, he worked as the graduate assistant of the Asian American Cultural Center and was immersed into the field of student affairs.