Fantasias: Asian Diasporic Poetics Reading Group

A thrilling year-long deep dive into Asian diasporic work with expert tutors, poet Q&As, and the chance to perform yourself!

* This course will take place on the video-conferencing platform ZOOM *

Over ten monthly online sessions this reading group will read books by Asian diasporic poets including Bhanu Kapil, Don Mee Choi, Brandon Shimoda, and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. Together, we will ask: Who gets to count as ‘Asian’? What does ‘diaspora’ include and implicate? And what radical experiments in form and language can Asian diasporic poetry take? Along the way, we will think about translation, ritual, the prose poem, the long poem, documentary poetics, and ecopoetics as ways of reading this space of nations, borders, migration, inheritance, and histories.

Our focus will be on reading these poets with particular attention to their formal, linguistic, and aesthetic innovations. Rather than treating ‘Asian diasporic poetics’ as a fixed category, we will approach our reading as a dynamic field where diverse lineages of rupture, disorientation, dreaming and fantasies converge.

Each session will last two hours and will be led by either Will Harris or Jay Gao. Alongside our discussions, we will experiment with creative responses to our reading, though no previous experience of writing poetry is necessary! During the course, we will also host a special Q&A with guest poets from the reading list. We will end with a celebratory reading and party, where participants will have the opportunity to share work inspired by the course if they wish.

List of Books (subject to change):

Schizophrene by Bhanu Kapil
Hydra Medusa by Brandon Shimoda
Fantasia by Nisha Ramayya
Empathy by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
The Morning News is Exciting by Don Mee Choi
from unincorporated territory [hacha] by Craig Santos Perez
A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure by Hoa Nguyen
beholden: a poem as long as the river by Fred Wah and Rita Wong
In the Same Light by Wong May

10 monthly Zoom sessions on Wednesdays 7–9pm (BST/GMT).

Please note: Entry to this course is by application only. If you would like to join, please email us at [email protected] before booking your place and we will send you the application form.

Concessions & Accessibility

To apply for a concession rate, please send relevant documentation showing your eligibility for one of our concessions to [email protected]. Conditions of eligibility are detailed here. If you have any questions or wish to be added to the waiting list of a sold-out course, please email [email protected].

What to Expect

Please check the left hand side of this page for information on how this course works in practice, under the heading ‘Course Style‘. If you’re unsure as to what any of the terms there mean, or if this course is a good fit for you, then please take a look at our What to Expect page which includes some further information on how our courses function.

Image credit: Saburō Hasegawa

About Jay Gao Will Harris View Profile

Jay Gao is a poet and writer from Edinburgh, Scotland, living in New York City. His second poetry collection The Dead One, The Unconscious One, Thundering in Your Ear, Thriving Slumber is forthcoming in Fall 2026 from Nightboat Books and Carcanet Press. His debut collection Imperium (2022) was a winner of the 2023 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize, an Eric Gregory Award, and a Somerset Maugham Award. Currently, he is a PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University where he focuses on 20th/21st-century experimental poetry and poetics alongside race, ethnic, and diaspora studies.

Will Harris is a London-based writer. He is the author of the poetry books RENDANG (2020) and Brother Poem (2023), published by Granta and Wesleyan University Press, and the essay Mixed-Race Superman (Peninsula Press, 2018). He has won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. He co-translated Habib Tengour’s Consolatio (Poetry Translation Centre) with Delaina Haslam in 2022, and helps facilitate the Southbank New Poets Collective with Vanessa Kisuule. Siblings, a conversation between Harris, Jay Bernard, Mary Jean Chan, and Nisha Ramayya, was published by Monitor Books in 2024. He received a Burgess Fellowship from the University of Manchester and was a Fellow at the Institute for Ideas & Imagination in Paris from 2024-25. He is currently working on a project about social care.

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