Megan Pinto: SAINTS OF LITTLE FAITH (with Samuel Cheney, Jimin Seo, and Jess Yuan)
Presenting a Sunday afternoon of poetry at Bird in Hand, celebrating Megan Pinto’s debut collection Saints of Little Faith! “These are beautifully rendered ruminative and thoughtful coming- of-age poems,” says Victoria Chang, and we couldn’t agree more. Exciting for widely-read poetry lovers or those looking to get into contemporary poetry, Saints of Little Faith is a fine-tuned collection of meditative transformations that engage with South Asian experiences of addiction, domestic violence, and mental illness, refusing to ignore narratives treated as unspeakable and overlooked by the English canon.
In one of our favorite formats for poetry events, several poets will join Megan Pinto to read alongside her, including Jess Yuan, Samuel Cheney, and Jimin Seo.
Megan Pinto is the author of Saints of Little Faith (Four Way Books, 2024). Her poems can be found in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Ploughshares, AAWW’s The Margins, Lit Hub and elsewhere. Megan has received scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, Storyknife, The Peace Studio and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers. Most recently, she received the 2023 Anne Halley Poetry Prize from the Massachusetts Review and was selected for Poets & Writers 2024 Get the Word Out poetry cohort. Megan lives in Brooklyn and holds an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson.
Samuel Cheney is from Centerville, Utah. He is the winner of a Pushcart Prize and was the 2021-23 Tickner Writer-in-Residence at Gilman School. His poems are in Copper Nickel, Michigan Quarterly Review, Missouri Review, Salmagundi, The Southern Review, and other magazines. He has been awarded scholarships from Bread Loaf and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and is Program Coordinator of The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins and Assistant Editor of Smartish Pace. Before moving to Baltimore, he worked at Grove Press, Gasser Grunert gallery, and the Criterion Collection. His debut manuscript, BELIEVERS, was a Finalist for the 2024 National Poetry Series.
Jimin Seo, born in Seoul, Korea immigrated to the US at the age of eight. His books include OSSIA (Changes 2024), and the chapbook A – 1982. His most recent projects were Poems of Consumption with H. Sinno at the Barbican Centre in London, and a site activation for salazarsequeromedina’s Open Pavilion at the 4th Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism.
Jess Yuan is a poet, educator, and architect. She is the author of Slow Render (2024), winner of the Airlie Prize, and Threshold Amnesia (2020), winner of the Yemassee Chapbook Contest. She is a Kundiman Fellow, and her poems appear in Best New Poets, Tupelo Quarterly Review, jubilat, Beloit Poetry Journal, Pleiades and elsewhere. She is currently an MFA candidate in Poetry at the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins.
