with Jen Lue and Natasha Rao

Selected by Kaveh Akbar as winner of the 2020 Broken River Prize, Coining a Wishing Tower is both story and song, a lyrical narrative that gathers and releases. The hybrid epic follows a fragmented narrative between the symbolic characters of HouseMouse, GodFish, Cat, and the moon, with a strong memoir lamenting a family torn between time and place. The book's thematic inquiry is around dying, death, and afterlife, philosophically explored through spiritual and earthly certainties and uncertainties. Coining A Wishing Tower holds moments of childlike wonder and of adult meditation—oftentimes one and the same. In fragments both real and unreal, this is a book of rituals, of history, of surrender.

Ayesha Raees identifies herself as a hybrid creating hybrid poetry through hybrid forms. Her work strongly revolves around issues of race and identity, G/god and displacement, and mental illness while possessing a strong agency for accessibility, community, and change. She cultivates relationships between poetry and the image through theatrical performance, filmic visual imagery, paint, and documentary photography. Raees currently serves as an Assistant Poetry Editor at AAWW's The Margins and has received fellowships from Asian American Writers' Workshop, Brooklyn Poets, and Kundiman. Her work has been published in Poets.org, Nation, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. From Lahore, Pakistan, she currently shifts around Lahore, New York City, and Miami. Her debut hybrid book of poetry "Coining A Wishing Tower" won the Broken River Prize hosted by Platypus Press in 2020.

Jen Lue is a 2021-22 Center for Fiction/Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellow and a 2021 NYSCA/NYFA fiction finalist. She is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Kundiman, VONA/Voices, Tin House, Jerome Foundation, Millay Arts and Anderson Center at Tower View, among others. Her work has been featured in The Margins, Sepia Journal, One Minute Press, BOMB Magazine, and Joyland. Photo Credit: Sally Wen Mao.

Natasha Rao is the author of Latitude, selected by Ada Limón as the winner of the 2021 APR/Honickman First Book Prize. The recipient of a 2021 Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, she has also received support from Bread Loaf and the Vermont Studio Center. Her work appears in The Nation, American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn.

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