about

The emi kuriyama spirit award is meant to enliven the themes in emi kuriyama’s (1991-2016) writing—those of care, absurdity, and transformation—in hopes that her legacy continues in the work and lives of other creative souls. In September 2019, Chicago-based press Candor Arts published emi’s book, sashiko, a collection of writing including the late writer’s unfinished novella, her CalArts Creative Writing MFA thesis proposal, and creative prose and poetry pieces.

The grant is organized by Sarah Williams, Sue Bell Yank, Jennifer Moon, and iris yirei hu, who co-authored this grant application with John Birtle. We are offering two unrestricted grants of $2,000 each to one writer and one artist who is in a transitional moment in their life or work, and demonstrates a commitment to working with others. The notion of transition is meant to be open and expansive to multiple possibilities, such as, but not limited to, bodily transitions (e.g., aging, genders, pregnancy, health), geographic transitions (e.g., a cross-country move, displacement, im/migrations), spiritual transitions, and/or a transitional shift in a creative practice. Just as emi’s work centered her friends and the ways we relate to one another, we seek work that embodies the spirit of collaboration, friendship, and worlding.

The emi kuriyama spirit award is administered through the Women’s Center for Creative Work, who serves as the fiscal receiver of our donor contributions.

The organizers of the spirit award would like to thank Caitlin Karyadi and Iki Ramen in Los Angeles, EJ Hill, and the Ahn Family for their generous in-kind contributions to the development of this award.

emi kuriyama (1991-2016) was a writer and poet born and raised in Redondo Beach, California. emi was a prolific writer whose vibrant curiosity led her to produce an expansive body of work that insisted on play and careful collaborations as ways to live. She built her work and world with people, plants, animals, objects, symbols, and currencies. She thought with and through these encounters, and found joy in their interdependencies and connections. Writing gave emi permission to play, to render possible what was not in her lived reality—to twist, push, pull, and tease her experiences into absurdity and magic. For emi, writing was rebellion, as it was resistance and resilience.

She founded the small press Young Cloud, and was a co-founder of the artist book project baumtest. At UCLA, she studied art history and was the editor-in-chief of the student publication, GRAPHITE, published by the Hammer Museum. She wrote extensively and expansively on art, with an attention to photography and its processes, often for Daily Serving, Complex, Notes on Looking, among others.

emi worked at the Hammer Museum as an educator and for the artist Matthew Brandt. She was enrolled in the Cal Arts MFA Creative Writing Class of 2017 until her death, and was mentored by Christine Wertheim, Douglas Kearney, and Jen Hofer.

Our Review Committee

Gelare Khoshgozaran is an undisciplinary artist and writer who, in 2009 was transplanted from street protests in a city of four seasons to the windowless rooms of the University of Southern California where aesthetics and politics were discussed in endless summers. Her films, video essays, installations and performances have been presented in solo and group exhibitions at the New Museum, Queens Museum, Eyebeam, Hammer Museum, LAXART, Human Resources, Articule (Montreal), Beursschouwburg (Brussels), Pori Art Museum (Pori, Finland) and Yarat Contemporary Art Space (Baku, Azerbaijan). She was the recipient of a Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant (2015), and an Art Matters Award (2017). Her essays and interviews on art, politics and culture have been published and are forthcoming in contemptorary (co-founding editor), The Brooklyn Rail, Parkett, X-TRA, The Enemy, Art Practical, Flat Journal, Ajam Media Collective and Temporary Art Review, amongst others.

Aurora Tang is a curator and researcher based in Los Angeles. Since 2009 she has been a program manager at the Center for Land Use Interpretation. From 2011–2015 she was managing director of High Desert Test Sites. Aurora has taught at Otis College of Art and Design and the University of Southern California, and is faculty at the Southland Institute. She is on the board of directors of Common Field.

Paula Wilson is a multi-disciplinary visual artist based in Carrizozo, New Mexico. Wilson’s most recent solo exhibitions include Entangled at 516 ARTS, Albuquerque, NM (2019), The Light Becomes You at Denny Demin Gallery, NY (2018), Spread Wild, Pleasures of the Yucca at Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY (2018), PIECESCAPE at Visitor Welcome Center, Los Angeles, CA (2018), and Salty & Fresh at Emerson Dorsch Gallery, Miami, FL (2017). Wilson’s artwork is in many prestigious collections including The Studio Museum in Harlem, the New York Public Library, Yale University, Saatchi Gallery, and The Fabric Workshop. Wilson is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Artist Grant and the Bob and Happy Doran Fellowship at Yale University. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and co-runs the artist-founded organizations MoMAZoZo and the Carrizozo Artist in Residency.

Kao Kalia Yang is a Hmong-American writer. Born in the refugee camps of Thailand to a family that escaped the genocide of the Secret War in Laos, she came to America at the age six. Yang holds degrees from Carleton College and Columbia University. She is the author of The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir (Coffee House Press, 2008), winner of the 2009 Minnesota Book Awards in Creative Nonfiction/Memoir and Readers’ Choice, a finalist for the PEN USA Award in Creative Nonfiction and the Asian Literary Award in Nonfiction. The book is a National Endowment for the Arts Big Read title and on the roster of the American Place Theatre’s Literature to Life Program. Her second book, The Song Poet (Metropolitan Books, 2016) won the 2016 Minnesota Book Award in Creative Nonfiction Memoir, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Chautauqua Prize, a PEN USA Award in Nonfiction and the Dayton’s Literary Peace Prize. The book is the first Hmong story adapted into an opera by the Minnesota Opera to premiere in the spring of 2021. This fall, Yang debuted her first children’s book, A Map Into the World (Carolrhoda Books) and a co-edited collection titled What God is Honored Here?: Writings on Miscarriage and Infant Loss By and For Indigenous Women and Women of Color (University of MN Press). In the spring of 2020, Yang’s second children’s book The Shared Room (University of MN Press) and third work of creative nonfiction, a collective memoire about refugee lives, Somewhere in the Unknown World (Metropolitan Books), will be published. Kao Kalia Yang is also a teacher and a public speaker.