The Intimacies of Kith seeks to bring together scholars who are also practitioners of poetry from Asian North American and Southeast Asian communities. Our goal is to create a shared space for poet-scholars to engage one another directly, creating opportunities for sustained dialogue across geographic and disciplinary boundaries.

Across disciplines and regions, we are used to policing borders. Poetry is categorised as subjective, and scholarship asked to remain objective; Asia is positioned as origin, with the Asian North American diasporas as its satellites. These distinctions have long shaped our critical and creative imagination. This symposium asks, instead, what kinds of new formulations are made possible by refusing these received borders. What happens when poetry is taken seriously as a mode of thought, rather than as its ornament? How might scholarship better admit and embody the forms of knowledge produced through practice? What kinds of relations emerge when we fully acknowledge the uneven histories between Asia and Asian North American diasporas, without automatically presuming affinity? And what kinds of writing might be required to hold these tensions in view?

This intimate symposium considers the asymmetrical relations and vantage points shaped by migration, empire, and cultural production. Rejecting attempts to reconcile Asia and Asian diasporas into a unified, pan-ethnic formation, we do not approach these asymmetries in order to smooth them out. Rather, under the sign of poetry, we celebrate the capacity of poets to hold contradiction and simultaneity across disciplinary divisions and territorial logics. That is to say, we are interested in how writing itself moves across boundaries. As poetic modes of questioning enter critical discourse, and criticism acknowledges poetic practice as knowledge production, questions of method mirror questions of geography: how do we sustain relation without collapsing difference? 

Emerging from panels at AAAS 2024, AWP 2026, and AAAS 2026, The Intimacies of Kith is part of a transnational project led by Samuel Caleb Wee (NTU), Carlina Duan (UNC Chapel Hill),  and Jasmine An (University of Oregon) that will culminate in an edited essay collection. We are delighted to bring Divya Victor, Paisley Rekdal, and Timothy Yu to Singapore as keynote speakers for the symposium!

We invite papers and proposals that seek to engage these crossings (across genre and geography) without presuming resolution. Specifically, we would be delighted to receive submissions that reflect the dual commitments of practice and scholarship and experiment with both form and topic. We’re open to submissions that broaden our understanding of the Anglophone, but ask that all papers and presentations be conducted primarily in English to allow for generative conversations. Some suggested forms and topics are listed below:

Possible Forms:

• Creative-critical essays 

• Lyric essays

• Hybrid poetry/criticism or poetry-as-critique 

• Situated academic papers that foreground the author’s positionality and episteme

• Documentary or archival poetics with critical framing 

• Multi-genre or formally experimental writing 

• Annotated creative work reflecting on process and method 

• Collaborative or dialogic pieces

• Ekphrastic, intermedial analyses

• Pedagogical reflections from poet-scholars

Possible Topics:
 

• Poetry as a mode of theory or knowledge production 

• Documentary poetics and historical memory 

• Lyric, subjectivity, and racialized authorship 

• Transpacific and Southeast Asian literary relations 

• Migration, labor, and diasporic entanglement 

• Archipelagic, oceanic, or ageographical frameworks 

• Negotiating indigeneity in Southeast Asia 

• Decolonizing theories of diaspora

• Digital poetics of diasporic intimacies 

• Innovative poet-scholar methodologies 

• Coalition, difference, and transnational relation

Submission and Publication 

In your symposium application, please email the following:

• Abstract (300 words maximum)

• Short bio (50 words maximum), indicating both scholarly and creative practice

to kith-symposium@ntu.edu.sg by June 15, 2026.

UPDATE: To accommodate additional submissions, the deadline for abstracts has been extended to June 30, 2026. 

The symposium is designed as a collaborative, workshop-driven space. Participants will both present their work and also develop it in sustained dialogue with others, with the aim of producing pieces that are responsive to and conversant with one another.

Selected contributions will be considered for inclusion in a creative-critical anthology currently in development, with Bloomsbury Academic expressing interest. The volume will emerge from the symposium’s conversations, with essays shaped through this collective process. As such, as a condition of participation, accepted participants will be asked to email beforehand:

A full first draft of your paper (5,000–7,000 words) OR equivalent creative-critical work

to kith-symposium@ntu.edu.sg by September 15, 2026.

A modest symposium registration fee of SGD 60 will be charged to support event costs, including meals and materials. A reduced rate of SGD 40 is also available for participants with limited institutional funding. If the registration cost is a prohibitive financial barrier, please contact us via email. Limited travel support will also be available for selected participants, with priority given based on demonstrated need and the strength of the submission.