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Grace Shuyi Liew and Abigail Chabitnoy

Grace Shuyi Liew grew up in Malaysia, a postcolonial peninsula firing with desire. From there she learned rural escapism, sea breeze, migration, longing. She is the author of the chapbooks Book of Interludes(Anomalous Press, 2016) and Prop (Ahsahta Press, 2016). She is a Watering Hole fellow, and her other honors include the Lucille Clifton Poetry Fellowship from Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Aspen Summer Words scholarship, resident writer at Can Serrat in Barcelona, resident at Agora Affect, and others. She holds a BA in Philosophy and MFA in Creative Writing. She is at work on a novel, and Careen is her first full-length collection of poetry.

ABIGAIL CHABITNOY is a member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak, Alaska. Her poems have appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, Tin House, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Nat. Brut, Red Ink, and Mud City. In How to Dress a Fish, poet Abigail Chabitnoy, of Aleut descent, addresses the lives disrupted by US Indian boarding school policy. She pays particular attention to the life story of her great grandfather, Michael, who was taken from the Baptist Orphanage, Wood Island, Alaska, and sent to Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. Incorporating extracts from Michael's boarding school records and early Russian ethnologies—while engaging Alutiiq language, storytelling motifs, and traditional practices—the poems form an act of witness and reclamation. In uncovering her own family records, Chabitnoy works against the attempted erasure, finding that while legislation such as the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act reconnects her to community, through blood and paper, it could not restore the personal relationships that had already been severed.