Cynthia Dewi Oka
Originally from Bali, Indonesia, Cynthia Dewi Oka is the author of A Tinderbox in Three Acts (2022), a Blessing the Boats Selection chosen by Aracelis Girmay for BOA Editions; Fire Is Not a Country (2021) and Salvage (2017) from Northwestern University Press, and Nomad of Salt and Hard Water (2016) from Thread Makes Blanket Press. A recipient of the Amy Clampitt Residency, Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize, and the Leeway Transformation Award, her poetry and essays have been featured in The Atlantic, POETRY, Oprah Daily, Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, Hyperallergic, Guernica, The Rumpus, PANK, and elsewhere.
An alumnus of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, she has taught creative writing at The Writers' Program at UCLA Extension, Bryn Mawr College, New Mexico State University, Blue Stoop, Voices of Our Nations (VONA), and the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival. For fifteen years, Cynthia worked as an organizer, trainer, and fundraiser in social movements for gender, racial, economic, and migrant justice. Based in Los Angeles, she is currently working on film projects and a collection of short stories. Cynthia writes to be free.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:
POETRY: “Manifest,” Poetry
POETRY: “Redacted from a Know-Your-Rights Training Agenda,” Poem-a-day
POETRY: “First Poem After Parting,” The Atlantic
POETRY: “Elegy with a White Shirt,” The Kenyon Review
POETRY: “That’s What She Said",” The Rumpus
POETRY: “The Year of the Show,” Poetry Society of America
ESSAY: “How Bruce Lee combined martial arts with the blaxploitation genre,” The Undefeated
ESSAY: “My Mother’s Pain,” The Atlantic
FICTION: “The Capacity,” PANK
works:
A Tinderbox in Three Acts
BOA Editions, 2022
Fire Is Not a Country
Northwestern University Press, 2021
Salvage: Poems
Northwestern University Press, 2017
Topics addressed in readings
Migration
Indonesian history
Authoritarianism, militarism, and censorship
Empire and nation-building
Reproductive labor
Power and intimacy
Innovative forms
Craft as self-determination
“Res Domestica,” UWRF Speakers at Home 2020
SAMPLE WORKSHOP 1: Writing Into What You Need to Recover
A workshop about transforming obsessions into quests; and questions into revelations. With critical attention to power, we will explore what it means to engage subjects beyond our immediate, lived experience through research, imagination, and formal experimentation. This workshop is open to all genres, and may be especially useful for writers who are working with/through suppressed histories and/or intergenerational traumas.
SAmple workshop 2: Writing from the Global South
A workshop about the craft of poetry that engages with contexts of post- and ongoing colonialism, imperialism, genocide, and oppression as they shape the material conditions of writing and our practices as readers. This workshop is intended to center the perspectives of writers who identify as people from the Global South and will explore, among other things, how we might use craft to transform estrangement into a source of play, connection, and liberation.
TESTIMONIALS
“Reading A Tinderbox in Three Acts is akin to ‘discovering our wet heart like a banner among the leaves’. This, this, this is a book so many have been waiting for… Cynthia Dewi Oka writes in a lineage of defiant artists who were killed, exiled or otherwise hurt for taking on this subject, and this book is a freedom—scalpel-cut from the tangled, corporeal forest of intergenerational trauma, from Western complicity in the ’65-’66 genocide and the decades of violence after. She fills (literal and metaphorical) holes with canny, sensitive, brilliant fictioning. Brava, selamat, an ovation for these three acts. ”
“Evocative and haunting, Cynthia Dewi Oka’s A Tinderbox in Three Acts is a choral undertaking, often in the clothing of familiar forms, state-sponsored and otherwise, that refuses the trickery of objectivity, and is instead frank in its imaginings, in its need for imagining. Bringing this imagination of poetry to bear on the imaginations of fascism and genocide, this stirring collection is not an argument of equivalence, but of the many forms of risk we undertake in being with each other. Through holding her ear to the holes of history, the poet gets us down to the central questions of solidarity and memorial and poetry itself. Movingly alive in its lament, we are better for this tending.”
“More probing, engaged and profound than many a contemporary novel, Cynthia Dewi Oka’s A Tinderbox in Three Acts demonstrates how a gifted poet can explore the often painful complexities of history, personal and public, with true originality. Utilizing lyric, narrative and documentary poetry, as well as drawings and nonpoetic forms with supreme skill, Oka both fills in the holes of the fictional story, centered on the horrific 1965 suppression of Indonesian Communists and the broader Left under General Suharto, with Western complicity, that she has set out to understand, and provides a needed model for 21st century poetry and poetics.”
