Miseducation: Stories & Poems from the Classroom & Beyond!
Five Queens writers explore the forces (of school, language, culture, family & history) that have shaped their learning identities. Their stories and poems navigate moments of learning despair and wonder, bewilderment and magic from the classroom and beyond. Catherine Kanjer Kapphahn, Nita Noveno, Wichuda McConnell, Mary Lannon and Pichchenda Bao enthusiastically invite you to attend this reading! This event is made possible in part with the public funds from the Queens Arts Fund, a re-grant program supported by New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in Partnership with the City Council and administered by New York Foundation for the Arts. Also a huge thanks to QED Astoria!
Nita Noveno is the recipient of the 2024 Women’s Prose Prize from Red Hen Press for her hybrid memoir Mud on the Moon (Fall 2026). She teaches composition and literature at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and is the founder and host emeritus of the Sunday Salon reading series in New York City. Originally from Southeast Alaska, she lives in Queens, NY.
Pichchenda Bao is a Cambodian American writer and poet, infant survivor of the Khmer Rouge regime, daughter of refugees, failed model minority and feminist stay-at-home mother of three. She never quite fits in anywhere, but her work has found homes in SWIMM, Cultural Daily, New Ohio Review and elsewhere. She is co-editor of the Braving the Body anthology (Harbor Editions). She has received grants, fellowships, and residencies from Queens Council on the Arts, Aspen Words, Kundiman and Bethany Arts Community and serves on the editorial board of Queensbound. She is at work on her first poetry collection, meaning she is always dreaming. More at www.pichchendabao.com.
Wichuda “Tang” McConnell is a social worker, wellness coach, photographer and storyteller. Born and raised in southern Thailand, Tang has found solace in being displaced through writing, to help process the complex conflict between alienation from her native land and belonging in her adopted one - and feeling that it was taboo to feel either. Tang works as a supervisor at an agency supporting the NYC DOHMH Early Intervention Program, serving New York’s youngest with developmental delays through in-home therapies. Tang is also a wellness coach who has guided many middle-aged women to attain their best health through lifestyle modification. She presently lives in Queens, New York, with her husband and two children.
Mary Lannon's novel Tide Girl was a finalist for the 2023 PEN\Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. Her stories have appeared at Story, Necessary Fiction, New World Writing and elsewhere. At work on a new novel and a book of essays, she teaches creative writing and women and gender studies at Nassau Community College in Long Island. She lives in Kew Gardens and runs a reading series at Maple Grove Cemetery.
Catherine Kanjer Kapphahn is an award winning writer, educator, storyteller and speaker. Her memoir Immigrant Daughter: Stories You Never Told Me received The Center for Fiction’s Christopher Doheny Award, was short listed for the Del Sol Press Prize, and was published by Audible. Her manuscript Miseducation of a Dyslexic Girl: a Memoir in Poems and Classrooms was long listed for the Steel Toe Books Poetry Award. Catherine received grants from the Queens Arts Fund, Queens Council on the Arts and City Artist Corps. Her writing and poetry has appeared in Queensbound, Motherwell Magazine, Croatia Week, Newtown Literary, the Feminist Press Anthology This is the Way We Say Goodbye, Astoria Life, and CURE Magazine. She has performed stories with No, You Tell It! and Generation Women. Catherine is an adjunct lecturer at City University of New York at Lehman College in the Bronx, where her students’ stories inspire her. Catherine is also a yoga teacher. She grew up beside the mountains in Colorado and now lives between two bridges in Queens, New York with her husband, two sons and rescue pup Percy.
