04/27/2026
This Wednesday 4/29 our very own will be in conversation with poet Maw Shein Win. Come join us ✨✨ for our last event of the season
Maw’s latest collection, Percussing the Thinking Jar, unfolds in dreamlike lines and is accompanied by ink drawings, reflecting on the experiences of living in an aging body, and was shortlisted for the Northern California Book Award.
Maw Shein Win is a Burmese American poet. She served as the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, California and her past collections have been longlisted for the PEN America Open Book Award, and the Golden Poppy Award.
Percussing the Thinking Jar was born out of the pandemic. “At the start of lockdown,” Shein Win has said, “I didn’t go out much. I wrote copious notes in multiple journals. When I returned to what I had written, I realized I was asking questions in these notebooks, creating juxtapositions, and listing instructions. I began to compile what I had written into thought logs, and I set rules for them, for example, each should contain sixteen lines. I continued to work on them as well as other poems.” The Racket said in a rave review: “Win transforms the mundane into exquisite with gentle humor in the face of calamity.”
