Featured at Have Book Will Travel

In a nice bit of news for the week, I was featured over at Have Book Will Travel, a website that provides a searchable database of authors willing to travel, reading series currently seeking guest writers, and venues available for booking events.

Their goal is to develop Have Book Will Travel into a valuable online resource that will make the task of planning a reading or a book tour easier and less confusing for all involved. That's certainly helpful in this day and age!

Among some of the interesting poets and writers already featured in the past at Have Book Will Travel include  Aimee Suzara, Angela Penaredondo, Brynn Saito, C. Dale Young, Esther Lee, Eugenia Leigh, Geneva Chao, Ginger Ko, Grace Shuyi Liew, Jeanine Hall Gailey, Jenny Yang Cropp, Kenji C. Liu, Marci Calabretto Cancio-Bello, Muriel Leung, and Neil Aitken.  Obviously you could spend the better part of the day looking at the various profiles and finding new writers whose work you love. 

I appreciate that they also took the time to find good images to the covers of my books, and allowed plenty of space for us to share more about ourselves.

They feature a flexible tag system, so if you have a particular focus and specialty in your poetry, it's easy for people to find you. In my case, I opted for: Asian-American, California, Elgin Award, Laos, NEA Fellowship in Literature, Science Fiction Poetry, Southeast Asian, Speculative Poetry, and TRA. 

But for poets to get the most out of this, I think it's best to also be proactive and use the site to look for reading series and residencies, which are fairly well represented on here. I'm personally looking forward to seeing more Laotian American poets and writers featured here, as well those from the Khmer, Hmong, Tai Dam, Lue, and Iu Mien communities one day, as well as more poets working in science fiction, fantasy, and horror.

This is a free website, established as an act of literary love, but there's always costs to keeping a good website up and taking the time to keep it current. If you'd like to help out, consider donating to Neil (the admin) through PayPal. For the price of a drink ($5) or a dinner ($10, $15, $25, or $50), you can help them cover their hosting fees and recoup their travel and book fair registration expenses for AWP 2017 in Washington DC. Every bit helps!