Sokunthary Svay joins Newtown Literary as Poetry Editor

A big welcome to Sokunthary Svay who has just been selected as the new poetry editor at Newtown Literary.

Established in 2012 Newtown Literary is published by Newtown Literary Alliance, a non-profit organization dedicated to helping promote the literary arts in Queens, NY and support established and emerging writers living in the borough.

I've been familiar with the work of Sokunthary Svay for many years and have always found her writing and her approach to the literary arts uniformly excellent and compelling. I'm looking forward to her time with Newtown Literary and seeing what selections she makes among the fine writing to be found in Queens. I'm also looking forward to her forthcoming book due next year.

Sokunthary Svay is a Pushcart-nominated Khmer writer (poetry and nonfiction) and musician from the Bronx, New York. Her writing has appeared in FLESH (Fixi Novo, 2016), Homelands: Women’s Journeys Across Race, Place, and Time (Seal Press, 2006), and more recently in Prairie Schooner, Women’s Studies Quarterly, LONTAR, and Mekong Review.

She is the recipient of the First Friday Residency at the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, and the Willow Arts Alliance/Weeksville Summer Arts Residency Fellowship.

She is pursuing her MA in Language and Literacy at City College in Harlem. Her recent collaborations include two different settings of her poem “Morning Song” by award-winning composers David Schober and Liliya Ugay. She is a newly-minted Willow Books Emerging Writer currently completing her first manuscript scheduled for publication in Fall 2017. In addition, she is writing the libretto for a monodrama opera for soprano and piano.