Cynthia Dewi Oka

The author of Salvage: Poems and Nomad of Salt and Hard Water.

A three-time Pushcart Prize Nominee, her poetry has appeared widely online and in print.  She has been awarded the Fifth Wednesday Journal Editor’s Prize in Poetry, and scholarships from the Voices of Our Nations (VONA) and Vermont Studio Center. As a 2016 Leeway Foundation Art and Change Grantee, she partnered with Asian Arts Initiative to create Sanctuary: A Migrant Poetry Workshop for immigrant poets in Philadelphia, and in 2017, she received the Leeway Foundation Transformation Award. She has also served as a poet mentor for The Blueshift Journal’s Speakeasy Project.

Cynthia has performed her poetry in numerous venues throughout the US and is a contributor to the anthologies Who Will Speak for America (Temple University Press, 2018), Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism (OR Press, 2018), Best of Kweli: An Aster(ix) Anthology (Blue Sketch Press, 2017), Read Women(Locked Horn Press, 2014),  Dismantle (Thread Makes Blanket, 2014), and Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Frontlines (PM Press, 2016). Her work has also been nominated for The Best of the Net Anthology.