Drawing on the radical generosity of Cha's multidisciplinary practice, authors Brandon Shimoda, Divya Victor, and Cathy Park Hong discuss the lasting impact of Cha’s work, as well as their own approaches to writing in relation to such themes as imperialism, displacement, exile, and subjectivity.

Brandon Shimoda is the author of several books, most recently The Afterlife Is Letting Go (on the memory/forgetting of Japanese American incarceration; City Lights, 2024) and Hydra Medusa (poems and prose from the US/Mexico borderlands; Nightboat Books, 2023). With Brynn Saito, he co-edited The Gate of Memory: Poems by Descendants of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration (Haymarket Books, 2025).

Divya Victor is a Tamil-American poet, essayist, and educator. She is the author of CURB (Nightboat Books), which won the 2022 PEN America Open Book Award and the 2022 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her next book, KIN, a collection of essays, is due out from Graywolf in 2027. She is the recipient of a 2025 Creative Capital Award for this work. Divya is also the author of KITH (Fence Books/ Book*hug); Scheingleichheit: Drei Essays (Merve Verlag, trans. Lena Schmidt), NATURAL SUBJECTS (Trembling Pillow), UNSUB (Insert Blanc), and THINGS TO DO WITH YOUR MOUTH (Les Figues), and her work has been collected in numerous venues, including BOMB, the New Museum’s The Animated Reader, Crux: Journal of Conceptual Writing, The Best American Experimental Writing, POETRY, The Yale Review, American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, The New York Times, W.W. Norton’s The Seagull Reader, and boundary2.

Cathy Park Hong is Professor and Class of 1936 First Chair in the College of Letters and Science in the Department of English at UC Berkeley. She is a writer and poet who has published three volumes of poetry, including Translating Mo’Um (2002), Dance Dance Revolution (2006), and Engine Empire (2012). Her creative nonfiction book Minor Feelings (2020) was both a Pulitzer Prize finalist and received the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. She was also named on Time’s 1200 Most Influential People of 2021 list, and is a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.