A reading and conversation to celebrate the launch of poetry debut B-Dragon Suite by Stine An from Nightboat Books, with Cynthia Shin, in Bloomington, Indiana.
Join us at Redbud Books to celebrate the launch of Stine An's debut poetry collection B-Dragon Suite (Nightboat Books), a hybrid poetry collection that remixes K-pop, experimental translation, sound art, and emoji poetics to explore Korean diasporic identity. Stine will be joined by scholar and translator Cynthia Shin for readings and a conversation.
Doors @ 5:00 PM
Start @ 5:30 PM with readings followed by a conversation + Q&A
About the readers
Stine An is a poet, translator, and performer based in New York City. She holds a BA in Literature from Harvard and an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown, and has received fellowships and grants from The Poetry Project, the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, Yaddo, ALTA, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her publications include Today’s Morning Vocabulary by Yoo Heekyung (2025), Winter Night Rabbit Worries by Yoo Heekyung (2026), S_MMER CR_SH (2025), and Comet & Star written by Lee Juck and illustrated by Lee Jinhee (2024). Her debut poetry collection, B-Dragon Suite (2026), won the 2023 Nightboat Poetry Prize.
Cynthia Shin (she/they) is a dual-degree PhD candidate in comparative literature and Germanic studies at Indiana University Bloomington. Her dissertation “Rogue Code: On Representation of Artificial Lives in Sf” traces various tropes of robots, AI, and other artificial lives. Her research interests include posthumanism, contemporary speculative fiction, and exophony.
About B-Dragon Suite
✨ Named a “Must-Read Queer Book” of 2026 by Language Arts newsletter
✨ Read “Emoji Poetics,” a writing prompt inspired by B-Dragon Suite, in Poets & Writers Magazine
This debut book of poetry treats translation as play, performance, and embodied sound. Across seven interlinked sections, Stine An stages a fabulated K-pop universe, complete with boy band LIL BANG and girl group The Pink Blossoms, alongside lyric poems and prose meditations that code-switch between Korean and English. The book situates K-pop as both pleasure engine and cultural archive, asking how language survives colonial history, migration, and spectacle without resolving into easy consumption.