March 29 New Vietnamese Poetry: A Group Reading & Discussion
Cathy Linh Che, Paul Tran, Ocean Vuong
Beacon Hotel, Beacon Room [Map]
Saturday, March 29, 2014
11:30am – 1:00pm
The Vietnam War continues to inform public discourse, scholarship, and national policies on race, empire, and the struggle for human rights. This layered roundtable and reading will excavate voices from the diaspora’s exiled. Three Vietnamese American poets will share their work and lead a discussion on the Vietnam War and its legacies in new Vietnamese poetry, exploring death, ghosts, belonging, displacement, memory, debt, intergenerational trauma, and sexual assault. It will examine how poetry and spoken word recover the history of marginalized peoples and the war’s connection to US colonialism throughout the world. Sponsored by Kundiman, an organization dedicated to the creation and cultivation of Asian American poetry.
Cathy Linh Che is the author of Split (Alice James, 2014), winner of the 2012 Kundiman Poetry Prize.
A Vietnamese American poet from Los Angeles and Long Beach, CA, she received her BA from Reed College and her MFA from New York University. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies from Poets & Writers, The Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, Kundiman, Hedgebrook, Poets House, The Asian American Literary Review, The Center for Book Arts, and The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Residency.
A founding editor of the online journal Paperbag, she is currently Program Associate for Readings & Workshops (East) at Poets & Writers and Manager of Kundiman.
She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Paul Tran grew up in San Diego, CA. His mother escaped from Vietnam in 1989 and raised him as a single-parent in the United States. Being the first in his family to graduate high school and attend college, Paul is fascinated by the promise and transformative power of education.
Since 2005, Paul has facilitated workshops and trainings for youth organizers throughout the United States. He designs curriculum around race, power, and the potential of arts activism. As an organizer and mentor, Paul has earned awards from the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. (2006), Prudential Spirit of Community (2007), Gloria Barron Prize for Young Heroes (2008), California Museum & Office of the Governor and First Lady Maria Shriver (2009), Parents, Families & Friends of Lesbians & Gays (2010), and funding from Qualcomm, Fish & Richardson, United Way San Diego, and the University of California, San Diego.
Ocean Vuong is the author of two chapbooks: No (YesYes Books, 2013) and Burnings (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2010), which was an American Library Association’s Over The Rainbow selection. A recipient of a 2013 Pushcart Prize, he has received fellowships from Kundiman, Poets House, The Elizabeth George Foundation, the Saltonstall Foundation For the Arts, as well as the 2012 Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets and an Academy of American Poets Prize. Poems appear in Poetry, The Nation, American Poetry Review, Quarterly West, Guernica, The Normal School, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Denver Quarterly, amongst others. Work has also been translated into Hindi, Korean, Vietnamese, and Russian.
Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he currently resides in New York City where he reads chapbook submissions as the managing editor of Thrush Press. He thinks you’re perfect.