Answering back to over-written narratives, these women of the Vietnamese diaspora offer insight into how writers may elasticize and complicate definitions of one’s various assigned “identities” and lend voice to the silenced, obscured, or overlooked. Addressing issues of craft and creative process in the elucidation of trauma, repercussions of war and colonialism, erasure and objectification, this panel’s topics will include narrative approach, collaboration, hybridity, and renewing the lyric.
Dao Strom is the author of You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else, a bilingual poetry book, We Were Meant To Be A Gentle People, an experimental memoir and music album, and two books of fiction. She has received awards from the Creative Capital Foundation, NEA, and others.
Aimee Phan is the author of two books of fiction: We Should Never Meet and The Reeducation of Cherry Truong. She has received fellowships from the NEA, the MacDowell Colony, the Rockefeller Foundation and Hedgebrook. She teaches in the MFA Program in Writing at California College of the Arts.
Vi Khi Nao is the author of a novel, Fish in Exile, and a poetry collection, The Old Philosopher. She was the winner of 2014 Nightboat Poetry Prize and the 2016 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest for A Brief Alphabet of Torture, a collection of short stories.
Thi Bui came to the United States in 1978 as part of the “boat people” wave of refugees from Southeast Asia. Her debut graphic memoir, The Best We Could Do, is a national bestseller and a National Book Critics Circle Awards Finalist in autobiography.