Reenacting Homecoming: Early Memoirs of Tibetan Exile Life and the Writing of History

Speaker: Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, Assistant Professor, Villanova University; Tibetan poet
Moderated by: Lauran Hartley, Tibetan Studies Librarian, C.V. Starr East Asian Library, Columbia University

Event Description: Tsering Wangmo Dhompa will give a brief talk on literature produced by Tibetans in the 1960s -70s and its relation to place. She will discuss literature as a logbook of events where the function of memory was not simply to recollect, but to attempt to recover, and to recreate the meaning of place. During the last part of her talk, she will do a reading of some of her recent poems.

Tsering Wangmo Dhompa is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Villanova University. She is the author of three collections of poetry: My Rice Tastes Like the Lake, In the Absent Everyday and Rules of the House (all from Apogee Press, Berkeley). Dhompa’s first non-fiction book, Coming Home to Tibet was published the US by Shambhala Publications in 2016.

Lauran Hartley is Tibetan Studies Librarian for the C.V. Starr East Asian Library at Columbia University and occasionally serves as Adjunct Lecturer in Tibetan Literature for the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. She is also co-editor of Modern Tibetan Literature and Social Change (Duke University Press, 2008).