Please register here.
Join us for a discussion with:
Deborah Paredez, Associate Professor of Professional Practice, Writing Program, School of the Arts and Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (CSER), Columbia University
Cathy Linh-Che, Author of Split (Alice James Books); Winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize, the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies.
Hoa Nguyen, Toronto-based poet, speaker, facilitator and author of As Long As Trees Last, Red Juice, Violet Energy Ingots, and A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure
“War,” Muriel Rukeyser writes, “has been in my writing since I began.” This event explores the legacies of the Vietnam War from the perspectives of women as the unsung keepers of history. The event will start with a reading by the author from the book based on the year 1970, the “Year of the Metal Dog,” which was the year of the author’s birth, the year her father prepared to deploy to Vietnam along with many other Mexican-American immigrant soldiers, and a year of tremendous upheaval across the United States. Images from iconic photographs, including Nick Ut’s “napalm girl” Kim Phuc, and her father’s snapshots are incorporated, fragmented, scrutinized, and reconstructed throughout the collection as Paredez will recall untold stories from a war that changed her family and the two nations. Joining Professor Paredez will be Vietnamese expatriate poets Hoa Nguyen (born in the Mekong Delta, based in Toronto) and Cathy Linh-Che (daughter of Vietnamese refugees, based in Queens) who are authors of prize-winning books of poetry themselves. Their conversation will explore questions such as: How have their encounters with the American War in Vietnam and its effects shaped their formal, linguistic, and aesthetic choices? How have they addressed the ethics of re-presenting depictions of violence? What can we learn from their work about race, colonialism, and intergenerational trauma?
