The San Francisco Friends of the Library

&

The Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network 
 
  Present  

San Francisco International Poetry Festival

Vietnamese Poets of the Diaspora 
 

November 8, 2008

Fort Mason Conference Center 

7:00 – 9:00 pm 

Followed by Reception

PROGRAM

Byron Spooner: Friends of the Library
Isabelle Thuy Pelaud: Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN)

Part I
Anh-Hoa Thi Nguyen                                                                                    
Truong Tran
Linh Dinh


Part II
Mong Lan
le thi diem thuy          
Bao Phi

Featured Poets:

Lê thi diem thúy
Lê thi diem thúy [pronounced LAY TEE YIM TWEE] was born in Phan Thiet, southern Vietnam. She and her father left Vietnam in 1978 by boat, eventually settling in Southern California. Her first novel, The Gangster We Are All Looking For, was published to great acclaim in 2003 and has been selected by colleges for freshman and summer reading programs. Ms. Lê’s prose and poetry have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Harpers Magazine, Muae and The Best American Essays, as well as in the anthologies Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible, The Very Inside, Half & Half, and Watermark. Her solo performance work, Red Fiery Summer, the bodies between us, and Carte Postale have been presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris, the International Women Playwrights Festival in Galway, Ireland, the New World Theater at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the Marfa Theater Company in Marfa, Texas. Lê has been awarded residencies from the Headlands Center for the Arts, the GAEA Foundation, and the Lannan Foundation and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the Guggenheim Foundation.She is at work on her second novel. For more information go to: www.randomhouse.com/knopf/ksb/speaker.php?sid=24.

Bao Phi
Bao Phi has been a performance poet since 1991. A two-time Minnesota Grand Slam champion and a National Poetry Slam finalist, Bao Phi has appeared on HBO’s Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry. His poetry has  appeared in the 2006 Best American Poetry anthology. His poems and essays are widely published in numerous publications including Screaming Monkeys and Spoken Word Revolution Redux. He has also released several CDs of his poetry, such as the recently sold-out Refugeography and his latest, The Nguyens EP.  He has performed in venues and schools across the country, from the Nuyorican Poets Café to the University of California, Berkeley.  In addition to his creative work, he was recently honored with a Facing Race Ambassador award in recognition of his community work.  He continues to perform across the country, remains active as an Asian American community organizer, and works at the Loft, where he creates and operates programs for artists and audiences of color.
For more information go to: www.baophi.com/getbao.html

Truong Tran
Truong Tran is a poet and visual artist. His publications include The Book of Perceptions,(finalist for The Kiriyama Book Prize), Placing The Accents (finalist for the Western States Book Prize for Poetry), dust and conscience (winner of the 2000 San Francisco Poetry Center Book Prize), within the margin, and Four Letter Words.. Tran lives in San Francisco, where he teaches poetry at San Francisco State University and Mills College.

Mong-Lan
Mong-Lan is apoet, writer, painter, photographer and tango dancer. Sheleft her native Vietnam on the last day of the evacuation of Saigon. Mong-Lan's first book of poems, Song of the Cicadas, won the 2000 Juniper Prize, the 2002 Great Lakes Colleges Association's New Writers Awards for Poetry, and was a finalist for the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award.  Her other books of poetry include Why is the Edge Always Windy, Love Poem to Tofu and Other Poems, and Tango, Tangoing: Poems & Art.  She received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Arizona, was the recipient of a Wallace E. Stegner Fellowship in poetry at Stanford University, and a Fulbright Scholarship to Vietnam. Her poetry has been  anthologized  in Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Book of Poetry: Best Poems from 30 Years of the Pushcart Prize, Asian American Poetry —The Next Generation, Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond , Force Majeure (Indonesia), Black Dog, Black Night: Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry, Jungle Crows: a Tokyo Expatriate anthology. She has read her poetry, lectured and/or given academic presentations in Argentina, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Switzerland, the United States, Thailand and Vietnam. Her paintings and photographs have been exhibited at the Capitol House in Washington D.C., in galleries in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston,  the Dallas Museum of Art, and in public exhibitions in Tokyo, Bali, Bangkok, Buenos Aires and Seoul. She has taught at the University of Arizona, Stanford University and the University of Maryland in Tokyo.

Anh-Hoa Thi Nguyen
Anh-Hoa Thi Nguyen received her MFA in Creative Writing at Mills College, where she was awarded the Mary Merrit Henry Prize in Poetry and the Ardella Mills Literary Composition Prize in Creative Non-Fiction. Her work has been published in the Asian Pacific American Journal,,There,, Nha Magazine, the Vietnamese Artists Collective anthology AS IS: A Collection of Visual and Literary Works by Vietnamese American Artists, and the Asian American Women Artists Association (AAWAA) anthology Cheers to Muses: Contemporary Works by Asian American Women. Nguyen has performed at Kearny Street Workshop’s APAture 8 & 9, San Francisco’s Litcrawl and Writers with Drinks. Nguyen is the founder of Pomelo Press and creates self-published and handbound artists’ books and is a photographer, printmaker and performer. Nguyen has also completed a residency at Hedgebrook, a Writers-in-Residence Program for women, and is currently a member of AAWAA’s board.

Emcee

Isabelle Thuy Pelaud
Isabelle Thuy Pelaud is associate professor in Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University. She recently finished a manuscript titled History, Identity and Survival: Reading Vietnamese American Literature  and is co-director of the Diasporic Vietnamese American Network (DVAN). Her academic work can be found in Mixed Race Literature, The New Face of Asian Pacific America, Amerasia Journal and the Michigan Quarterly Review. Her essays and short stories have been published in Making More Waves, Tilting the Continent, and Vietnam Dialogue Inside/Out.

Sponsors
                                                                                               
The Friends of the Library
The friends of the Library’s mission is to create, steward, and support a superior, free public library system in San Francisco. We are committed to raising the standard of excellence of our libraries by funding programs and services beyond what is allocated in the City's budget. We believe in free and equal access to information for all.
For more information go to: http://www.friendsandfoundation.org/

Jack Hirschman
Poet, painter, translator, editor, and activist, Jack Hirschman was born in New York City in 1933 and has lived in San Francisco since 1973. He has published more than 25 translations of poetry from eight languages. Since leaving a university teaching career in the 1960s, Hirschman has taken the free exchange of poetry and politics into the streets and has been called by Luke Breit, American’s most important living poet. Among his many volumes of poetry are A Correspondence of America’s (Indiana U. Press, 1960), Black Alephs (Trigram Press, 1969), Lyripol (City Lights, 1976), The Bottom Line (Curbstone, 1988), and Endless Threshold (Curbstone, 1992). His poetry has been published in Italy as well. In 2006 he was appointed Poet Laureate of San Francisco by Mayor Gavin Newsom. He released his most extensive collection of poems yet, The Arcanes that year with 126 long poems spanning 34 years.

Reception
Bac Tran (song writer/guitar) with Quelani Penland (violin)
Linh Tran (Jazz vocalist) with Alan Hightman (guitar)

The Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN) 
DVAN’s aim is to promote artists from the Vietnamese Diaspora whose work in literature, visual art, film and performance art enriches our communities and strengthens ties between Vietnamese across the globe. We undertake to support this body of work through cultural events, exhibits and publications that explore connections between art and society.

DVAN is international in scope. It provides resources and promotes the work of Vietnamese artists in the United States, France, Canada and Australia, as these countries host the largest Vietnamese communities overseas. It also supports artists who have returned to Viet Nam and produce from that location. The “Vietnamese Poets of the Diaspora” is DVAN’s first event.

Core members
LAN DUONG, assistant professor, Media and Cultural Studies, UC Riverside.
MARIAM B. LAM, assistant professor, comparative literature, UC Riverside.
VIET LE, artist, creative writer and curator, University of Southern California.
DAVID NGUYEN, financial analyst, Palo Alto.
NGUYEN QUI DUC, author and journalist,Ha Noi (Vietnam).
KATHY L. NGUYEN, writer and editor, San Francisco.
VIET THANH NGUYEN, associate professor, American Studies and Ethnicity, USC.
ISABELLE THUY PELAUD, associate professor, Asian American Studies, SFSU.

Fiscal sponsor
DVAN's fiscal sponsor is Intersection for the Arts (San Francisco), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization. DVAN has partnered with Intersection through its incubator program.

Donations
Checks of any amount can be made to "The Intersection for the Arts (for DVAN)"
446 Valencia Street, San Francisco, CA 94103. Donations are tax deductible.

This event was made possible with the support of the following foundations and nonprofit organizations: Zellerbach Family Foundation, the James Irvine Foundation, and Poets & Writers, Inc. (through a grant it has received from the Jamese Irvine Foundation).