Creating the Cosmos

Name: Creating the Cosmos
Start: 2025-09-06T19:00:00-07:00
Location: 625 W Anaheim St, Long Beach, CA 90813-2817, United States

Schedule

Sat, 06 Sep, 2025 at 07:00 pm

UTC-07:00

Location

625 W Anaheim St, Long Beach, CA 90813-2817, United States | Long Beach, CA

Let’s celebrate the growing cosmos of Cambodian American literature. Join us for an evening of readings by writers Vichet Chum, Veasna Has, April Lim, and Layhannara Tep. We will reflect on the importance of world-building through language and how our unique experiences in America shape the stories we tell about our community.

As we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Khmer Rouge genocide, we will discuss language as a portal to the past, present, and future. How do we use writing to challenge and nurture the ongoing conversation about Cambodian American identity? What do we hope to read in the next 50 years?

Please join us for a Q&A after the reading moderated by the poet Monica Sok.

FEATURED AUTHORS

Veasna Has is a nonfiction writer whose personal essays explore themes of family and cultural identity. She was a 2024 Periplus Fellow, an alum of the Tin House Summer Workshop, and a Wedding Cake House artist-in-residence. Her work has been supported by Kundiman and the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference, and has been published in diaCRITICS and Slant’d, among others. She is currently at work on a memoir-in-essays. Born and raised in Long Beach, California, she now calls Queens, New York home.

Vichet Chum (He/Him) is a New York City based writer from Dallas, Texas. He’s received the 2023 Lucille Bulger Service Award, 2018 Princess Grace Award in Playwriting with New Dramatists, the 2021 Laurents/Hatcher Award and a 2021 Edgerton Foundation New Play Award for the world premiere of his play Bald Sisters which premiered at Steppenwolf Theatre in 2022, and a special state citation from the Massachusetts House of Representatives for his play KNYUM at Merrimack Repertory Theatre in 2018. He is currently an Underground Fellow at Roundabout Theatre Company, a Usual Suspect at New York Theatre Workshop, a fellow at Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, a board member for the New Harmony Project, and a steering committee member for the Obie Award and Tony Award-winning organization, AAPAC (The Asian American Performers Action Coalition). Vichet's debut YA novel "Kween" was released in 2023 with Quill Tree Books.

Layhannara Tep was born and raised in Long Beach, California. She is the daughter of Cambodian refugees, an experience that continues to shape her writing. She is working on a collection of short stories about the Cambodian American diaspora in Long Beach. Her work is interested in addressing historical erasure and examining the ways that fiction can help us reconcile gaps and imagine more. Layhannara earned her MA in Asian American Studies from UCLA and an MFA in fiction from NYU. Her work can be found in Aster(ix) Journal and The Hopkins Review.

April Lim is a Teochew-Cambodian American writer from Houston, TX. She has received fellowships and scholarships from Tin House, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, The Watering Hole, and elsewhere. Her writing has appeared in Honey Literary, Sweet: A Literary Confection, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She has an MFA in Poetry. She is currently a Fulbright Research Fellow in Cambodia. You can find her at aprillim.com

Monica Sok is the author of A Nail the Evening Hangs On and Year Zero, winner of a 2015 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing at NYU and has received support from the Anderson Center, Hawthornden Foundation, Hedgebrook, MacDowell, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship, among others. In 2018, she was recognized with a 92Y Discovery Prize. Sok has taught at Stanford University, Barnard College, and the Center for Empowering Refugees and Immigrants. Her latest poems have appeared in The Believer, Paris Review, POETRY, New England Review, Washington Post, and Michigan Quarterly Review among others. She was born and raised in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and calls New York City home.